Oh Dear!

UPDATE: Wikileaks paralyzed by civil war

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The unintended consequences of a Likiweaks' document dump:

"...the most significant revelations from the massive WikiLeaks document dump is the apparent extent of Iran’s nefarious role in Iraq. Remember how we were always being told that the Bush administration was exaggerating the extent of Iranian influence with the Shia militia groups in order to push along a neocon plot to attack Iran? Well, an initial reading of the documents conducted by the New York Times indicates there wasn’t much exaggeration at all.

Come to think of it, none other than Vice President Joe Biden said as recently as August:

Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.(Emphasis mine.)

So exactly how does that statement square with this from the NYT?

The reports make it clear that the lethal contest between Iranian-backed militias and American forces continued after President Obama sought to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran’s leaders and reaffirmed the agreement between the United States and Iraq to withdraw American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011."

That doesn't fit the narrative, does it, Joe.

And Syria, too:

"An Iraqi border patrol unit in Anbar province came across a group of smugglers – what they were smuggling is unclear – near the Syrian border in May 2009. When they gave pursuit, the Iraqi soldiers found themselves drawn into a gun battle with their western neighbours.

5th division border guards chased some smugglers and exchanged gunfire. The smugglers returned back to Syrian territory and the Syrian forces supported them by using med and light weapons against the 5th division border guards.

In his recently-published memoirs, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, claimed the Bush administration was close to invading Syria - in part because of its alleged support for the Iraqi militants. The leaked documents contain hundreds of references to Syria's role in Iraq, most of them suggesting a deep involvement with the armed groups."

[---]

"Syrian border guards were complicit in the smuggling of weapons and people across the border – and that they at times directly engaged the US and Iraqi forces."

There's more:

"The leaked war logs reflect significant progress as well. There has been a dramatic improvement in security since the height of the violence in 2006-07, due to a weakened threat from al-Qaida and an Iraqi population weary of the sectarian bloodletting that once threatened to plunge the country into civil war.
Even so, some experts question whether the fledgling military and police forces are capable of defending Iraq after Washington completes its scheduled pullout Dec. 31, 2011."

[---]

"(Ambassador Ryan) Crocker called it "profoundly important" that the U.S. maintain a military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, despite America's weariness with the long and costly war and pressure to shift more resources to Afghanistan."

Ooops.

And more oops:

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction."

This game was played before, and it didn't work.

Eight days.