Iraq heading the Lebanon
way By Iason Athanasiadis
TEHRAN - The recent saga of Nawaf Obaid, a
security analyst and adviser to Turki al-Faysal,
the Saudi ambassador to Washington, is instructive
about the trepidation currently felt by Iraq's
neighbors over its future. In a published opinion
piece, Obaid warned that the withdrawal of US
forces from Saudi Arabia might prompt the Saudi
leadership to give funds, arms and supplies to
Iraq's Sunni militias as a way of countering
Tehran's support for Iraqi Shi'ite militias.
The article raised a storm of Saudi
official protest. The Saudi
Press Agency, a government
entity, pointed out that Obaid's article does "not
represent in any way the kingdom's policy". Just
to be sure, it added the caveat that Riyadh's
policy is "to support the security, unity and
stability of Iraq with all its sects and
doctrines". A few days later, Obaid was dismissed
from his advisory post. He had obviously touched a
raw nerve.
"Saudi Arabia has been, mostly
unofficially, supporting Sunni Islamist movements
around the world for a long time with the
philosophy that their money buys them some minimal
influence and even immunity from criticism from
them," said Graham Fuller, the former vice chair
of the National Intelligence Council at the US
Central Intelligence Agency. "I have no
information about what the kingdom is doing in
Iraq, but almost certainly they are in touch with
and aiding to some extent the Salafis and maybe
the Islamic Party of Iraq as well."
With
barely any inquiry by the Western media into US
ally Saudi Arabia's role in Iraq, it is not
peculiar that Riyadh's relationship with Sunni
political groups in Iraq has gone unremarked upon.
But as early as 2004, Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan,
the chief justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme
Judicial Council, was caught on videotape at a
government mosque encouraging young Saudis to go
to Iraq and wage jihad against the Americans.
"The lawfulness of his action is in
fighting an enemy who is fighting Muslims and came
for war," Luhaidan was heard saying on the tape.
Last week, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani
visited Tehran and was quoted by Iranian state
television as saying his country is in dire need
of Tehran's help in establishing security and
stability in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group
proposed that Iran and Syria be engaged by the US
government on Iraq's future.
"Were the
Americans or any outside forces to exit Iraq, the
weapons that the factions have, along with the
free-for-all that is prevalent in most of Iraq
now, will simply result in a chaotic bloodbath,"
Abdurrahman al-Shayyal, a Saudi analyst, told Asia
Times Online.
Iran holds some sway over a
number of the Shi'ite political parties currently
controlling southern Iraq. Iranian officials have
been hinting that any US military strike against
Iran's nuclear program would have consequences in
the Iraqi arena. At the same time, they have
privately complained that Saudi Arabia is taking
the silent war for influence in Iraq into Iran as
well by pumping money into the Arab-majority
province of Khuzestan by encouraging locals to
convert from Shi'ite to Sunni Islam.
Iran
and Saudi Arabia are both flush with near-record
oil receipts and intent on continuing their
confrontation for regional dominance. Iran is a
regionally resurgent Shi'ite theocracy, while
Saudi Arabia stands as the self-proclaimed
champion of Sunni Islam and views Iran as a
regional and religious trespasser.
"The
Middle Eastern Cold War is pushing Washington,
allied with the Arab conservatives, into a
contradictory stance in Iraq, having installed a
Shi'ite, pro-Iranian government there but
remaining unable to work with this new reality on
a geopolitical level," opined Juan Cole, the
foremost Iraq watcher in US academia. "Iraq is
caught in the middle of this new Cold War and
seems likely to be the major victim of it."
A month ago, I interviewed a childhood
friend of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in
his office in Tehran's sprawling and polluted
downtown. At our last interview just before the
summer he had appeared an enthusiastic proponent
of his friend's presidency. This time, however, he
was full of complaints.
"Ahmadinejad is
demolishing all these efforts that [former
president Mohammad] Khatami made to allay the
Arabs' fears of us. He believes that Iran has to
be a superpower and does not like the Arab
sheikhdoms because he is anti-royalty. So he is
returning the revolution [of 1979] to where we
started, and it has taken 27 years to assure [the
Arab states that] we are not a threat."
Listing Iran as a member of an "axis of
evil" and accusing it, despite the absence of
published evidence, of destabilizing Iraq and
sponsoring a "Shi'ite axis" across the wider
region have terrified staunch Arab Sunni allies
such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. So it is
unremarkable that cries of treason are elicited
from the Arab world when the White House considers
changing tack and invites Iran into Iraq to pacify
it. On a September trip to Syria, it was clear
that even the policymakers of this closest of
Iranian allies were less than jubilant over the
prospect of Iranian influence lapping against
their eastern borders.
The US invasion of
Iraq forever demolished the regional security
architecture that prevailed in the 1980s and
contributed to a stable, investment-free Persian
Gulf region. Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein is no
longer the cork in the Sunni bottle, protecting
Arab states from the spread of Iranian influence.
Nor is Iran the boxed-in, under-fire country it
was in the first years after the revolution, when
Sunni Arab money kept Iraq's war machine oiled and
on the offensive against the nascent Islamic
Republic. It was Saddam Hussein's aggression
against Iran in September 1980 that sparked the
bloody Iran-Iraq War that claimed an estimated 1
million victims in horrific trench warfare over
eight years.
Iran's new leadership has
done little to avert confrontation aside from
making soothing rhetorical overtures toward its
Arab neighbors. Ahmadinejad has not repeated the
diplomatic success effected by his moderate
predecessor Khatami. Where Khatami invited Saudi
Arabia's King Abdullah to Tehran and hosted a
successful meeting of the Organization of the
Islamic Conference in 1998, Ahmadinejad's Persian
chauvinist utterances have heightened the Arabs'
perceptions of vulnerability. By stressing the
anti-royalist, populist strains that run through
Shi'ism, Ahmadinejad has refocused a confrontation
between the Islamic Republic and the Persian
Gulf's kingdoms that had been in remission.
But there is little the oil-rich but
politically fragile and sparsely populated Persian
Gulf monarchies can do against a muscular,
security-centered Iran numbering 70 million and
intent on assuming leadership of the region. Early
this month, Iran's national-security supremo, Ali
Larijani, counseled the Arabs to eject the US
military from its bases in the region and join
Tehran in a regional security alliance. It was an
unprecedented statement and a sign of Iran's
growing confidence in its might. Further proof
that Tehran's message is being heard in the
capitals of minuscule US allies such as Qatar,
Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates was their
non-participation in recent US-led maneuvers in
the Gulf that were calibrated to send a warning to
the Islamic Republic.
Iran's official
entry into Iraq - even if only diplomatic - would
create a perception of threat and escalate that
country's travails. Just as Lebanon is today being
resurrected as the proxy battleground for a host
of regional powers, Iraq is increasingly turning
into a "Lebanon of the east".
Iason
Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.
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