Syria's out, Iran is in, troop levels...

are going UP for Ashura, and in the face of the Iranians being publicly mentioned as the problem.

Heh.

For those of you who don't get it, let me spell it out.

1. We never found an unproblematic successor candidate in Syria, and the ground for a democratic "colored revolution" needs serious watering before somebody reasonable could conceivably come to power. So we haven't toppled them, but we've made sure that Hezbollah and the Palestinians can no longer rely upon them.
2. Therefore, the latter two groups shift the purse strings upon which their survival depends (since their leadership is too corrupt and stupid to "grow the pie" and enact the reforms that would be needed to create something beyond a 1700s-level economy on their own) to Iran.

Now, I hear the rebuttal coming: "but now Iran runs the whole show!"
And my answer to that is, GREAT!

Because once we put the kabosh on the Iranian regime, which has much greater prospects for satisfactory regime change than Syria does... the gig's up. All that will be left are a bunch of Pakistani madrassas and the local "Al-Qaieda (sp) in (fill in franchise name here)" chapters. And we are actually very, very good at rolling up these little groups when they try to take over and piss on the locals, as recent events in Yemen and Somalia show.

3. And we're publicly moving extra troops in b/c of Iran's agents sneaking across the border. What signal does that send? Well, signal numero uno is that we're NOT stretched to our limits already, and that the Iranian political calculus has been made with a couple of incorrect values on our side of their equation.

If I were a mid-level Iranian officer without exceptionally-good ties to Ahmadinejad's new "even more loyal than my other superloyalbestestBasijbuddies" units, I'd be a very worried man.

The Fire Celebration is coming... and in spite of their best efforts, the regime is a laughing-stock, and powerless to prevent the Iranian people from celebrating their heritage.

Zahak will fall.