Don’t hold your breath waiting for the GOP to congratulate Obama on his handling of the wars in Libya or Iraq. They don’t like Occupy Wall Street but they love Occupy Iraq so much they don’t ever want to see the end of it.

According to GOP mythology it was ‘the surge’ that reduced the violence in Iraq. Nonsense. What really ended the violence was the US public voting for Democrats in the 2006 mid terms. It was the GOP losses in the mid terms that forced Bush to finally sack Rumsfeld and other incompetents and to at last start running the Iraq war in the way that the professional military had advised from the start. And it was that same GOP defeat in the mid-terms that started to convince the Iraqi insurgents fighting against the US occupation that the invaders might actually leave of their own accord.

Make no mistake about it, as Glenn Greenwald points out, the agreement to withdraw US forces from Iraq is merely fulfilling the commitment made by the Bush administration. Factions within the government were attempting to negotiate an extension of the occupation up to the last minute. But even the idea that the US must abide by its commitments to other countries has become a point of distinction between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats think that the US should honor its obligations and Republicans think it should ignore any that they consider inconvenient.

John McCain had hoped that the US would stay in Iraq for ‘100 years’ and slammed today’s announcement:

Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States in the world. I respectfully disagree with the President: this decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration — which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office — as well as the Iraqi government.

What I would like to see is a journalist asking McCain what he proposes Obama should have done instead. Should he have ignored the Iraqi parliament and kept the troops anyway? Should he have allowed the troops to be stationed in Iraq without immunity from Iraqi laws? How is it possible to build democracy in a country by ignoring the results of the elections that take place? But no, the establishment media never seem to ask such questions of McCain, to expose the fact that he is full of it might appear partisan.

Of course Iran is going to be a bigger influence on Iraq after the US withdrawal. Iran has been the biggest influence in Iraq since the 2005 elections. Unlike the neo-con clique that plotted the US invasion, the Iranian regime realized that their country would benefit from a second US-Iraq war regardless of the outcome. Chalabai’s Iraqi National Congress was known in intelligence circles as an Iranian front throughout the 1990s.

Iran will have a greater influence in Iraq than the US regardless of how many US troops are stationed there because of the simple fact that the two countries are next to each other and both have majority Shi’ia populations. The US is an English speaking country with a largely Christian population and a capital 6200 miles from Baghdad.

The best way for the US to counter Iran’s growing influence is to support the emergence of strong democratic Islamic powers that can protect legitimate US interests without the need for US occupation. As the operation in Libya has proved, the US can achieve results that further US interests without feeling the need to lead the fighting in every war that comes along.

Contrary to what McCain and the other Republicans imagine, the rising powers in the Middle East are Turkey and Egypt. Iran’s influence grew under Bush but is now shrinking under Obama. The US withdrawal will actually reduce the Iranian influence in Iraq as factions that previously attempted to play one foreign power off against another seek to eliminate foreign interference completely. Meanwhile Iranian influence in Syria is only as strong as the embattled Syrian regime. Should Assad fall, the Iranian regime will be too busy fighting for its own survival to worry much about regional power status.

