Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. 'Handed the Country Over'

[DonViejo]

By TIM ARANGOJULY 15, 2017

BAGHDAD — Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran.

A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border.

And that’s not even the half of it.

Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership.

When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause.

From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread Iranian influence around the region.

In that contest, Iran won, and the United States lost.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-iraq-iranian-power.html

[roamer65]

1. What will happen in Sept if Iraqi Kurdistan votes for independence?

Already Shi'a militias have called for war if they do...

[malaise]

2. It was not theirs to hand over

When they financed the war against Iran in the1980s, they might have thought it through.
Then they made up lies and illegally invaded and occupied Iraq and had their goons hang him to boot.

[David__77]

3. The friendly relations between Iraq and Iran make sense.

The headline of this article conveys a colonialist viewpoint.