WASHINGTON - Anyone who still believes
that the US neo-conservatives who led the drive to
war in Iraq are diabolically clever, geostrategic
masterminds should now consider Iran's vastly
improved position vis-a-vis its US-occupied
neighbor.
Not only did Washington knock
off Tehran's arch-foe, Saddam Hussein, as well as
the anti-Iranian Taliban in Afghanistan, but, with
the near completion of a new constitution that is
likely to guarantee a weak central government and
substantial autonomy to much of the Shi'ite south,
it also appears that Iran's influence in Iraq -
already on the rise after last spring's
inauguration of a pro-Iranian interim government -
is set to grow further.
"The new
constitution will strengthen the hand of the
provincial forces in the south, which are
pro-Iranian," according to University of Michigan
Iraq expert Juan Cole, who notes that the state
structure authorized by the draft charter would
amount more to a
confederation than a federal
system.
Moreover, Cole told Inter Press
Service, the constitutional ban on any law that
contravenes Islamic law will likely give Shi'ite
clerics significant power over the state, moving
Iraq much closer to the Iranian model.
"While there's no clerical dictator at the
head of government as in Iran, if you had five
ayatollahs on the Supreme Court who were striking
down laws because they contravened Islam, that's
pretty close to the Iranian system," he said.
In a recent colloquium for The Nation
magazine, Shibley Telhami, a Middle East
specialist at the Brookings Institution, noted,
"No one in Washington would have imagined that
with all the human and financial costs of the war,
the United States would find itself supporting a
government ... [with] close ties to Iran and that
would conclude a military agreement with Tehran
for the training of Iraq forces, even as nearly
140,000 US troops remained on Iraq soil."
This, indeed, was not how it was supposed
to turn out for neo-conservatives who had argued
that the gratitude of Iraqis for their
"liberation" from Saddam would result in the
installation of a secular, pro-Western government
that would permit its territory to be used for US
military bases as yet another pressure point - or
possible launching pad - against an increasingly
beleaguered and unpopular Islamic republic (and
Syria, too) next door.
When US troops,
however, were not in fact greeted in Iraq with the
"flowers and sweets" that they predicted, and an
unexpected Sunni insurgency began to seriously
challenge the occupation, neo-conservatives were
unfazed.
By empowering the majority
Shi'ites through elections, they argued, the US
would create a democratic model that would prove
irresistible for the increasingly disillusioned
Iranian masses who - with political and possibly
paramilitary support from the US - would rise up
and overthrow the theocracy.
"Such a
government supported by Iraq's Shi'ite
establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's
clerical dictatorship," argued the
neo-conservatives' top Iran expert, Reuel Marc
Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, in a
Wall Street Journal column in December before the
January 30 Iraq elections brought to power the
Ibrahim Jaafari government.
But while
Gerecht was confidently predicting that a Shi'ite
government in Baghdad and Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani in Najaf would ring the death knell of
the mullahs in Tehran, other analysts saw an
altogether different scenario.
"The real
long-term geopolitical winner of the 'war on
terror' could be Iran," concluded a September 2004
report by the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, Britain's most influential foreign policy
think-tank.
"The Iranians have so much
control over what happens in Iraq," one of the
authors, Gareth Stansfield, told USA Today then.
"The United States is only beginning to realize
this."
Contrary to Gerecht's predictions
that influence, if not control, has only
strengthened since the January elections, which
were won by the Shi'ite coalition headed by
Jafaari's Da'wa party and, most especially, the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI). In addition to getting the most votes in
the federal election, it swept nine out of the 11
provinces, including Baghdad province, where there
are substantial Shi'ite populations.
"In
1982, Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini created
[SCIRI], whose members included Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, the current SCIRI leader and Jaafari,
Iraq's current prime minister," Cole told The
Nation's colloquium. "Khomeini dreamed of putting
them in power in Baghdad. Bush and [Pentagon chief
Donald] Rumsfeld have fulfilled that dream."
Since coming to power, these officials
broke entirely with the frosty relationship with
Iran carried out by the government of transitional
prime minister Iyad Allawi and initiated what
could only be described as warm, if not, fraternal
relations with the Islamic republic.
Accords were struck between the two
countries covering military aid and cooperation,
major infrastructure projects - including the
construction of an oil pipeline that will send
Iraqi oil to Iran for refining - an airport in the
holy city of Najaf for Iranian pilgrims and other
aid programs, including schools, medical clinics
and mosques.
Last month's three-day visit
by Jaafari to Tehran, where he was warmly received
by Iran's top leaders, including its new
president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khameini, was capped by a
reverential pilgrimage to the tomb of Khomeini in
a gesture that could not have been interpreted as
a good sign, even by Gerecht and other
neo-conservatives.
"It was a love-fest,"
according to Cole.
And, as noted by a
senior US diplomat in the Wall Street Journal last
week, the recent audience with Sistani granted to
Iran's outgoing foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi,
"didn't exactly please us", particularly because
the ayatollah, widely considered the single-most
influential leader in Iraq today, has refused to
meet with any US official since the invasion.
Meanwhile, Iranian intelligence is
reported to have so thoroughly penetrated Iraq's
security forces and militias - many of whose
members were trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard
- that the US military has restricted its own
intelligence-sharing practices with its Iraqi
charges, according to officials here.
Indeed, as acknowledged by Gerecht, many
Iraqi government leaders had lived for years, in
some cases decades, in Iran and been supported
there by the government. Even Jalal Talabani, the
Kurdish president in the government, was dependent
to a great extent on Iranian support during
Saddam's reign.
While Cole does not
entirely discount Gerecht's thesis that a
Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad, operating under
the influence of Sistani's quietest views of
Islam's relationship to the state, could
eventually act as a counter-model to Tehran and
thus undermine support for the clerical regime, he
doesn't rule out that the Iranians, who have shown
a growing willingness to confront the US since
January's elections, have the neo-conservatives to
thank for their good fortune so far.
