There is a really helpful and clarifying article on Iraq in today’s Boston Globe online, written by Middle East expert Juan Cole. It’s no wonder Iraq is confusing—as Cole points out, there are three major wars going on there, and American troops are mostly involved in only one of them. The article succinctly summarizes the players and the issues and what’s at stake. I have been following this stuff fairly closely for some time, but it’s still really nice to see it explained so clearly. Most news coverage of Iraq has been superficial at best, simple flag-waving at worst.

There are many reasons why American media have done such an appalling job of covering this war: news departments concerned only with the bottom line keep cutting back on overseas staff, the idea that extremely complicated issues must be reduced to bumper sticker-sized sentiments, the way real substance is constantly trumped by celebrity worship and the pettiest of personality quirks—it goes on and on.

Of course it doesn’t help that our government is lying through its teeth for political motives, both as a CYA move and to bolster support for an attack against Iran. In a related post on his own site, Professor Cole says administration claims that the (nationalist) Mahdi Army is a tool of Iran “is like calling the Minutemen vigilantes in Arizona tools of the Mexican government.” Muqtada al-Sadr’s group’s whole purpose lies in rejecting outsiders like the US and Iran. Who do the Iranians support? The al-Maliki government, which US troops helped bail out a couple weeks ago in Basra as they tried to defeat the Mahdi army. So we are helping the Iranians even as we attack them verbally, and quite posssibly prepare to attack them militarily.

I almost wrote that attacking Iran is one of the few things that could make the situation in Iraq worse, but of course reading Cole’s articles illustrates there are many, many ways it could get worse, and almost certainly will. We’ve landed with both our big flat feet in the middle of a hornets’ nest and done nothing but kick and flail blindly for five years. What happens now? Whether we stay or leave, we’re going to get stung, and I fear, stung badly.