ARTICLE: Iranian Reveals Plan to Expand Role in Iraq, By JAMES GLANZ, New York Times, January 29, 2007

The dynamics here are so predictable. Iran's been involved in supporting Shiia in Iraq for a long time. Now we're "discovering" this like crazy and revealing it to our public, but it's been well known and well documented all along. Now that we target this, the Iranians are signaling they can go as long and as hard as need be on the subject. They're betting this is a struggle they've got legs on while clearly the Bush administration is under fire at home and therefore needs obvious wins in the short term. I don't believe in fair fights. I also don't believe we've made this unfair enough to Iran, so I think we're picking a fight we will not win. As sectarian violence picks up across Iraq, Iran will ramp up support to Shiia and Saudi support to the Sunnis will also ramp up. Both flows of support will enable the killing of Americans. Don't expect any crack down on Saudi support any time soon. This is classic Rumsfeldian "enlargening the unsolvable problem in search of a larger solution." Problem is we're not offering Iran anything, so Iran's gonna simply wait us out. The sectarian strife is the dominant dynamic now, which means we lost control of the situation in Iraq a long time ago. Now Iran's more in the driver seat, thanks to the Shiia being majority. We haven't solved Iraq, now Iran naturally thinks it's their turn. And, quite frankly, they're right. "Victory" in civil wars--as Niall Ferguson so aptly points out--comes when winning sides are supported by outsiders. I would pick the Shiia over Sunni, and so when Iran does the same, they just access the solution set faster than we do. Our picking a fight with Iran won't change this underlying reality which our previous incompetence set in motion. The Bush administration simply won't admit that our actions to date in the Long War have dramatically empowered Iran (my point all along), so they compound past failure with future failure. We made the choice to empower Iran, but Bush simply doesn't want to deal with that. He and Cheney are being completely unrealistic about what comes next. Their "my way or the highway" is cute when we're in the driver seat, but we're not anymore on Iraq, so pledging undying support to their continuing incompetence ain't patriotism, it's simply surrender to the current correlation of forces that they themselves have created.