The degree to which we are being jerked around by the Iranians is far greater than most realize.
I know there is a debate over whether or not the Iraqi government has simply become a proxy government for Iran. But Iran has penetrated the Iraqi political and military sufficiently enough to easily make Iranian operations look Iraqi.
You're probably right in ways you don't even realize. As we sit here in 2017 and look back over the last 15 years, it's hard to argue with the outlandish suggestion that the entire George W. Bush administration was run by Iranians with American-sounding aliases like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.