The government bent over backwards to ignore the Iranian militias. Which had the double whammy of provoking Sunni militias, which lead to ISIS, and strengthened the Iranian position in the government.
If al-Sadr was sent packing, we’d have done far better.
There was never the support to build the pyramid of skulls that would require.
I wish FR had a like button.
I was an intelligence analyst during the war and there we were told we could not write anything in our reports about iran. We sent a guy down to Basra to set up a new collection system and while he was there he found out the reason the British kept reporting nothing about iran was because they had purposely turned their collection equipment away from iran.