Concentrated Information

This paragraph, from an interview with Patrick Cockburn about Iraq (not Alex Cockburn - and I found the link at Yglesias's blog) has so many interesting ideas that I'll just paste it into this post and highlight the ones that jump out at me. Read the whole interview, though, it's amazing:

The Iranians clearly are the winners so far, and this will probably continue. In 1991, fear of benefiting Iran was a prime reason why George Bush Senior ended the war so quickly. Khalilzad, the present American viceroy in Baghdad, who was then head of policy planning in the State Department, warned at the time that if the us, after winning its victory and getting Saddam out of Kuwait, went on to overthrow him, the real victors would be the Iranians. Today it’s pretty bizarre that the one place where optimistic announcements by the White House regarded with derision by the rest of the world—that the Iraqi elections are a major turning point, that the referendum is a terrific success, that the Constitution is a solution to the problems of Iraq—are immediately applauded is in Iran. The us occupation is opening the door to a regional Shia government, and a Shia government which sees its identity as Shia, rather than Iraqi. This is much in Iran’s interest. It now has a weakened Iraq on its western border, in which the Americans have a big stake. If the US puts too much pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, it can squeeze the Americans in Iraq. It’s much more in Iranian interests to fight the US in Baghdad than in Tehran. They know how vulnerable the Americans are in Iraq. So I think that they have clearly been the beneficiaries. Supposing that the invasion had been a tremendous success, and there were a rock-solid pro-American regime under the control of the us in Baghdad, then the Iranians would be very nervous, caught in the pincers of Washington’s control of Afghanistan on one side and Iraq on the other. They now seem much more confident.