Middle East

Dec 14, 2006

Page 2 of 2
The cost: An army and a leg
By Jason Motlagh

groups such as Muqtada's to take their cues from mullahs next door. For all his anti-US vitriol, Muqtada has styled himself as an Iraqi nationalist critical of Iranian influence and is not as close to Tehran as some of his rivals are. He cooperated with Sunni militants earlier in the insurgency and two weeks ago called on a top Sunni sheikh to issue three fatwas, one of them against inter-sectarian killing, stating: "We Iraqis - Sunnis and Shi'ite - will

always be brothers."

There are further doubts as to how many active militants Muqtada commands, and whether they would obey his orders when push comes to shove.

Meanwhile, other prominent Shi'ite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the SCIRI, continue to deal openly with US officials. "It's illogical to believe that Hakim has gone through all of this simply to do the bidding of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei, Pike said, just days after the Iraqi cleric met with President George W Bush in Washington and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. "These people are Iraqis first."

But any coordinated effort that interrupts traffic along the US supply line could have grave consequences. Air deliveries could not exceed 25% of daily requirements in the event overland lines were compromised, according to Lang, and alternative ground supply lines through Jordan or Turkey could meet resistance from Ankara officials loath to cooperate or Sunni insurgents in deadly al-Anbar province, which must be traversed to reach Jordan.

Another weak point in the current supply line is that storage facilities at the Kuwaiti entrepot are replenished by a steady stream of goods shipped through the Iran-controlled Strait of Hormuz. Iranian warships and sea mines would delay, or severely reduce, inbound supply shipments, as they did during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Global oil markets would also quake.

Iran "would close off the entrance to the Persian Gulf and try [to] close our lines of communication from Kuwait to up to [140,000] troops stranded in the middle of Iraq", retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey recently said on the US cable news channel MSNBC's Hardball. "You'd see a huge insurgent effort against our supply lines. We'd be in a crisis mode within a week of the first air strike."

The Desert Storm veteran went on to call the idea of using conventional air power to knock out Iranian nuclear facilities "preposterous".

Jason Motlagh is deputy foreign editor at United Press International in Washington, DC. He has reported freelance from Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean for various US and European news media.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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