Picking up on the item below -- namely, Reuel Gerecht's odd observation that Iran has overplayed its hand in Iraq -- I can't help but add the Times' latest account of how Iran helped to broker the deal that led to the ceasefire (of sorts) in Sadr City. This comes after Iran did the same in Basra:

The Iraqi government and leaders of the movement of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Saturday to a truce, brokered with help from Iran, that would end more than a month of bloody fighting in the vast, crowded Sadr City section of Baghdad. ... The Iranians helped end the standoff by throwing their weight behind the government after a delegation of Shiite members of Parliament visited Iran earlier this month, according to three people involved in negotiating the truce....

The members of Parliament asked Iran to lean on the Shiite militias they have influence with, said Ali Adeeb, a Parliament member from Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party who was part of the delegation. “They said the better way to deal with the Sadrists is by negotiation; don’t fight them and don’t use force.”

Haider Abbadi, another member of Parliament, said the Iranians “promised that they would pressure all the groups that they have communication with to defer to Iraqi law.”

Never one to admit his errors, a typical point of view for neoconservatives who backed the war in Iraq, Reuel Marc Gerecht has an editorial in the Weekly Standard proclaiming the imminent end of Iran's influence in Iraq. As if.

Says Gerecht:

The Iranians have seriously overplayed their hand along the Tigris and Euphrates.

Oh, have they? And I suppose Gerecht thinks we have played our own hard "along the Tigris and Euphrates" beautifully. He adds: "The clerics in Tehran could be dealt out of the inner circles of Iraqi Shia politics."

It's true that Iran's odious clerics might be dealt out of Iraq, but those doing the dealing out will be Iraqi nationalists, Sunni and Shia both. Yet Gerecht insists that the good guys in Iraq are those in the pro-Iranian government of Iraq, including Maliki and the Hakims. These are the same people Gerecht, Ahmed Chalabi, et al. were hobnobbing with in 2001-2003. They still, apparently, love those Iraqi Shia turban-wearers.

Gerecht seems to believe that Hakim and SCIRI-ISCI have changed their spots, transforming into Iraqi nationalists willing to betray their Iranian sponsor. He writes:

Although conscious of the fleeting loyalty of Iraqi Shiites who once took refuge in Iran from the wrath of Saddam Hussein and are now blessed with ever-larger Iraqi oil revenues, Tehran probably didn't anticipate how quickly Shiite sentiment in Iraq could change.

But what's the evidence that Hakim ("who once took refuge in Iran") has broken with Iran? There isn't any. And there wasn't any in 2002, either, when Hakim and Co. showed up en masse to take over the London conference of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles. Oops.

A delegation of Iraqi Sunnis traveled to Cairo with unfriendly things to say about Iran:

An Iraqi Sunni delegation on a visit to Cairo on Wednesday urged Arab countries to act against what it called the "Iranian occupation" of Iraq.

"We would like a common Arab position to save Iraq and its people ...(in the face of) the Iranian occupation," Sheikh Majid Abdel Razzak al-Ali Suleiman said after a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit.

"Such an Arab position, led by Egypt, is necessary to weaken Iran's role in Iraq, because if Tehran occupies this country, it will occupy other Arab countries too," said the head of the Dulaim tribe, which is concentrated mainly in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

There's more than a grain of truth in what the Sunnis are saying. As I wrote in a lengthy Nation piece recently, quoting Chas Freeman, "The American military occupation of Iraq has facilitated an Iranian political occupation of Iraq." But it's important to remember that most Iraqi Shia are not supporters of Iran. The great Shia "silent majority" is intimidated by the power of the armed militia organized by pro-government religious parties.

Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, said this week that "the majority of Shi'ites in his country maintain strong nationalistic ties to Iraq," according to the Washington Times. "In fact, the Iraqi Shi'ites presents a threat to the Iranian state rather than the other way around," said Sumaida'ie.

Representative Walter Jones, one of the very few Republican members of Congress with a conscience, won big in his primary election against a pro-war GOP challenger. I profiled Jones in a cover story for Mother Jones magazine (no relation!) in 2006. See: "The Three Conversions of Walter Jones."

OK, no surprise here:

John Bolton, America’s ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.

“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”

Bolton also called for carpet-bombing the U.S. State Department and the CIA. "That would show we're not going to tolerate any crap from them either," he said. [This last part is not true. But he actually said the other stuff. You can look it up.]

A top Mahdi Army (JAM) commander in Sadr City has described the role of Iran in building ties to corrupt and "greedy" factions of Sadr's militia:

A year ago, in one of a series of interviews with the Times, his voice rose in anger when he talked of Iran's efforts to co-opt the Mahdi Army movement. He seethed about Tehran's drive to recruit fighters to bomb U.S. convoys at a time when Sadr was trying to halt such activities. He railed against militia members whom Iran had bought off.

At this time of immense pressure, however, he embraces the breakaway factions.

"Not all Jaish al Mahdi members are angels," he acknowledged, using the group's Arabic name. "Some have material interests in mind and they're greedy, and so Iran was able to hit on this particular angle and put them on its side."

But this is the price of survival.

Uh oh. Even Iran's clerics can't tolerate this little gem from Ahmadinejad:

"The Imam Mahdi is in charge of the world and we see his hand directing all the affairs of the country."

So said the prez, and it's the mullahs in a kerfuffle.

Two leading clerics retorted that Ahmadinejad would be better off concentrating on Iran's social problems -- most notably its double-digit inflation -- than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.

"If Ahmadinejad wants to say that the hidden imam is supporting the decisions of the government, it is not true," sniped Gholam Reza Mesbahi Moghadam, the spokesman of the conservative Association of Combatant Clerics.

"For sure, the hidden imam does not approve of inflation of 20 percent, the high cost of living and numerous other errors," he said, according to the Kargozaran daily.

Ali Asghari, a member of the conservative Hezbollah faction in parliament, told the president not to link the management of the country to the imam.

"Ahmadinejad would do better to worry about social problems like inflation ... and other terrestrial affairs," Etemad Melli daily quoted him as saying.