Iraq is not our place

The story of the week - which may soon become the story of the Iraqi war - was the picture of the hawk-nosed, cold-eyed Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, standing confidently on Iraqi soil, overseeing his fighters attacking Tikrit.

Everything seemed to be going well for these Iranian Shiite militias, who were deep into Iraq. Their confidence seemed to be rubbing off on their Iraqi brethren fighters. As for the Americans who once thought to reform those Iraqi sands, they announced that the U.S. was sitting this out, lest the Iranians be given even more confidence.

In short, it was not a good week in the Middle East for the American soldiers and strategy. As The Washington Times wrote in its front page in one of the best sum-ups:

"Iran is on a roll in the Middle East, becoming a dominant military player in Iraq, rescuing the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, bringing down a U.S. ally in Yemen and building its surrogate Hezbollah terrorist army into a political force in Lebanon and throughout the region."

As if that were not enough, it was more or less at this point that the Pentagon announced the spring attacks it had planned to take back the Iraqi city of Mosul (2 million people) were now going to be delayed, while special analysts estimated that Iranians coordinate as many as 100,000 Iraqi fighters brought together by Iraqi clerics sympathetic to Iran.

Now, permit me, please, to say something absolutely outrageous (and I will sneak off to Florida to avoid your spleen). I beg you to not inform our Pentagon of my perfidy:

The Iranians are fighting - and perhaps even winning - in Iraq against the hated Islamic State, which beheads children and enslaves women, and I am supposed to be mad that our boys and girls are not fighting and getting themselves killed? Well, my response is, "WONDERFUL! Let them do it!"

Pause. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Get a glass of cold water and open a history book tonight.

I happened to be covering the Middle East in the late 1970s and throughout the '80s. In the '70s, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian Shiite leader who had been hiding out in Iraq, suddenly rose up as the new quasi-religious political leader of Iran. Just about everybody in the Middle East believed that Khomeinism (super-conservative Shiite Islam) was going to take over the region. The WHOLE region.

I remember interviewing Yasser Arafat in Beirut at the time. The PLO chairman rarely showed a lot of enthusiasm, but this day he seemed dazed by a what he had seen. "I was just in Tehran," he finally told me. "Up on the podium with Khomeini. And his 'troops' were marching, and marching ... and I reviewed them." He ended with a look on his face of such joy that I thought maybe I should clear out.

If there was any time in my many years in the Middle East that I seriously thought the entire area was going to fall to an Islamist revolution, the years of 1978 to 1980 were them. But the fact is, the revolution did not happen. Instead, Iran and Iraq got into one of those imbecilic wars that have ravaged that part of the world through history, a million people were killed between the two sides, and in the end, the "great Iranian Revolution" just kind of puttered out, the way everything eventually does in the Middle East.

Moreover, when you look at American interventions in the region, you rather quickly come to the conclusion that we are muddling out, as well.

We overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, the reformist, elected prime minister, in 1953 and backed the Shah of Iran; he worked reasonably well until the people revolted against him in 1978 and we forbade him to shoot into the crowd. So he was thrown out and Khomeini came in. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1979-'88, we supported Iraq's brutish Saddam Hussein, then when he had won, connived against him.

In 2003, after 9/11, we were looking for Osama bin Laden, but decided to detour and take over Iraq on the way to the Afghan/Pakistani border. Why? Because it was there! Unfortunately, the man we put into power threw all of Saddam's military out, leaving them rootless, violent men without home or hearth. It was these who largely built up the Islamic State.

So you really think it is we who should be putting the Middle East in order? Well, you have a point. Nobody else can teach democracy like we can. No one else can teach another country's men to fight for us like we can. And nobody else can teach those other violent peoples "peace on Earth" like we can. (Why, we've only been in or started seven wars since World War II, after all.)

So, anyone who would like to go over to Baghdad and fight the Iranians, please raise your hand. And any mothers who are just dying to send your sons over there, please stand up. Not everybody all at once.

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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