Posted by
Defend America on Friday, March 12, 2010 7:00:41 PM
March 12, 2010 4:00 A.M.
The Death of the ‘Iran Won’ Myth
In the Left’s eyes, Iran was the greatest beneficiary of the Iraq War. Let’s look at the reality.
Did the fall of Saddam Hussein and the violent birth of Iraqi democracy really empower Iran?
That
conventional wisdom might have been true in the shorter term during the
chaotic Iraqi insurrection, but it was never an accurate assessment
over the longer haul — as we are beginning to see, nearly seven years
after the Iraq War began.In the last twelve months, mass civil disobedience has spread throughout Iran, most notably when nearly a million people hit the streets to protest last summer’s rigged elections. There is unrest in Iraq as well, and a myriad of conflicting interests, but note that the tension is of a completely opposite sort. Whereas in Iran an unpopular government uses violence to squelch a majority that seeks free elections, in Iraq
a legitimately elected government enjoys public support against
occasional attacks from small cadres of terrorist extremists. So in an Iran supposedly at peace, more died voting than in an Iraq purportedly at war.
The use of Saddam Hussein as a proper balance to Iran
was always an atrocious idea — and it is bizarre to hear critics of the
war cite post facto his obscene government as a once-necessary check on
the Iranian theocracy. Given Saddam’s genocidal policies, and America’s war against him in 1990–91, there was no way that the United States should ever again have used his dictatorship to thwart Iran’s. And while the present democratic government of Iraq
is dominated by Shiites — logically, given demographic realities — it
is not true that they are all pro-Iranian Muslims who have forfeited
their Iraqi identities. In time, a stable democratic Iraq may be one of the very few mechanisms by which Iranian regional influence can be checked.
That is why Iran
for the last five years has done its best to destroy Iraqi democracy,
by supplying money and weapons to cross-border terrorists. Yet Iraq has
survived, and it is now slowly proving subversive to Iran, albeit in
quite a different manner — by reminding Iran’s uneasy Shiite population
that free elections are not incompatible with their religion, as they
can now readily see from the free, uncensored media across the border.
The percentage of Iraqis who turned out for this round of voting was
greater than the percentage of Americans who turned out for our
landmark election of 2008.
http://article.nationalreview.com/427456/the-death-of-the-iran-won-myth/victor-davis-hanson