I haven’t been following the results of the recent Iraqi elections like I should have been, so I’m trying to get caught up now, and everything I’m reading, outside of the statements being made by administration officials, is terribly depressing. Here, for example, is a clip from an article by author Robert Dreyfuss:

The last hope for peace in Iraq was stomped to death this week. The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran’s intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what’s left of the Iraqi state by force…

The consequences of SCIRI’s victory are manifold. But there is no silver lining, no chance for peace talks among Iraq’s factions, no chance for international mediation. There is no centrist force that can bridge the factional or sectarian divides. Next stop: civil war…

The more perceptive among U.S. intelligence officials and Iraq experts know how to read the situation, and they mostly believe it is hopeless. “I hate to say, ‘Game over,’” says Wayne White, who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until last spring. “But we’ve lost it.” There is no mechanism for the Sunnis now to restore a modicum of balance in Iraq, and the Shiite religious parties have no incentive to make significant concessions either to the Sunnis or to the resistance, White says.

I haven’t been able to find the final numbers yet, but the last article that I read indicated that the secular Iraqiya party only received 8% of the vote and that Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress didn’t even have the votes necessary for one seat in the new Iraqi parliament. As I understand it, that essentially means that almost everyone voted along religious and ethnic lines, choosing not to build coalitions across them. Most experts, from what I can tell, feel as though civil war is inevitable at this point. They also, almost without exception, feel as though the real winner in all of this is the government of Iran… So, it would seem to me, an admittedly undereducated observer, that we lost 2,000 American soldiers and spent countless billions of dollars to install what’s shaping up to be an extremely unstable Islamic theocracy… And that, I think, is why we didn’t see a lot of our leaders dying their fingers purple in symbolic solidarity this time around.