American Meddling

A regional power is training Iraqi militias and funding extremists. The question is, why is the United States interfering in the affairs of the Iraqi people?

While Iran tries to create the most advantageous outcome in Iraq - a neighboring country which it shares a nine-hundred mile border with - for its own prosperity and security, the United States, Iraq's 7000-miles-away neighbor, is also involved in Iraq - significantly involved - with 150,000 American troops and over 100,000 private contractors on the ground, all trying to get control of an oil-rich region that seems to be slipping from America's mighty stranglehold. 

The United States is: supporting an unpopular government which has very little legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqi's; supporting sunni clan and militia leaders with money and weapons; supporting Shiite militia leaders with money and weapons; fighting other shiite militia leaders with larger popular support (Muqtada Al-Sadr); fighting a "war on terrorism" (and militias not on the US's good side) complete with a sloppy dragnet that has caught thousands of Iraqi's, many, undoubtedly, innocent, and sent them into massive American run prisons for torture (Abu Ghraib is but one example) and indefinite detention without trials. 

So who is the meddling nation then? Well, as Michael M. Gordon of the New York Times (see here), and many other American journalists would have you believe, the meddlers are the Iranians. Never mind the fact that much of the cash and weapons being used, Iraqi on Iraqi, and Iraqi on American, are either American weapons or weapons America failed to secure after their toppling of the Baathist regime. 

The truth is that the New York Times is wrong. The Los Angeles Times is wrong. The Washington Post is wrong. The real meddlers are the American armed forces and contractors, who have come so far to interfere in the lives of people who have done them no harm, and hold up the fig leaf of democracy and rebuilding to hide the shameful nature of the occupation. The Iraqi's want America out. They want the superpower from 7000-miles away to stop its meddling.