Iran's influence in Iraq grows.
Peter Feaver sees vindication for the Bush administration's surge in the recent WikiLeaks document dump:
There is a cottage industry among academics and some pundits attempting to discredit the surge as either a total failure or as irrelevant to what progress there has been in Iraq. The latest Wikileaks dump poses a real problem for them, and I haven't seen any of them yet adequately rise to the challenge: how would any of their preferred options in 2006 have dealt with the Iranian challenge in Iraq more successfully than did the surge that President Bush ordered?
I think some of this hinges on semantics - i.e. what you feel the "Iranian challenge" is and was in the country. For instance, does this qualify:
Iran has dramatically expanded economic ties with Iraq, taking advantage of increased security there to extend its influence.
That's from yesterday's USA Today.
Or this:
The Iraqi premier met his erstwhile Shiite Muslim rival in Iran Monday, state television said, as Tehran moved to patch over their differences to help ensure Iraqâ??s next government is led by Shiites.With Iranian intervention, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had already won the public backing of fiery anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for his bid for a second term in office after an inconclusive election seven months ago.
Feaver isn't wrong to highlight the important role that quieting Shiite militias played in reducing violence inside Iraq. But as with the success in curbing the Sunni insurgency, there's little evidence yet that these gains are durable, much less that they contributed to blunting any "Iranian challenge" inside Iraq.
