The Times of London has a disturbing article about a potentially unsettling event–an Iranian-style theocracy in post-Ba’athist Iraq.

The mullahs who are orchestrating this get their oxygen from Iran. We’ve been hoping (or so at least I infer) that Iran would have a pro-western (and pro-American) revolution as a result of a democracy on the border to their west. But what if, as a result of infiltration of pro-theocracy Mullahs from Iran, such an entity is still-born, or strangled in the cradle, due to coalition indiligence or inattentiveness? How, then, will the young Iranians be encouraged, rather than discouraged, from taking the fate of their nation in their own hands?

It may be that Iran will have to move much higher on the priority list in the War on “Terrorism” (scare quotes because it’s really a war on many other things, of which terrorism is simply a tactic) in order to ensure that we have a chance at a viable democracy in Iraq. We may have to preempt another country to prevent the one we recently liberated from falling under the thrall of yet another, though different, dictatorship. I don’t have any specific answers right now, but I hope that it’s something that’s being debated both at Foggy Bottom, and across the river…