Petraeus works to halt foreign fighters.

What's funny about this whole thing is that Sadaam was actually our buffer against Iran. Now we have to physically be there to buffer and contain them. To control Iran, without physically being there, we would have to create something similiar to Sadaam. I'm not advocating Dictatorship here but in the since that Sadaam had a very strong central government in Iraq that was very nationalist.

When Sadaam fell and the central gov along with him it was like when the levees broke. There was a flood of Iranian sympathizers who are now attempting to establish strongholds in Iraq that they could not develop under Sadaam. On arab TV Sadr spokesman are televised live from Iran, Sadr gets all of his talking points/funding/arms from them, and he travels there frequently. The government in Iraq is just as much an Iranian backed one as it is a U.S. backed one. Iraq needs a strong central government and a huge nationalist movement that goes beyond the religiousity that Iran and their Shiite tools have been pumping in.