Around the same time, Josh Marshall was writing about another hawkish argument in Washington Monthly. "Most experts believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran," he observed. "That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran's border. But the opposite could happen," he added. "If the mullahs are smart, they'll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran's brother Shi'a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been."

As it became clear that the Iraq War would prove much more difficult than its advocates imagined, the mainstream media began recognizing how vulnerable U.S. foreign policy had become to Iranian influence. David Ignatius wrote this in February 2004:

The United States is "stuck in the mud in Iraq, and they know that if Iran wanted to, it could make their problems even worse," Rafsanjani said in an interview with the Tehran daily Kayhan. He coyly opened the door to a Washington-Tehran dialogue about Iraq and other issues, saying, "For me, talking is not a problem." The hard-line mullahs in Tehran are sitting pretty these days: America has toppled their historical foe, Saddam Hussein, and is struggling with a nasty postwar insurgency. Meanwhile, an Iranian-born Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has emerged as the dominant figure in the new Iraq. ... Anyone in the White House who imagines that the Iranians are running scared because more than 100,000 U.S. troops are bivouacked next door hasn't been reading the papers. From Iran's standpoint, the United States is pinned down and vulnerable. And because of Tehran's overt and covert influence among Iraq's Shiite majority, the mullahs may actually be in a position to shape the terms and timing of America's departure.

Meanwhile, in the right-leaning blogosphere, Instapundit and his readers still felt confident not just that the Bush administration was winning the war in Iraq, but that it was all part of a brilliant plan to surround and conquer the regime in Iran.

Take this July 19, 2004 post:

All these years later, it's clear that hawkish analysis and the conventional wisdom that it shaped was dead wrong. Invading Iraq did not strengthen America's hand with Iran. Rather, it gave Iran geopolitical leverage over the United States even as it enabled that country to contribute to the deaths of U.S. troops with impunity. As AP reports that Iran's influence in the region is reaching unprecedented levels, the foreign-policy lesson isn't that hawks were wrong, though they were, or that Iran's new strength imperils America. (I have no idea if it does.) The lesson is that Americans vastly overestimate their ability to develop grand strategies and to predict how foreign interventions of choice will play out over time. This has led the United States to treat war as a viable means of shaping the world rather than as an option of last resort that has wildly unpredictable consequences. You'd think that the business of making confident predictions about wars of choice would be discredited by now, given how often prominent elected officials and foreign-policy commentators have been wildly wrong in recent years. But even after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, confident predictions by hawks remain a prominent feature of our foreign-policy debate, even when it comes to Iran. When will America learn?