Iran Urges Iraq to Seek Pullout Timetable
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani as part of Talabani’s three-day visit to Iran. According to the AP’s reporting, Khamenei “urged the Iraqi president on Tuesday to seek a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, saying the American presence harms the country.”
Leaders from Iraq’s divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities agreed in a conference in Cairo this week to call for a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, but gave no specific timeframe and tied it [to] the training of Iraqi forces to carry on the fight against Sunni-led insurgents. The interior minister said this week he expected Iraqi forces to be capable of taking over security duties by the end of next year.
It’s good to see that the Iraqis have tied their timetables to the training of Iraqi security forces. When this was first picked up on the wires, mention wasn’t made that it was tied to training, just that Iraq wanted to establish a timetable. (Aren’t you thankful the media doesn’t have an agenda?)
As you’d expect, Khamenei is pushing Iraq to get rid of Coalition forces, especially U.S. military forces. This makes abundantly clear that Khamenei sees the Iraqi-Coalition relationship as a threat to the mullah’s well-being. I suspect that they don’t want their already rebellious people seeing how good life is in a democracy. The Iranian rebellion is being led mostly by pro-western young people.
These young people are interested in Western civilization and write about it in their blogs. Farsi is the 4th most common blog language in the world. Anything we can do through our friendly relationship with Iraq will go a long ways towards undermining and limiting the Iranian mullahs’ power, in both Iran and Iraq.
The other possible benefit of friendly relations with democratic Iraq is that it’d help if the people of Iran toppled the mullahs before they got nuclear weapons. A democratic Iran would also dry up alot of Hizbollah’s funding and sanctuary, which can’t happen soon enough.
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing