A couple of weeks ago Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to Baghdad. Having helicoptered into the Green Zone, she was photographed with Prime Minister Al-Jaafari wearing a military flak jacket, a sign of just how dangerous the Secret Service thinks Baghdad is for Americans. Three days later (and not to be upstaged), Kamal Kharrazi, Iran's foreign minister, drove, yes, drove to Baghdad to meet President Talabani and Al-Jaafari, and was photographed with them sans flak jacket for the world to see. To add insult to injury (not that we in America noticed), Kharrazi then drove, again yes, he drove to Najaf to see Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, leader of Iraq’s Shiites, who granted him an audience. Neither Ms. Rice, nor indeed any other American, has ever been granted an audience with Ayatollah Sistani, the most important man in Iraq, a point often highlighted in the Middle Eastern press but somehow ignored by ours.
If nothing else, these two separate Iraq excursions by top officials of the U.S. and Iranian governments are telling of our involvement in the region. The Iraqi leadership, most of whom have lived in Tehran off and on for the last twenty years, declared Iran to be a valued and dear friend of Iraq and promised to strengthen ties. The Iranians wanted more and they got it: Iraq's admission that Saddam Hussein started the war with Iran in the eighties and thus should be tried for war crimes. What did we want from the Secretary of State’s visit? A nice photo-op? Well, the flak jacket ruined that. Mr. Kharazzi’s drive through war-zone Iraq should have told us what many of us already know: we don’t need an exit strategy for Iraq, we just need to exit. The Iraqis don’t want us there, our troops don’t want to be there, and we’re not gaining anything from overstaying our welcome. President Bush who rarely appreciated Colin Powell’s advice has seemed to have taken the one silly thing he said to heart: “You break it; you own it.” Well, the Iraqi’s don’t think we own it. And usually when you break something you throw it away; we just keep trying different glues. Oh, we want to give it back, perhaps minus an oilfield or two, but we want to make sure that the glue sticks before we do, and then maybe they won’t notice the cracks.
Everybody, including most of the Democratic leadership, seems to have bought into the idea that we can’t leave Iraq, that we can’t leave something unfinished. That there will be a civil war. (What’s the war going on now called?) That Iraq will become unstable, that the region's instability will affect our national security. That we’ll lose face. (We lost plenty of face in Vietnam but somehow that didn’t stop us from becoming the world’s only superpower.) No, nothing will happen that won’t happen anyway if we leave Iraq. Every last soldier; just pack up and leave. It took twelve days to get to Baghdad? How about two months to leave. Say we're sorry we invaded but we still believe that Iraq's better off without Saddam. The Sunni insurgency can claim they defeated America all they like, but who cares? Now they'll have to deal with the Shiites, and the Shiites won't be as nice as the Americans. (Think a hundred Abu Ghraibs and a few more Fallujahs.) Ayatollah Sistani may even call on his Iranian brethren to come and help put down the Iraqi wing of Al Qaeda, and the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards will be only too happy to oblige a fellow Iranian citizen (yes, Sistani is an Iranian citizen and couldn't vote in the election he urged Iraq's Shiites to participate in). Iran will have too much influence in Iraq? Well, wake up and smell the chai, America, Iran has plenty of influence in Iraq today. Enough that her foreign minister can drive around the country as if he's taking a leisurely tour of the Amalfi coast.