Probably the best article I’ve read on the situation in Iraq and it comes from a Canadian publication, Macleans. Free of spin and ideology the author speaks from direct experience outside the protective bubble of US propaganda but also outside of the internal American political debate as well. Iran is seriously engaged in Iraq, but not quite as the US administration would have us believe and in fact as a direct result, along with the pipsqueak but deadly AQ in Iraq, of our invasion and utterly screwed up occupation.

An excerpt, but read the whole article and learn:

America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for “staying the course.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a perverse form of an Islamic state. Its death squads and enormously destructive truck bombs have killed thousands of Shias, but Sunnis, too, have suffered al-Qaeda’s violent nihilism. Car bombs, assassinations and “religious punishments,” including decapitations and cutting off the fingers of smokers, have put Sunni Iraq under a Mordor-like shadow of terror and justified collective punishment from the Shias. In his testimony to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American general—because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.