We made the monster. Has it broken out of the lab?

Iraq woos Iran and US grows insecure

The eagerness of post-Saddam Iraq to reach out to its Shiite neighbours in Iran, a sworn enemy of the United States, has become a new pressure point as Iraq's Shiite majority stonewalls in the face of US attempts to dictate the shape of a new government in Baghdad....

The Iraqis sent a delegation to Tehran, presenting it as a neighbourly visit. But the Americans would have been stunned by the inclusion in the team of their hand-picked candidate as the likely next leader of Iraq - the returned exile and former banker Ahmed Chalabi.

US retaliation was swift. It closed all but three of the crossing points on the Iraq-Iran border. This was presented by the chief of the US occupation, Paul Bremer, as just another security measure, but observers here saw the border tightening as a rebuke to the Iraqi Shiites.

The Shiites responded by making it known that they might oppose a role for the United Nations in brokering an agreement on the shape of Iraq's next interim government....

The anxiety in Washington is that Iran and Iraq will form a Shiite rump to compete for dominance with US-backed and Sunni-led regimes in the region....

--Sydney Morning Herald

(Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link.)