The Shia fellas: how the Bush Administration and the Neocons got into bed with Iran's agents in Iraq.

BACK IN 2004, PRESIDENT BUSH WENT ON NBC'S MEET the Press to assure Americans that Iraq was not going to turn into an Islamist theocracy under the emerging Shia leadership.

"They're not going to develop that," said Bush, noting that he'd just met Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the

Added the president: "This is a Shia fellow."

No matter that the president actually said "fella," inadvertently pronouncing the Arab word for "peasant." Even by then it was clear, and by now it is blindingly obvious, that not only is there no room for Methodists in Hakim's Iraq; there isn't much room for Sunni Arabs, either. Indeed, the central irony of the war in Iraq is that a military operation ostensibly designed to install a model democracy in Baghdad has created a regime dominated by benighted Shia Islamist theocrats and run by mullahs and activists allied with Iran.

Bush perhaps can be forgiven his naivete about Hakim--though the fact that the name of Hakim's organization includes the words "Islamic Revolution" might have tipped him off. Others, however--including the hawks promoting the war in 2001-03--were fully informed about al-Hakim, SCIRI, and its origins in Iran. They knew that by toppling Saddam Hussein, they would unleash the Shia majority in Iraq. They knew that Al Dawa ("the Call"), the party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, had a long history as a terrorist-inclined Islamist secret society. They'd read the reams of intelligence dossiers--compiled over decades by the U.S. intelligence community--on SCIRI, A1 Dawa, and their allies. And they had plenty of evidence that Ahmad Chalabi, the smooth-talking Shiite who brought SCIRI and Dawa into the inner circle of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), was a snake-oil salesman who made no secret of his own close ties to Tehran's ruling circles.

Today, virtually all of Iran's leading Shia political and religious leaders are either kowtowing to Tehran, beholden to Iran for support, or fearful of challenging Iran's dominant role. "Iran has leads into every single Shia group," says Ali Allawi, a longtime Shia opposition leader who served as Iraq's first postwar civilian minister of defense. "They have leads into ... SCIRI, into Dawa--one of its wings is far more dependent on Iran than the other--into [Muqtada] al-Sadr, and into politicians like Ahmad Chalabi."