Brits leave vacuum for Iran to fill

Via Juan Cole, I see this in USA Today.

By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — Britain's planned reduction in its force in southern Iraq could empower Iran and lead to more bloodshed between rival Shiite Muslim groups, analysts warned Wednesday.

The area around Basra is less violent than Baghdad, and sectarian killings are rare, in part because it is overwhelmingly Shiite. But the government's authority there is rivaled by armed groups that are "thoroughly intertwined with criminal enterprises," according to a report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"In the coming year, the drawdown of British forces in the deep south will likely be accompanied by an upsurge of factional violence as the long-delayed fight for local supremacy begins in earnest," said the report, written by Iraq security specialists Michael Knights and Ed Williams.

It makes a lot of sense that, with the Brits gone, the Shi'a area down there near the Iranian coast would end up coming under the influence of Iran. I doubt we can do anything meaningful about it, but I doubt too that it comports with Bush's plans for the region.

The real solution here is to try to work things out with Iran so that whatever influence they do have is as benevolent as possible. Instead, we're guaranteeing it will be a malevolent as possible.


Update:

Right after posting this, I read this report by Christiane Amanpour about her meeting with an Iranian that supports my comments:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.

''Natural allies,'' this official said.

It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.

"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."