Iran: From Axis of Evil to Super-Evil

That bastion of liberal democracy, the Guardian, ran a startling story this week on how Iran is the real bogey-man in Iraq. An 'unnamed US official' (dodgy!) stated that Iran is backing everybody in the region against the US. Iran we are supposed to believe is backing the Shia resistance (ok, I can see this, but not every Shia faction is pro-Iran), the Sunni resistance (so now they are backing people who are attacking their allies?) , al-Qaida (they are backing people who consider them to be heretics?) and now the Taliban (who, again, Iran is ideological opposed). I think all this is unlikely. So, ok, the U$ might believe all this, but the article presents no evidence of this at all. So, ok, an 'unnamed US official' might suggest this, but you would expect a journalist to talk to other people, offer counter opinion and so on – nope, it's all there uncontested on the front page.

Meanwhile the 'surge' continues to fail:

Alas, the bad news is that sectarian death squad attacks, which produce bodies in the street every morning, have crept back up. Sudarsan Raghavan of WaPo discovered that more people have been killed that way so far in May than had been in all of January, before the new security plan (the "surge") was implemented.

And fail...

Farmers in southern Iraq have started for the first time to grow opium poppies in their fields, sparking fears that Iraq might become a serious drugs producer along the lines of Afghanistan.