In other words, The Mirage is a provocative, timely, fascinating intervention in the way we think about not just the post-September 11 world but about American power and popular culture. The novel is full of funhouse mirror details like a television show with the tagline: “Shafiq: he’s Sunni. Hassan: he’s Shia. They fight crime,” where “episodes typically offered one or more moral lessons, the most common of which was ‘Respect the other People of the Book—even if you don’t like them very much.’” It’s an incredibly effective way of both exposing our debates and politics as ridiculous, and of forcing us to put ourselves in Muslims’ shoes by letting them stand in the footwear of the mostly white, mostly Christian cops, politicians and criminals we see on American television. And the magic, when it comes, is wonderfully lovely and inventive, the result of Ruff having researched not just geopolitics but fantastical belief.

I spoke to Ruff yesterday about breaking out of stereotypical images of Muslims in popular culture, how we decide which terrorist attacks to excuse and which to condemn, and how our beliefs about our ability to change history can lead us astray. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’d be curious how you decided which cultural phenomena would survive—or develop naturally—in your alternate history. Personally, I’m glad to hear that Oded Fehr’s still a huge star in the world of The Mirage.

For me, it wasn’t so much a matter of what to include but what to leave out. I’m a huge pop culture fan, so I had tons of ideas that I could have included. It was more a matter of picking and choosing things that were either short and clever and wouldn’t disrupt the plot, or would support it in some way. One obvious case was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an alternate version…it was a way of introducing the fact that Samir [one of the Homeland Security agents who works with Mustafa] is fighting his homosexuality…Another idea I had come up with that I didn’t use was the infamous Star Trek mirror world episode. I had thought to have that on TV in the background, the difference being that the Evil Spock would be clean-shaven.

I was also wondering if you could talk a bit about the decision to set the novel in Baghdad instead of, say, Saudi Arabia, and to marginalize oil politics in the novel. Are those resources democratized in the UAS?

There were a lot of specific nuts and bolts questions like that that I left unanswered becuase they didn’t fit what I was doing. The very first incarnation of the book, I had thought to set it in Riyadh. Riyadh became the federal district, it became the alternate Washington, DC, and to have it serve as New York didn’t work. What I wanted to do was offer central roles to people who suffered the real brunt of the War on Terror, so it made sense to make Baghdad Ground Zero because that is Ground Zero of the U.S. response to the War on Terror. These were the folks who I wanted to be in the center of the novel and have their turn on the other side of the looking glass…you’ve go the South representing the more religious vision of what Arabia should be, and then you’ve got Egypt as an alternate, more secular vision but they have lost out on the competition for where the capital should be.

The Mirage also has a vision of a decidedly more moderate global Islam: is there more we could be doing in politics and popular culture to be supportive of moderate interpretations of Islam?

If you give people freedom of conscience, you’re going to get more moderate versions of religion. It’ll take a while. Part of what drives extreme conservativism in relgiion is people are afraid to voice alternate views…if you can go to jail or be killed for voicing a unorthodox opinion… I don’t see anything incompatible in Islam, as I don’t in Christianity, with gay rights or women’s rights. It’s more do with people having breathing room.

Similarly, the way we talk about acts of terrorism committed by people inspired by their Christian beliefs is very different than the way we talk about terrorists who are inspired by Islam. Do you think we should be looking more carefully at things like attacks on abortion providers?

I think you always tend to be much more forgiving of the behavior, even the bad behavior, of people you are more familiar and comfortable with. I don’t think it’s an exact parallel, but the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a Christian war would trouble a lot of people. But obviously it was launched by George Bush, who was asked ‘who’s your favorite philosopher?’ in one of the debates, and he said ‘my favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ.’ People are going to assume that anything you do is essentially a Christian act. If you launch a war, even with the best intentions, that kills thousands of people, a lot of people are going to look at that as Christian terrorism.

A lot of it is being able to put yourself in the mindset of people on the receiving end of violence…[When Christians commit violence, people are able to think] ‘they’re bad, but they’re not representative of what Christianity is supposed to be.’ What are you familiar with? Who are your friends? Does the violence affect you and people you care about? And all of that goes into the calculation of what gets labeled terrorism?…Any religion that lasts for more than 1,000 years and flourished in hundreds of different cultures is going ot have to be pretty adaptable to local traditions and is going to have to speak to you in times of peace and times of war…To condemn an entire religion that way, or to do the other thing and say the violence doesn’t count because the real expression is when we’re being nice, that doesn’t work either.

I think part of the problem, too, with a lot of portrayals of Islam on television and in movies, is if you’ve only got one character who is meant to represent the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims, no actor is good enough to capture all that diversity. The only way to represent a religion organically is to having multiple characters practicing the faith each in their own way, and to go about their lives being Muslim. Which was part of what I was after. I didn’t want to have to say, oviously Osama bin Laden is a bad example of Islam. I wanted to be obvious that what sets him apart from other people in the story is he’s a mass murderer.

I’d love to hear how you developed your characters. One of the things I’ve found really frustrating about popular culture is how it’s essentially failed to provide a pushback to the stereotypical depictions of Muslims as terrorists, and how we haven’t had iconic representations of Muslims that are the equivalent of the Cosbys or tropes like the sassy gay best friend to defuse any anxiety people may feel about having Muslims as friends, neighbors, or even intermarrying into their families.

This was originally a pitch for a TV pilot. It came out of a more general desire to tell a story about 9/11 and the U.S. response ot it. I’m a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I wanted to do something like that where you set up a genre universe where along the way you explore these different issues in a metaphorical or a less direct way, as part of telling a really exciting story. The other thing on my wish list was to give a more central role to the Iraqis who were bearing the brunt of the War on Terror, who got committed to sidekick status or not mentioned at all. I wanted to do this more organic portrait of Islam and get away from it as a problem religion. Because I’m also a big science fiction geek, I hit on this idea of turning the world upside down, and not just the geopolitical situation, but even the idea of who the center of the story should be. Who constitues a protagonist. This is a universe wehre not only are Muslims the center of the universe, but when you turn on TV, you’d expect the elite to be an Arab Muslim, you’d expect the Christians to be the sad sidekicks, the people who remind you that, yes the people in the third world are humans too.

I just started putting together the characters. I was creating the classic thriller setup. You’ve got your main character, Mustafa, who has the tragic marriage, but in his case because they have polygamy, he’s got more than one. His loveable sidekick, who is there for comic relief, is Samir…Amal is the scrappy new recruit who’s got to prove herself. That was the core of the story, and I built out from there.

One of the basic rules was that people’s characters would not be fundamentally altered. Osama in Laden would be more a respectable political figure who was doing dastardly things behind the scenes. Originally, Saddam Hussein was going to be more of a recurring character. But it made sense that he would be a gangster. A number of the biopics about Saddam tend to do the same thing, they portray him as the Al Capone. And of course the Muslim war on drugs would be a war on alcohol.

There was the central conceit of the mirage. Apart from being a neat twist that you could build off of [it was a reminder that] your place in history, at the top of the pyramid of power, is not assured. If the world is turned over once, it could turn over again, and you should maybe build your ethics on the idea that you’ll be on the bottom some day or you’ll be in need of mercy…If you took Americans and you put them in a position where they believe they should be at the top, and instead, had been humiliated and put at the bottom, the rage that would evolve from that is probably not that different than the rage that comes out of the Middle East. They’ve been on the receiving end for a long time. Certainly guys like [Ayman al-]Zawahiri are oppressed, they’re mad. The Mirage was part of the way at getting at some of that mindless violence.

Do you think significant culture change is possible? The book is a very funny, pointed warning for folks who think they can alter the course of history and civilizations easily, but I’m not sure that answers the question of whether those world-historical forces can be altered at all?

History is in part a series of human decisions, but it’s also a series of accidents. It’s not so much that we can’t change hsitory or affect it, but we overestimate our ability to do it and to do it quickly. Desire often gets ahead of reason…If you’re happy with the way your society works, it’s natural to assume this is the way it should work for everybody. Something that drives this adventure of we’ll go into Iraq, and take out the dictator, and democracy will flourish, and that’s the end point of history for everybody, that ignores that history works differently for everybody…It’s not that I don’t hope that Iraq and other countries will eventually have a robust democracy. But part of it is having a robust democracy for long enough that people don’t want to return to dictatorship. In America, we haven’t had a king for over 200 years, so if you tried to set up a monarchy, you’d be faced with a collective disbelief of 300 million people. That interia protects us from more obvious forms of despotism.

President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight will reportedly focus on the economy, jobs and what he calls a “return to American values.” But as the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Lindsay notes in a CNN column today, “What the president says about foreign policy, however, will be equally important.”

Indeed, the last year saw the end to two very different wars and two competing visions of American power. One war, in Iraq, finally came to end in December after a series of poor policy choices and overzealous neoconservative thinking cost the U.S. nearly a trillion dollars and 4,500 American lives over the course of eight and a half years.

The other war, in Libya, accomplished nearly the exact same objectives as the war in Iraq, but the selective application of American power and the diplomatic efforts to gain the support of both NATO and the U.N. Security Council allowed the U.S. to accomplish its goals for just over $1 billion and not one lost American life.

A new infographic from the Center for American Progress compares the costs of the two wars:

Libya may not be a model for every future American conflict, just as the lessons of Iraq do not preclude the use of American force in every scenario. But as the country looks back on 2011 and looks forward to the international challenges we face in 2012 and beyond, Iraq and Libya present us with two different visions of American power. As CAP’s Peter Juul writes, President Obama’s actions over the past three years have reaffirmed the credibility of American military power; credibility that President Bush put into question.

Looking at the comparative costs of war in Iraq and Libya, what do you want American power to look like in 2012 and beyond?

But this week, a group of military veterans changed her mind with an act of solidarity. Patrick Scanlon, a Vietnam veteran and a coordinator for Veterans for Peace, organized so many veterans and other supporters to come and patronize the restaurant that they ended up filling every seat — twice. “For someone to come and throw a rock through this window, in what we consider a hate crime, is totally unacceptable,” said veteran Pat Scanlon. The Lowell Sun captured video of the outpouring of support for the restaurant. Watch it:

“This solidarity gives us the courage to stand,” said Al-Zubaidi. “There is no more fear in my heart because there are such nice people behind us.” (HT: Reddit user rootGrapefruit)

Today on MSNBC, the presidential hopeful ditched the dodge. Asked by Chuck Todd, he answered that “of course” the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq had intelligence reports indicated that, as we later learned, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

ROMNEY: Well, if we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction — if somehow we had been given that information, why, obviously we would not have gone in.

TODD: You don’t think we would have gone in?

ROMNEY: Well, of course not. The president went in based upon intelligence that they had weapons of mass destruction. Had he known that that was not the case, the U.N. would not have put forward resolutions authorizing this type of action. The president would not have been pursuing that course.

But we did not know that. … [K]nowing what we know now, they did not have weapons of mass destruction; there would have been no effort on the part of our president or others to take military action.

Watch the video:

Compared with his dodge this weekend, Romney here presents a fair accounting of what his position would have been if there were no WMDs in Iraq. (Romney, as ThinkProgress noted on Sunday, supported the push for war at the time.) While some Iraq war supporters — including some in the Bush administration — have made apologia for the botched (or cooked, depending on how you look at it) intelligence in the run up to the war, others have been more honest in their assessments. Take Paul Wolfowitz, a top Bush Defense Department official and Iraq hawk, who said this year: “We did not go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan to promote democracy, but rather to remove regimes that were dangerous to us and to the world.” Romney’s assessment rightfully recognizes the dynamic that was at work during the run-up to the war.

1.The Director: Jiang Qing. I should have mentioned this former actress as a perfect example of the dictatorial effort to set up the government as a source of joy by dominating culture, and you could tell a fabulously scary story about her through a look at a single production. She interfered with the Beijing Opera, interfered what she called “revolutionary plays” ran the film section of Communist China’s propaganda ministry, and even discovered Joan Chen. Glee and Smash would have absolutely nothing on her in a story that could be about both the coercive power of government and the tyranny of people who are convinced they’re artistic visionaries.

2. The Escapee: Malyamu Amin. To a certain extent, The Last King of Scotland is an exploration of the life and death of Kay Amin, Idi Amin’s youngest wife, who is said to have had an abortion go wrong. But the movie isn’t from Kay’s perspective — her mutilated body is the means by which an arrogant young Scottish doctor comes to consciousness. And wouldn’t it be fascinating to see a tyrant through the eyes of his first wife, to try to understand what it must be like to see your husband become a monster — and to watch her make the decision to get out?

3. The Mother: Sajida Khairallah Talfah. Gillian Darmody and the other nightmare mothers of antihero television have precisely nothing on Saddam Hussein’s first wife in terms of producing deeply messed-up. One of her sons, Uday Hussein, was apparently a serial rapist and killed the man he believed introduced Saddam to his second wife at a party for another authoritarian leader’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak. He also ran a nasty little sideline torturing Iraqi athletes who underperformed in world competitions. Her other son, Qusay, managed to keep his crimes at the level of the state, wiping out the environment that was the home to the Marsh Arabs and rare bird species, and cracking down on dissidents. Her husband may have also murdered her brother. What can it be like to be the widow to such a man? The mother to such dead sons? She does play a role in House of Saddam.

4. The Pretender: Magda Goebbels: In a sense, she was the closest thing Germany had to a first lady, because Adolf Hitler hid his relationship with Eva Braun to avoid putting anything in the way of German women’s fantasies. A wealthy divorcee when she married Goebbels, she was humiliated by his affairs (though she had her own) and asked Hitler for permission to divorce his propaganda minister. Ultimately, they stayed together, and Magda supported the regime even though she privately doubted it, made no move to save her Jewish stepfather from death in a concentration camp, and helped kill her six children before killing herself with her husband. Again, it’s not as if there haven’t been portrayals of her on film before. But it would be fascinating and dreadful to see the story from her perspective, to see Magda go from bourgie flirt to participant in a genocidal regime.

5. Eva Peron, again. Sure, we’ve got Evita. And yes, her husband is nowhere near as bad as the spouses of the other women on this list. But in some ways, the more interesting story about Eva Peron is what happened to her after she died. Her enbalmed body was supposed to go on display in a monument that would rival the Statue of Liberty. Instead, it vanished for 16 years, and she ended up buried under another name in Milan. Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita turns the mystery into a macabre and fascinating horror, complete with wax replicas and corpse desecration. But either way, it’s a fascinating illustration of how an even more restrictive regime tried to erase the memory of the one that followed it, and to dismantle a cult of personality.

Baghdad

According to results of the survey by Zogby Research Services (PDF), Iraqis expressed concern about the departure of U.S. forces, but are nonetheless cautiously optimistic. Six in 10 Iraqis, said a report on the results, feared a possible civil war, partition of the country, outsized foreign influence by neighbors, terrorism, or economic woes. The concerns played into mixed Iraqi emotions:

Iraqi views can again be described as conflicted: 22% saying they are happy; 35% saying they are worried; and 30% saying they feel both emotions.

Iraqis, overall, feel that their country is “worse off” because of the U.S.-led war there — perhaps, for example, because Baghdad recently ranked as the worst place on the planet to live — with strong divergences across ethnic groups. Likewise, in the U.S., respondents were split between political affiliations about whether they thought Iraq was better or worse off. This chart breaks down the various responses to the survey:

So, if not themselves, who do Iraqis think became better situated vis-à-vis their country?

When asked who benefited the most from the war in Iraq, Iraqis most frequently point to Iran (54%), the United States (48%), and Iraqi elites (40%). Additionally, more than one-quarter of Iraqis see al-Qaeda as a chief beneficiary of the war. Only 4% think the Iraqi people benefited the most from the war.

Majorities in five of the six other countries surveyed — “Egypt (88%), Lebanon (86%), Tunisia (81%), Jordan (66%), Saudi Arabia (58%), and Iran (50%)” — agreed with the plurality of Iraqis who saw the U.S. benefiting the most, with nearly half (47%) of respondents from the United Arab Emirates sharing this view.

The survey — of 1,000 Iraqis across sect, ethnicity, cities, regions, age groups and socio-economic status — did bear out recent reporting on Iraqi resistance to undue Iranian influence in their affairs. Overall, two thirds of Iraqis view Iran unfavorably, with 90 percent of Sunnis, 83 percent of Kurds, and, notably, a bare majority of Shiites — Iran’s co-sectarians — holding that view.

All told, Iraqis responded with a guarded optimism about the prospects for their country’s future. While, only 21 percent overall both want a democracy and think it possible, 55 precent of Iraqis are either “very optimistic” (9 percent) or “somewhat optimistic” (46 percent) that Iraq will be stable and make progress.

Drone operators fly missions over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Iraq from bases in Nevada and California. The study — conducted by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — found that frequent shift-changes, “mind numbing” monotony, and increasing workloads contributed to the heightened stress levels. Between 65 and 70 percent of drone operators with symptoms of mental illness were not seeking treatment.

The dramatic growth in the use of drones in recent years has led the Air Force to increase the number of drone pilots but the ratio of pilots to drones remains low. The Pentagon has about 7,000 aerial drones and about 1,100 drone pilots. “There’s just not enough people,” Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist who helped conduct a six-month study of drone operators from 2010 to 2011, told USA Today. “You have to constantly sustain a high level of vigilance, both visual and auditory information, and that would be really tough to do when there’s a lot of monotony.”

While Lt. Gen. Larry James, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, told USA Today that he didn’t think instances of pilot error could attributed to high stress levels among drone operators, instances of pilot error and civilian deaths have increased as drone mission over Afghanistan and Pakistan increase.

In April, a Predator done killed a Marine and a medic in what appeared to be the first case of “friendly fire” from a drone. And in late October, the drone program drew more negative publicity after 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike one day after attending a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on communities in Pakistan.

“It’s awesome, it’s a great feeling,” said Airman First Class Damian Guardiola. “It’s great being a part of history, but it’s an even better feeling to be going home.” The Wall Street Journal has video of moments from the U.S. military’s last flight out of Iraq:

The other side of the good news about leaving Iraq is the tremendous toll the war has had on the United States in both blood and treasure. The Washington Post reported on the last combat fatality of the entire war. Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman was killed on November 14 in Baghdad by a roadside bomb — the 4,474th U.S. service member to die in the war. The Post published a picture of Hickman resting at Al Asad Airbase in Al Anbar Province:

“it’s crazy that he died,” said a close friend to Hickman, “No matter your position on this war — if you’re for or against it — I think everybody thinks we shouldn’t have been over there anymore.”

(HT Jonathan Rue)

WALLACE: [L]ooking back, and hindsight is always 20/20, should we have invaded? [...]

ROMNEY: At that time, we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now. At that time, Saddam Hussein was hiding. He was not letting the inspectors from the United Nations into the various places that they wanted to go. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was blocked from going into the palaces and so forth. And the intelligence in our nation and other nations was that this tyrant had weapons of mass destruction.

And in the light of that — that belief, we took action which was appropriate at the time.

Watch the video:

While running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 at the height of the run-up to the Iraq war, Romney campaigned alongside President George W. Bush. Then-Romney aide and now-adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters: “Al Gore has been a critic to the president’s policies in regard to the war on terrorism, specifically on the plans with regard to Iraq. Mitt’s position is that he supports the president.”

In his 2007 presidential campaign, Romney answered the same question Wallace posed the same way. “I supported the president’s decision based on what we knew at that time,” he said, noting that Hussein had not allowed inspectors in. But, as Media Matters pointed out at the time, by the fall of 2002, U.N. inspectors had entered Iraq and were making progress taking stock of weapons of mass destruction programs.

Today, Romney repeated the false claim that Hussein never allowed inspectors in, adding that “the IAEA was blocked from going into the palaces.” However, in a March 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog wrote: “In the past three months they have conducted over 200 inspections at more than 140 locations, entering without prior notice into Iraqi… presidential palaces.”

Ignoring altogether what the Iraqi government wanted, Romney said the U.S. “should have left 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 personnel there.”

Many Romney advisers pushed for invading Iraq in the early 2000s, and now they’re doing the same with Iran.

Asked by Wallace if, as president, Romney would send troops back to Iraq, the candidate replied, “I think the decision to send U.S. troops into a combat setting is a — is a very high threshold decision. This is not something you do easily.” Perhaps he should apply that principle to his reflections about the initial invasion.

“That’s it, the war is over,” NBC’s Richard Engel quoted one of the last soldiers out as saying. Photos of the pull out:

The last column of U.S. troops leaving Iraq crosses into Kuwait

Iraqis wave at an armored vehicle as it leaves the country.

A U.S. soldier celebrates as his vehicle crosses the border

A member of the Kentucky National Guard kisses the ground after landing in Indianapolis, Indiana

With the New Year approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of the U.S. government’s response to the political upheaval throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Government officials continue to grapple with how best to balance American security interests with support for expanding democratic rights in the region. In recent important speeches, however, Hillary Clinton layed out the U.S. intention to support these transitioning countries and their citizens.

Notably absent from the conversation, though, is how the State Department and other key U.S. foreign affairs agencies can do a better job detecting –- and responding to –- crisis and conflict writ large. Such tools are essential given the increasing regularity with which political instability can emerge anywhere in the world.

As the first-ever Quadrennial Defense and Development Review noted, “With the right tools, training, and leadership, our diplomats and development experts can defuse crises before they explode.” Indeed, as political dynamics around the globe continue to shift unexpectedly, preventing and responding to expensive and destructive global crises will need to be incorporated as a cornerstone of our foreign policy — not an afterthought. If the United States wants to become a more effective international player and avoid costly engagements, our diplomats and development experts need to possess the right skill set. And let the price of the just concluded Iraq war underscore the huge price to be paid when we get our analysis wrong.

While the bulk of Americans probably assume their diplomats and development experts are the best trained, they would be shocked to learn how little training these officials actually received, especially compared to those who serve in the military. In fact, former Secretary of State Colin Powell noted that he spent 6 out of his 30 years of service in the classroom. With better and more regularized training, diplomats and development experts can help advance democracy, galvanize economic growth, and strengthen the rule of law before a conflict emerges — not after. Without it, they are left making ad-hoc and reactive decisions that end up costing a whole lot more.

The newly upgraded Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations is a tremendously important first step in the State Department’s effort to “get ahead of change” -– particularly with Rick Barton as its inaugural Assistant Secretary. But if the bureau is going help ensure crisis prevention is a core consideration of policy making, it must be underpinned by a more broad-based comprehensive training initiative.

A new joint report from the Center for American Progress’ Sustainable Security Program and Humanity United — entitled “It All Starts with Training” — delineates the profound need for improved training courses and professional development opportunities at core U.S. foreign affairs agencies. As the paper makes painfully clear, the current state of conflict prevention training at both State and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) remains shockingly limited, ad hoc, and uncoordinated. In fact, training has little or no link to career advancement, as opposed to our military branches, and is often seen as an inconvenience rather than an asset.

Expanded and mainstreamed crisis prevention training is certainly no foreign policy panacea, but with such a high number of countries around the globe at risk of unrest and wholesale violence, it’s high time we ensure American diplomats and development experts at least have the right tools to respond. Unless the United States can get ahead of this curve and does a better job in crisis prevention and mitigation, the costs to America — and its national interests — will remain untenable.

Iraqis hoist posters of Ayatollah Sistani

Iranian influence, and even meddling through Iranian-backed militias, are indeed the reality in Iraq, inevitable with the fall of Hussein and advent of democracy. Two of Iraq’s powerful Shia political parties — including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s — were sheltered in Iran under Hussein. But a recent incident between the neighbors’ governments and religious institutions indicates that the scope of that influence may not be quite as severe as opponents of ending the war make it out to be. As the Washington Post reports, “although Iraqi Shiites broadly welcome the departure of the Americans, they seem in no mood to substitute one form of foreign domination for another — and least of all, they say, from Iran.” Indeed, tensions between clerics representing Iran’s theocratic structure and Iraq’s own Shia establishment show that the Iraqi side is pushing back against Iran.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, based in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq, and one of the sect’s most revered clerics, was “reported to be furious” when the announcement came last month that Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a close ally of Iran’s theocratic Supreme Leader, intended to open an office in Najaf. The Post outlined the differences of view that caused the tension:

Najaf’s religious authorities, or marjaya, have become a beacon of moderation for the newly established Shiite order. The authorities have moved firmly to assert their quietist school of Shiite religious thought, under which the clerics are expected to merely advise rather than participate in politics, as they do in Iran.

The move by Shahroudi represents a threat to both this “quiet” modus operandi of clerical political involvement in Iraq, and to the supremacy of Sistani as the undisputed religious authority — Shahroudi would represent a rival school of thought on religious grounds alone. (There are other political issues as well.) For Iraqis, this appears to already be fostering resentment and opening up ethnic tensions. The Post reports:

“Do you know who in Iraq hates Iran more than anyone? It is Najaf,” said Neama al-Ebadi, director of the Najaf-based Iraq Center for Research and Studies, echoing a view widely expressed on the streets of the city.

“The Shiites of Iran are Iranian first. They think they’re superior to Arabs. But Najafis believe they are the original Shiites and the Iranians are just copies.”

The flare up, which follows on other tensions, fits a context described by none other than former Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who recently said, “I think it’s easy to overstate the degree to which the Iraqis have any attraction to Iran — that’s a pretty lousy relationship, really.”

Newt Gingrich has also attacked Obama for not doing whatever the generals tell him to do. Here’s what the former House speaker said shortly after Obama’s decision was made:

GINGRICH: I think we are drifting to a very, very dangerous situation. None of the generals recommended the speed of the drawdown the president wants. [...]

And if you watch what is happening there’s a steady drift from the United States at a time when the president is signaling his desire to get out as fast as he can and potentially faster than the generals think is safe. … You should go to the White House and ask the president why did he overrule all his generals?

Yet there was at least one point in Gingrich’s career in which he understood the chain-of-command, and actively promoted it. In 2006, a number of retired generals called on then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to step down because of poor leadership in the Iraq war. Gingrich defended Rumsfeld in an April, 2006 interview on Fox News, saying, “We have civilian control. … The generals don’t control”:

WALLACE: Do you agree with any of the criticism from those six retired generals that Secretary Rumsfeld went in with too few troops, went in without a plan, hasn’t been listening to the generals?

GINGRICH: Look. First of all, Don Rumsfeld listens to generals. He doesn’t obey them. We have civilian control. The president is in charge as commander in chief. The secretary of defense works for the president. The generals advise. The generals don’t control.

Watch the two clips:

So what does Gingrich really believe? Does the president control the military or do the generals control the president? For Newt, it probably depends on which political party the current White House occupant belongs to.