The Workday Liberal

All Headline News has an article which describes the most recent silliness from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says, "A successful Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors and that has a government that's representative of the various elements within the country would represent an enormous success for this region."

"It would add to prosperity for the region.

So far so good! If the insurgents would just lay down their arms, the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd agree to play nice and share, and everybody sang kum bay ya together in Iraq the entire region would be better off.

Of course if a UFO were to zap my car with a wealth-ray and turn it into solid gold I'd be far better off as well. And the chances of Rumsfelds dream occurring are about the same as mine happening as well. But it is nice to imagine, and just taking what he said so far I actually would have to agree with him. Unfortunately Rumsfeld has to keep moving his lips in an attempt to make some political point and thereby entirely destroys any semblance of intelligence gained by his previous speculations:

"It would be something that all of the neighbors would benefit from, except Iran."

Rumsfeld explains, "Iran's view of the world is quite different, and [a successful democracy in Iraq] would represent a failure from the standpoint of Iran."

For those of you who may not know the basic and rudimentary history of the Persian Gulf, let me just bring you up to date with a few basic truths. Iraq under the reign of Saddam Hussien fought a horribly bloody and atrocity filled war with Iran. When Saddam was captured Iran actually made a request that they be allowed to try him for war crimes. So believe me when I tell you that Saddam was hardly a friend of Iran.

Indeed our removal of Saddam from power has allowed the Shiite majority in Iraq to gain political power. This same Shiite majority is heavily allied with the Iranian government as can be seen by anyone who cares to take half a moment to look at the issue. I suppose that Secretary Rumsfeld is relying on the notion that you will not take a moment to study these ties, because if he really thought his audience knew the slightest bit about the politics of the region he certainly would not have said what he did.

Looking at this solely from the viewpoint of who in the region benefited by our invasion, it clearly is the case that Iran is one of the big winners in the game. Now I full well understand that the administration hates the notion that it helped Iran, but the facts as they stand at this time clearly indicate that this invasion was clearly a boon Saddams greatest enemy.

So yes Secretary Rumsfeld, we have helped Iran by taking out Saddam. Flapping your gums isn't going to make history go away so please stop treating us like children. That is great advice to this whole craven lot in this failure of an administration actually!