Iraq Is Not Our War Anymore. Let It Be Iran’s Problem.

[DonViejo]

Christopher Dickey

It’s time the Iraqi Pottery Barn rule—‘You break it, you pay a trillion dollars for it’—is applied to someone else.

Back in the George W. Bush administration’s darkest days occupying Iraq, I ran into a guy who was about as close to Bush as you could get without being Bush himself. We were at one of those Davos cocktail parties where you can barely hear what you are saying yourself, much less what’s being said to you. But I wanted to press this guy on all that had gone wrong in Iraq, especially the fact that the mullahs of Iran were gaining so much power and influence on the American dime.

“All that blood and treasure and we might as well have handed Baghdad to Tehran on a platter,” I shouted.

The Bush clone looked at me—and I don’t know if this was just an off-the-cuff kiss-off, or a half-considered bon mot, or some perverse quasi-serious notion of his (not speaking for the president, of course)—but what he said was, “If you really want to fuck Iran, let ’em have Iraq.”

I was speechless and we were both kind of hoarse by then. We drifted our separate ways. But the idea stayed with me as one of those notions that is so logical, yet so outside the box, that nobody ever will take it seriously.

Well, now, maybe we should.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/17/iraq-is-not-our-war-anymore-let-it-be-iran-s-problem.html

[onehandle]

1. And along the same lines, maybe we should let China have Korea.

China created that problem. We have a very expensive finger in that dike as well.