PARIS -
As confrontations between Iraqis opposed to the US-led
coalition forces in Iraq continue unabated and spread,
the Islamic Republic of Iran is watching the situation
with both joy and fear, as expressed by Ayatollah Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime's second-in-command
after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Talking to
worshippers during the Friday prayers in Tehran, the
former Iranian president said that the presence of the
US in Iraq was a matter of both "opportunity and threat,
for this wounded qool, or giant, blessed with all
the huge possibilities it possesses, can take very
dangerous actions that would cost itself and others
direly, but if it is taught a lessen here, neither the
United States nor any other superpower would ever think
of engaging in military adventures by occupying other
nations."
Commenting on the situation in
neighboring Iraq, which many describe as President
George W Bush's Vietnam, or "Iraq's third war" or "a new
intifada in Iraq", the official Iranian news agency IRNA
wrote:
"One year after the fall of Saddam
Hussein, bewildered Iraqi people are watching American
soldiers dressed in astronaut gears and equipped with
the latest war technologies roaming in the streets,
with this simple question, why have the Americans not
been able to satisfy their most basic daily needs,
such as electricity, running water, telephone lines
and, above all, restore security? Baghdad's
international airport is still closed to international
traffic, and the Baghdad-Amman highway, Iraq's only
lifeline to the outside world, is now controlled by
thieves and bandits."
The answer, for the
IRNA commentator, lies in the fact that the Pentagon
administers Iraq as a colony. "Impotent of restoring
peace and security and the basic needs of the people, it
can neither understand the popular resistance that
becomes more active and widespread every day, imputing
it to followers of the former dictator [Saddam Hussein],
nor why its is so unpopular among the Iraqis."
But the fact is that the present Iranian regime,
unpopular at home and, in the words of Mohammad Mohsen
Sazegara, a respected political dissident condemned to
one year of imprisonment for "activities against the
sacred Islamic Republic", has lost all ideological,
political, popular, revolutionary and theological
legitimacy, is vehemently afraid of the emergence of a
democratic Iraq on its troubled borders, and for this
reason is using all the strings at its disposal to pull.
Hussein Baqerzadeh, an Iranian human rights
activist based in England, comments: "If successful, the
American intervention in Iraq would make them even more
popular with the bulk of Iranian people, mostly the
young generation aspiring for freedom, democracy and
secularism, making them more ready for the repetition of
the Iraqi scenario for Iran. That explains the fears of
the Iranian ayatollahs and why they are fanning
violence, bloodshed and chaos in Iraq, doing their best
to make the country a quagmire for the United States."
The direct Iranian presence in the Shi'ite areas
of Iraq in political, security and economic affairs
cannot be ignored any more. This presence is accompanied
by a vigorous effort to create bridges with different
forces in Iraq; first, by material and logistic aid to
parties other than the Shi'ites, and secondly through
the traditional Iranian influences in the religious
seminaries or Hawza, and in the religious Shi'ite
institutions.
According to Bakhtiar Amin, an
advisor to the American-installed Iraqi Governing
Council, every day between 14,000 to 15,000 Iranian
pilgrims travel to to Iraq to visit the holiest shrines
of the Shi'ites, "two thirds of them are members of the
Iranian intelligence services, the Qods [Jerusalem] Unit
of the Revolutionary Guards, and professional agitators
who are involved in terrorist activities, directing and
taking part in terrorist operations and sabotages."
Unlike any other actors in Iraq, the Iranians
are the only ones who not only are directly present in
the war-ravaged country, or, thanks to their numerous
proxies, also have friendly relations with all the Iraqi
components, from the demographically, and now
politically dominant Shi'ites to the minority Sunnis,
the Kurds and even smaller religious and ethnic
factions.
Iran's favorite is undoubtedly the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),
led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a member of the ICG and the
younger brother of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim,
assassinated a year ago in the holy city of Najaf in a
deadly operation that many attribute to Muqtada al-Sadr,
the young firebrand cleric who has made himself
America's number one public enemy and most wanted man
after he initiated the latest cycle of bloody violence
and hostage-taking in Iraq more than 10 days ago.
At first opposed to the Iranians, the young
Muqtada, who has no other legitimacy than using the
prestige of his father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadr, killed
ruthlessly by Saddam in 1999, was turned into a fierce
supporter of an Iranian-style Islamic republic after he
visited Tehran last year and was assured of material,
financial and propaganda support from the ruling Iranian
ayatollahs in return for giving the American as much
trouble as possible - for the simple reason that the
Iranians could not expect the same thing from the SCIRI
or the Iraqi Shi'ite Hawza that, under the authority of
the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are
basically opposed to the mixing of politics and
religion, a system that has been in work in Iran since
the Islamic revolution of 1979.
In a statement
published immediately after the start of the recent
confrontations, Sistani called on all parties to stop
the violence and find a peaceful solution to the
problems, but not only was he not heard, but also
President George W Bush said: "We will not be shaken by
the thugs and terrorists. These killers don't have
values ... We face tough action in Iraq but we will stay
the course."
The latest violence erupted after
the savage killing and mutilation of four private US
security contractors, whose bodies where attached to
cars and dragged in the streets of Fallujah, the
heartland of the Sunni triangle, before being hanged
from a bridge.
The incident followed the
killings of eight US troops in gun battles with members
of the Jaysh, or Mahdi Army, headed by Muqtada, in the
poor, heavily populated Shi'ite bastion of Sadr
(formerly Saddam) City near Baghdad, after American
forces had arrested Mostafa al-Yaqoobi, a close aide of
Muqtada, suspected - like the cleric himself - of the
assassination, in Najaf, of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a
young Shi'ite clergyman based in London days after his
return to his homeland on the heels of the American
forces in Baghdad a year ago.
Muqtada, in a
statement made to his followers after the arrest of
Yaqoobi, called on Shi'ites not to be afraid of the
Americans and their terrorist methods. "Terrorize those
who are terrorizing you", he ordered his supporters.
According to some informed Iraqi and Iranian
sources, the escalation also was connected to the
Americans' decision to expel Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the
Iranian charge d'affairs, whom sources say is in fact a
high-ranking member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,
and recently appointed as the chief Iranian agent in
Iraq to coordinate the activities of all the Iraqi
groups fighting the coalition forces.
The order,
however, triggered the resignation of the IGC's interior
minister, Noori Badran, who was visiting Tehran when the
news of the arrest of Yaqoobi was announced.
Some correspondents in Iraq who covered the
Islamic revolution in Iran 25 years ago and saw material
and psychological techniques used by the Islamists to
destabilize the then ruling monarchy, like burning movie
houses filled with audiences, carrying empty coffins
pretending they belonged to innocent people, mostly
women and children killed by soldiers, transforming
peaceful demonstrations and meetings into violent
clashes, are unanimous in confirming that the Mahdi Army
is using almost the same methods against the
American-led coalition forces.
Muqtada is also
the protege and the personal representative in Iraq of
Ayatollah Kazem Husseini Haeri, an ultra-orthodox Iraqi
and close confidant of Iranian leader Khamenei.
From his base in the Iranian city of Qom, the
cradle of Shi'ite militancy, Haeri, whom Muqtada
considers as a father, makes daily anti-American
declarations, calling on the Iraqi people to stand up to
the coalition forces by force until the sacred land of
Iraq and Islam is "clean from the infidels".
Capturing the young Muqtada by force could
possibly make him more popular among ordinary Iraqis
deprived not only of their basic needs - and also with
the masses of the half a million Iraqi soldiers and
secret services personnel made redundant after the
dissolution of the Iraqi army - than Iraq's more
powerful moderate clerics who prefer democracy to a
theocracy, some analysts point out.
The
continuation of the present round of confrontations in
Iraq, now involving almost all of the coalition forces,
would either spread to other Shi'ite groups, or the
reverse, a fratricide war among them, analysts say,
adding the bigger worry for the Americans is the
creation of a coalition between Sunni and the Shi'ite
extremists, a scenario Tehran is working on hard to
bring about.
In his Friday sermon, Rafsanjani,
who, as the head of the Expediency Council, is known for
indicating the way in which the regime tackles major
problems, offered the Americans an olive branch, saying
that Iran would help them get out of the Iraqi quagmire,
as it did during the Afghan conflict, "provided they get
out of Iraq and hand over the affairs to the Iraqis to
themselves".
But Rafsanjani, who met Muqtada
last year in Tehran, praised the Mahdi Army, saying:
"Contrary to terrorist groups in Iraq, there are
powerful bodies which contribute to the security of that
nation ... among them is the Mahdi Army, made up of
enthusiastic, heroic young people."
Reiterating
that the aim of the Bush administration is to "control
Iraq's oil resources" and also establish a huge military
base "right in the heart of our strategic region"
besides "guaranteeing" the security of the Jewish state
(Israel) at the expense of Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah and
the Palestinian resistance, and "putting its hands on
the oil-rich Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea",
Rafsanjani described the road ahead for Washington as
"full of obstacles, starting with mounting opposition
from the Iraqi people to the foreign presence in their
country".
But while Rafsanjani is brandishing
both an olive branch and a sword to the Americans, the
leadership in Tehran, very much like in Washington, is
not talking with one voice. "There are both clerics,
militaries and even civilians who would see Iran more
vigorously involved in Iraq in order to improve the
regime's fading revolutionary image among Muslims, and
there are others who go in the opposite direction,"
Masoud Behnood, a veteran Iranian journalist and
political analyst, told Asia Times Online.
"Those who want Iraq turned into a new Vietnam
for the Americans must also remember what happened after
the Americans left the country: embattled with poverty,
corruption and prostitution as a source of revenue and
facing economic disaster, the victors of Saigon, which
they quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City, threw out the red
carpet for the same hated Americans," Masoud Behnood
said.
However, analysts believe that unless the
militias in Iraq are demobilized and disarmed, a
transition to democracy in Iraq will become impossible.
"Now there is no turning back. If any kind of decent,
democratic and peaceful political order is to be
possible in Iraq, the coalition will need to arrest
[Muqtada] Sadr, crush his attempt to seize power by
force, and dismantle his Mahdi Army," says Larry
Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who
has served as a senior adviser to the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad.
And talking to
Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, an Iranian
analyst of the Iraqi situation comments: "As a matter of
fact, the arrest of Muqtada, no matter the costs, would
be the right message the majority of the Iraqis, as well
the public opinion in the Arab world, would like to hear
from the Americans, the world's most powerful country
but considered ruled by weak leaders, as in general
there is a tendency of respecting and admiring strong
leaders and nations, as they [Arabs] did with the
British Empire, [Adolf] Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the
late Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Saddam."
Interestingly enough, even the US's European
allies opposed to intervention in Iraq have renewed
pledges not to withdraw their troops ahead of the
planned June 30 handover of power to an Iraqi authority,
at a time when the insurgents, by reverting to
hostage-taking, have found "the best arm" to force
Washington's smaller allies like Japan to take their
forces out of the country.
To date, the rebels
have taken 21 civilian hostages, including eight South
Korean pastors - liberated afterward - four Italians,
three Japanese, two Americans, two Arab Israelis, one
Canadian and one Briton.
In an editorial on
Wednesday, the center of the right newspaper Le Figaro
warned France not to gloat over Americans' growing
difficulties in Iraq. "It is wrong to fall into what the
Germans call Schadenfreude, or be joyful over the
difficulties of others, not only because the US is our
ally and has helped us several times in the past, but
also because an American defeat in restoring peace in
Iraq would mean disastrous consequences for the whole of
the Western world," the paper pointed out, reminding
that the United Nations has "never" succeeded in
establishing peace in places where it was sent to
administer.
However, the solution to the latest
Iraqi crisis might come from the Iranian Internet
newspaper Baaztaab, owned by Mohsen Rezai, the former
commander of the Revolutionary Guards who is now the
secretary of the Expediency Council and close to
moderate conservatives, suggesting that Muqtada be
transferred to Iran.
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