There's an annotated copy of Bush's Jan. 10, 2007 speech up at Future of the Book. The idea is to run comments alongside the speech. They invited various people to comment, and also invited comments from the general public. The latter are moderated. I sent one in on Friday. The website promised a decision within two hours, but my comment has yet to appear, and I have not received anything back. Several new commenters have appeared in the meantime, but possibly they were preapproved. It's possible that they're just being slow, but looking at the biographical notes on the commenters make me suspect credentialism. Everyone to appear so far has an officious sounding job title and something of a publication record. I don't. Obviously, anyone can publish a blog, so that doesn't count for much. Same thing has been said about rock critics -- in fact, I recall doing so myself. Still, I'm reminded that Jane Jacobs put credentialism high on her list of dark ages trends. It seems like every time you turn on the TV or look an op-ed page, you'll see idiocy vouchsafed by nothing more than credentials. That seems to be the media's guideline for deciding who's opinion counts, and whose can be safely ignored. Like they say: opinions are like assholes -- everyone's got one.

But having a blog, I'll run this one anyway. For reference, it's about Bush's paragraph 19:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity -- and stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

My comment is:

Iran and Syria may have reasons for undermining the US in Iraq, but like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, they also have reasons to fear instability and upheaval there. The Assad family's worst fear is that the Salafist Jihadis so prominent in Iraq's Sunni resistance will spread into Syria. Iran has historical issues with Sunnis and Kurds, although their favor with Iraq's Shiite parties puts them in a strong position to rival or replace the Americans as the Shiites protector. On the other hand, Turkey has threatened action if Iraq's Kurds move toward independence, and the Saudis have are making noises about defending Iraqi Sunnis in the civil war. Bush's focus on Iran and Syria reflect his blind ideology more than anything happening in the region. It's as if he can't even conceive of anyone else having interests orthogonal from his "either you're with us or against us" view of American interests.

That Iran is not supporting anti-American forces in Iraq in any significant way can be proven by comparing the arms that are used in Iraq to Iranian-supplied Hezbollah. If Iraqis had Qassam rockets, they could easily breach the Green Zone and the major US military bases, to devastating effect. If Iraqis had the anti-tank weaponry Hezbollah used, their attacks on US armored vehicles would be much more effective. In short, it's easy to see how Iranian-armed Iraqis could push the US death toll from 3000 to 4000 almost overnight. Of course, if that happened, the US would retaliate, and Iranian losses would be far worse, but that would set off further escalations in Iraq and the Persian Gulf which would be very painful for both sides.

Sane leaders would back away from any such confrontation. Indeed, even the Baker-Hamilton group found ample reason to argue that diplomacy could find all parties sharing a common interest in stabilizing Iraq. But here we find Bush issuing threats as if Tehran doesn't take the threat he represents seriously. As Baghdad burns, the moves we're seeing toward attacking Iran -- moving US carriers and subs into the area, Israel practicing bombing runs on Gibraltar -- I'm reminded of Nixon's "madman" strategy, when he tried to influence negotiations with the Vietnamese by scrambling SAC bombers to feint a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Of course, Nixon was just pretending to be wacko. It's hard to be sure about Bush.

After I wrote this, I saw a TV news story that showed a small cache of allegedly Iranian anti-tank weapons the US captured from the Mehdi Army -- the Sadr-affiliated militia. That is plausible, but falls far short of what Bush has implied. While there is no love lost between the Americans and the Sadrists, they are also not involved in open warfare, and where there are skirmishes it is often because the Americans went looking for it. That could, of course, change: there is at least a camp among the Americans that wants to squeeze Sadr out of the government and smash his militia. But Sadr seems to have far more grass roots support than SCIRI, coincidentally the Shiite group the Americans like best and the one most completely in Iran's pocket. That contradiction seems to have escaped the people who pick their friends by how flattering they are, and figure everyone else can be beat into shape.