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How Iran could help the US in
Iraq
By Massoud Khodabandeh
Grievances between the US and Iran date
back to the 1979 revolution's removal of the
Central Intelligence Agency-backed Shah's regime,
or, more properly, to the US Embassy hostage
crisis which followed that landmark event.
Since then, relations between the two have
staggered back and forth on points of trust, but
they have not quite found enough mutuality to move
forward. Efforts have been made on both sides to
engineer some kind of rapprochement. Iranian
reformists and nationalists - both in the Iranian
government as well as among some opposition groups
outside Iran - and some advocates for non-military
oriented businesses in the US and Europe have
tried hard to develop and expand economic trade
with Iran.
But these efforts have been
hampered, if not to say completely negated, by
other, unbending elements on both sides of the
divide which have acted vigorously to undermine
and block the achievement of such a goal. On the
Iranian side sits a bizarre mix of hardliners in
the regime itself and a vociferous but largely
defunct exiled opposition group, the Mujahideen-e
Khalq Organization (MKO), which, seeing no hope of
success through its own efforts, courts hawkish
proponents of US military intervention in Iran.
More importantly, on the US side we have
seen the generic influence of pro-Israeli groups
and personalities which regard Iran as the major
threat to Israel's best interests, and therefore
an enemy not to be negotiated with. For these,
Iran does genuinely reside in an "axis of evil".
The traditional focus for this enmity -
Iran's support for anti-Israel groups Hezbollah
and Hamas - and more recently, doubts about
Tehran's nuclear ambitions, has been eclipsed by
the new complication added to the region by the
removal of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Although few
would deny the benefits of his removal, the move
has deeply affected the checks and balances in the
region, and perhaps the country most affected is
Iran.
For Iran, to have its enemy travel
thousands of miles on a military adventure to
establish a pro-US regime in Iraq with the
potential to continue Saddam's aggressive policy
toward the Islamic republic is not acceptable. As
the only country which openly refuses to accept
the legitimacy of Israel, a further cause for
concern for Iran is the presence of Israeli
intelligence operatives in Iraq. Iran will
understandably want to use its well-established
contacts there to counter such a threat from Iraqi
territory.
For the US, on the other hand,
it is the very existence of these close ties
between Iran and Iraq, particularly the majority
Shi'ite Iraqis, that is the crux of the problem.
The emergence of a pro-Iran regime in Iraq is
equally unacceptable for the US. In simple terms,
they did not occupy Iraq for the advancement of
Iran.
Omar Musa, secretary general of the
Arab League, speaking just before the occupation
of Iraq, said the invasion would "open the gates
of hell". Part of this hell for the US is the wide
open opportunity afforded to its enemy to
establish an Iranian-style Islamic republic in
Iraq, or at the very least to engineer the
election of an Iraqi government dominated by
Shi'ites subject to Iranian influence.
Certainly, any gain Iran makes, especially
as it would have been paid for by the US invasion
of Iraq, is intolerable to Washington. And perhaps
the Iranians know this better than anybody else.
Given this mutual hostility and fear, it may be
surprising to learn that what Iran actually wants
is stability in Iraq rather than chaos and the
disintegration of the country. There is no
evidence either that Iran wants a rival Shi'ite
Islamic republic on its doorstep. So in a sense,
Iranian and US goals are the same. What separates
them is the amount of influence each will have on
the formation of the new government.
So
what is one to make of accusations that Iran is
meddling in Iraq's scheduled January 30 election?
Is Iran, as many believe, maneuvering cleverly to
gain control of the country?
Significantly, the insurgent bombing of
Shi'ite cities did not provoke a violent
retaliation. Rather, Iraq's Shi'ite leaders
announced that they would answer these killings in
the elections. In the rest of the country, the
remaining 40% of Sunnis, Kurds and others are
entrenched in day-to-day fighting in Kurdish and
Sunni-controlled areas, so the effectiveness of
their voting becomes more questionable day by day.
The closer polling day looms, the more
rumors surface that vote quotas could be
implemented; an idea already pushed to the fore by
some US officials and the Iraqi interim
government. As of yet there is no clear wording as
to what this actually means, but it indicates that
in the likely event that pro-US elements are
eliminated over the course of this election -
because after all there is only so much you can do
under such conditions to win the hearts and minds
of the people in the streets to vote for your
candidates - there should be a minimum number of
seats - premier Iyad Allawi put the figure at
about 20% - allocated to the Sunnis and the Kurds.
That still leaves the problem of finding the right
Sunnis and Kurds to choose from, but as the
occupying force, perhaps this is a reasonable
demand from the US.
One way to legitimize
such an action - and only one of them - is to
emphasize Iran's influence on the Shi'ite
community and interpret this as a threat to the
democratization of Iraq. This would prepare the
grounds, on the basis of fairness, to counteract
an overwhelmingly pro-Iran outcome. Such an
outcome would skew the already unbalanced
situation of the region in a way unacceptable not
only for the US and Israel, but even for the many
others who are currently engaged in controlling
the fast growth of Iran and its regional
influence.
Iran is trying its best to
counter such action by not giving any more excuses
than the existing ones, at least until the
election takes place. Even top Shi'ite leader
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has added some Sunnis to
his shopping list of candidates for the Shi'ite
population to vote for. As much as he wishes for
the departure of foreign forces, particularly from
Iraq's Shi'ite religious cities, alienating the
occupying power clearly is not in his benefit.
Everybody, it seems, knows that in this particular
stand-off the stakes are much higher than the
problems presented by atomic energy or support for
Palestinian groups by Iran.
But perhaps
the fundamental flaw in the US approach comes from
the assumption that Iran's influence in Iraq is
both greater than it actually is, and that what
influence it has will have entirely negative
effects for the US.
The close ties between
the Shi'ite clerics in Najaf and Qom in Iran go
back many centuries. Many prominent clerics in the
Iranian government hail from Najaf, or are first
generation Iranians born to families emigrated
from Najaf. Sistani is Iranian by birth. The
language spoken at home by over 50% of the
population of Najaf, Karbala and Kazemiah is
Persian. For the general Shi'ite population, holy
shrines exist in both countries. There is little
either Iranian or Iraqi officials - or for that
matter the Americans or British - can do to stop
the influx of pilgrims from Iran desperate to
reach the long-denied shrines in Karbala, Najaf
and Kazemiah.
With ties as close as this
it is unlikely that Iran would even need to
pressure Iraq's Shi'ite leaders into putting
forward sympathetic candidates, let alone actually
dictate lists of candidates. Over the last two
decades of the 20th century, many Iraqi Shi'ite
leaders enjoyed the hospitality of Iran while
escaping persecution by Saddam Hussein. Long
before the US turned its back on Saddam - and
especially during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war,
when the US vetoed Iran's complaints at the UN
Security Council about Saddam's use of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) against Iranian soldiers -
Iran supported Iraqi dissidents who were working
hard from inside Iran to overthrow the Iraqi
dictator. Many Kurdish groups in the north, too,
still maintain their close relations with Iran,
which had provided shelter whenever Kurds were
attacked by Saddam or by his mercenaries, the
Mujahideen-e Khalq.
Saddam for his part
employed the MKO as his own private army, an
adjunct to the Iraqi military, to counter Iraqi
opposition moves from inside Iran and to aggravate
Iran by carrying out blind terrorist acts in the
streets of Iran. Although the number of MKO
members never reached more than a few thousand
(compared with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in
Iran) nevertheless they were used to their full
potential. The fall of Saddam in this respect can
be considered a victory for which the Iranians as
much as Iraqi dissidents can be expected to show
gratitude.
So will US maneuvering against
Iran to curtail its influence in Iraq really work?
This depends on what the aim is. If it is about
preparing the grounds for a military crackdown on
Iran, bombing its nuclear facilities and reducing
the country's infrastructure to such a level that
it would not and could not pose a threat to US
interests and to Israel for the foreseeable
future, then the issue needs much more heat than
this, and therefore much more fuel.
Iran
has long passed a point of no return in its
social, political and technological progress. The
heat that it can withstand is much greater now
than many could have envisaged even a few short
years ago. The Islamic republic has proven its
maturity in its recent nuclear negotiations with
the European Union, its role and conduct in
Afghanistan and its ever-expanding economic ties
with China, the Far East, Russia and now the EU.
Not many would disagree that to prepare the
grounds for a military showdown against Iran,
while not impossible, will not be a short-term
scenario. But for those keen to pursue this path,
time is short. A longer-term scenario will only
allow the Iranians to establish themselves to an
even greater extent, both nationally and
internationally.
However, if the goal is
to curtail the unacceptable behavior of the
Iranian regime, forcing it to play its games
according to accepted international laws and
traditions and to become a fair player, respecting
others in the region and beyond so that its role
in Iraq and its enmity toward Israel is moderated,
then the only suggestion left is to actually put a
carrot in the other hand and see the difference.
The social, political and economic
structure of Iranian society, as well as the
ruling regime itself, have come to a point of
desperation. The country has grown to its fullest
possible extent within the limits imposed by
standing outside the free markets of the free
world. Iran desperately needs to open up, and this
phenomenon is not unappreciated, especially by the
country's leaders.
A direct appeal for
Iranian help in Iraq would probably go much
further to bringing Iran into a position of
cooperation with the US over democratization of
the country than threats from an Egyptian
president who admits himself to having big
problems because of US policies in the Middle
East, or from the young King Abdullah of Jordan,
who is regarded by 90% of his country's population
as still learning his homework and too naive to
effectively stand in his father's shoes.
Provocation by the US Department of
Defense or the Iraqi interim government's defense
minister is not taken seriously by the Iranians.
And as divided as they are over internal affairs,
their answers to the outside world have shown that
they speak with one voice when it comes to foreign
affairs. Asking for their help in establishing a
fair election in Iraq (as they helped in
Afghanistan) presents a much more realistic method
of ensuring not only better representation in the
coming election but also in maintaining it
afterwards.
The Iranians, backed by what
they have constructed internally over the past 20
years, no longer respond to threats. They are
instead desperate to find partners, allies and
especially investors from the free world. For that
they would go to almost any extent to prove their
commitment to the security and stability of the
region and beyond, as they tried to do during the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
To
achieve this, they would even start paying out if
they are allowed to help create a calm, fair and
reasonable election in Iraq, in so far as their
influence does reach. And who knows, once started,
this rapprochement could lead the way to closing
the gates of hell again and finding real solutions
to the Middle East crisis. The hope and the will
can be found in many parts of the world, including
the European Union, the United States and even
Israel. But again, we must wait for the Bush
administration to catch up.
Massoud
Khodabandeh is English/Iranian and lives in
the United Kingdom, where he works as a security
consultant. He has been active in Iranian
opposition politics for over 25 years. He works
closely with the Centre de recherche sur la
terrorisme in Paris as an expert on Iran.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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