Right Side of the Rainbow

Our forces in Iraq are holding at least four Iranians, including “senior military officials,” the New York Times reports. We arrested the Iranians Thursday in raids directed at fighters attacking Iraqi security forces. But note how deep the rabbit hole goes:

At least two of the Iranians were in [Iraq] on an invitation extended by Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, during a visit to Tehran earlier this month. It was particularly awkward for the Iraqis that one of the raids took place in the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, who traveled to Washington three weeks ago to meet President Bush.

[…]

In one raid, which took place around 7 p.m. [Thursday], American forces stopped an official Iranian Embassy car carrying the two Iranian diplomats, one or two Iranian guards and an Iraqi driver. Iraqi officials said that the diplomats had been praying at the Buratha mosque …

All in the car were detained by the Americans. The mosque’s imam, Sheik Jalal al-deen al-Sageir, a member of Parliament from Mr. Hakim’s party, said the Iranians had come to pray during the last day of mourning for his mother, who recently died.

Mr. Hakim heads a Shiite political party called Sciri:

Many Shiite political groups are now suspected of having ties to Iran, and Sciri is no exception. Senior party leaders lived in exile in Iran for years plotting the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Deeper:

The predawn raid on Mr. Hakim’s compound … was perhaps the most startling part of the American operation. The arrests were made inside the house of Hadi al-Ameri, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s security committee and leader of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of Mr. Hakim’s political party.

According to the Times, “The United States is now holding, apparently for the first time, Iranians who it suspects of planning attacks:”

One senior administration official said, “This is going to be a tense but clarifying moment.”

Yes, but for whom? Maybe for us:

Iraqi leaders appealed to the American military, including to Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American ground commander in Iraq, to release the Iranians, according to an Iraqi politician familiar with the efforts.

[…]

Hiwa Osman, a news media adviser to Mr. Talabani, said, “The president is unhappy with the arrests.”

[…]

The Shiite-led government has begun to chafe under the control of the Americans, pressing for more control of its army and for greater independence from what it says is unilateral American decision making.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that “[o]ne of Iraq’s most influential Shiite clerics rejected a U.S.-backed proposal to isolate Shiite extremists in the national government, saying the country should govern itself with the help of anti-U.S. firebrand Muqtada Sadr, according to politicians who spoke with the cleric Saturday:”

Shiite politicians met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in this Shiite holy city, and then said they had thrown their support behind Sadr, who demands a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq rather than the temporary increase under consideration in Washington.

“The Sadr movement is part of Iraqi affairs,” said Haider Abadi, a leader of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party. “We won’t allow others to interfere to weaken any Iraqi political movement.”

Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controls one of Iraq’s largest militias and has traveled to Tehran to meet with officials there. We have allowed Sadr to remain alive and at liberty even though he led weeks of fighting against U.S. troops at Najaf.

What in hell is going on here?

Michael Ledeen suggests (correctly, I fear) that Iraqis leaders have decided to cast their lot with a winner — and it ain’t us:

We can only win the war — the real war, the regional-or-maybe-even-global war — if we stop playing defense in Iraq and go after regime change in Damascus and Tehran. Everyone in the region, above all, the Iraqis, knows this. And everyone in the region is looking for evidence that we might be able to muster the will to win this thing.

But dumping responsibility for dealing with Iran in the quivering laps of the Iraqi leaders is precisely the wrong thing to do. We have to lead this war, we have to go after the Iranians. Otherwise, surge or no surge, fifty or a hundred thousand troops more or less, we’re gonna lose. Because the peoples of the Mideast, who have seen many armies come and go over the centuries, are going to throw in with the likely winners. And we can’t win if we refuse to engage the main enemy, which is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Some members of the “reality-based community” think war with Iran is exactly what the Administration has planned. But I think reality lies elsewhere:

It’s been the world’s worst kept secret that Iran is actively supporting Shia militias in Iraq, and otherwise stoking the troubles. If Iranian military officials have been caught actively supporting militant activities, and this can be proven, it will actually place the US administration in something of a quandry. There is simply no support for serious [U.N.] sanctions in Russia and China, and the Bush administration has absolutely no domestic political capital to launch anything resembling a military response.

What to do?

Iraqi blogger Omar Fadhil writes in Opinion Journal that we must kill Muqtada Sadr:

If the way forward requires maintaining the basic course of the political process and empowering (and cleaning) the current government and its head then the only way to do this is to relieve Mr. Maliki, his party and the rest of the Shia alliance from the dominance and influence of Sadr, and there are two ways to accomplish this: either persuade Mr. Maliki and his team and promise them great support and protection from Sadr’s reach, or deal a lethal blow to Sadr and his militia in order to render him unable to inflict harm on Mr. Maliki and other members of the United Iraqi Alliance.

Now really, it shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out that the first way isn’t working out right; what’s needed now is to take the decision to try the second way and deal with the biggest threat to stability in Iraq in the way we should.

[…]

The members [of Sadr’s militia] were recruited by either fear or persuasion, and these bonds that still keep some units highly loyal will fall apart once the head is taken. Ideological fighters constitute a minority in my opinion and those, along with presumed Iranian and Hezbollah fighters who are assisting Sadr will represent the bulk of the remaining actual force that U.S. and Iraqi troops would have to fight and eliminate. Those are highly organized, but they are not invincible.

Together we succeeded in reducing the threat posed by al Qaeda when it was identified as the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability and security. Now together we can do the same with Sadr and other thugs.

If we’re not going to challenge Iran directly, we must challenge her proxies and allies. Mr. Bush speaks to the Nation in January regarding his plans for the war. We’ll know he’s serious about winning if he identifies Sadr by name and announces that it is U.S. policy to kill him and all those loyal to him.

If Mr. Bush is not serious, then it will be time for us to leave Iraq — and time for Republicans to say so.

Technorati tags: War+in+Iraq, Iraq, Muqtada+Sadr