Iran is supplying Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

And no doubt, Saudi Arabia is funding the Shia militias right?

Of course, since there’s no history of ethnic strife in the region, who cares?

Pure Bliss…..

Thing is as long as we intend to play in these guys backyard this kind of thing is going to happen.

We are in a defensive stance regardless of how the US military reacts. The team on offense dictates military action always, and we by winning the invasion/actual war part of the whole operation are on defense till this whole thing ends. The bad guys can move around as they see fit while we have to hold strategic points therefore we are going to get slowly chewed up, and Americans are inheriently impatient.

We could go on offense, but that would require killing non-combatants and destroy infrastructure of which we can’t afford to do for bad PR reasons with the Iraqis in the non-combatants area, and also we don;t rebuild what we destroy. Therefore we are screwed untill the Iraqi gov. and military decides to do it’s job, and we go home/guard the damn borders instead and let them run the cities.

I have no doubt that Iran is meddling in Iraq–they probably know that the longer our military remains entangled in this expensive, draining war, the fewer resources will be available to use against them and their nuclear program. They remember Bush’s idiotic “Axis of Evil” speech and they remember the costly consequences of the USSR’s ten-year long war in Afghanistan, and how its empire collapsed shortly afterwards. Yes, Iran is meddling. But so are the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Syrians and a host of other neighbors who would not benefit from a Shiite crescent.

Why all the attention solely on Iran? Imo, it is to deflect blame when the war inevitably is lost. The surge is a stopgap measure, and even if it worked it would be unsustainable for more than a few months. When we do lose, Bush can point to the meddlesome Iranians and the Defeatocrats, instead of 4 years of inept strategy which followed the initially fatally flawed war plan.

Yes, but the question is still what proportion of the weaponry is coming from there? 1%? 10%? 50%? The answer matters to policy decisions, and as a conservative you should be concerned that when lives are at stake that resources flow to the most important problems that are most amenable to solution.

The pernicious dynamic at work here is to focus on one problem out of many, and also to focus on something that generates moral outrage more than something that is empirically important.

Sry, Michael, but where do you ge your idea that Iran is involved? This is contrary to the facts known so far. And I want to point out that the ‘Strela’ series of handheld ground-air missiles is produced by Russia. Just look at the list of former Russian states around the Middle East, and at the increasing corruption in the underpaid Russian Army, and it should be clear that it’s not exactly difficult for experienced arms smugglers to lay their hands on these highly demanded weapons.