Iran in Iraq

I'm glad that armor piercing attacks against US forces in Iraq have declined but attributing this to the success of the Basra offensive which was supposed to have somehow -- and nobody in the article explains any causal mechanism -- to have crippled Iranian capabilities is a bit bizarre. It's not clear how much of these attacks ever had anything to do with Iran, but insofar as Iran is playing a role the obvious cause of a decline in the tempo of attacks is efforts at "appeasement" like the Bush administration's somewhat renewed interest in diplomacy with Teheran and so forth.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/07/iran-in-iraq/49351/