WASHINGTON - The supreme irony of US
President George W Bush's campaign to blame Iran
for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as
attacks on US forces, is that the Shi'ite militias
who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad
area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present
sectarian crisis did so with the support of both
Iran and the neo-conservative US war planners.
The US policy decisions that led to the
sectarian war can be traced back to the conviction
of a group of right-wing zealots with close ties
to Israel's Likud Party that overthrowing the
regime of
the
late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein would not
destabilize the region, because Iraqi Shi'ites
would be allies of the United States and Israel
against Iran.
The idea that Iraqi Shi'ites
could be used to advance US power interests in the
Middle East was part of a broader right-wing
strategy for joint US-Israeli "rollback" of
Israel's enemies. In 1996, a task force at the
right-wing Israeli think-tank the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, under
Richard Perle, advised then Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu that such a strategy should
begin by taking control of Iraq and putting a
pro-Israeli regime in power there.
Three
years later, the former director of that
think-tank, David Wurmser, who had migrated to the
neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), spelled out how the United States could use
Iraqi Shi'ites to support that strategy in
Tyranny's Ally. Wurmser sought to refute
the realist argument that overthrowing Saddam
would destroy the balance of power between
Sunni-controlled Iraq and Shi'ite Iran on which
regional stability depended.
Wurmser
proposed replacing the existing "dual containment"
policy toward Iran and Iraq with what he called
"dual rollback". He did not deny that taking down
Saddam's regime would "generate upheaval in Iraq",
but he welcomed that prospect, which would "offer
the oppressed, majority Shi'ites of that country
an opportunity to enhance their power and
prestige".
Whereas the "realists" had
assumed that the Iraqi Shi'ites would be "Iran's
fifth column", Wurmser argued that the Iraqi
Shi'ite clerics would "present a challenge to
Iran's influence and revolution". He cited their
rejection of the central concept of the Iranian
revolution of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - the
"rule of the jurisprudent" - justifying clerical
rule.
From that fact, Wurmser leaped to
the conclusion that Iraqi Shi'ites would be an
ally of the United States in promoting a "regional
rollback of Shi'ite fundamentalism". Wurmser even
suggested that Iraqi Shi'ites could help pry
Lebanese Shi'ites, with whom they had enjoyed
close ties historically, away from the influence
of Hezbollah and Iran.
Wurmser was close
to the key officials in the Pentagon and the White
House who were planning the invasion of Iraq:
deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and
under secretary of defense for policy Douglas
Feith. After September 11, 2001, it was Wurmser
who set up the now-infamous "Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group" in Feith's
office to produce the evidence that could be used
to justify invading Iraq. After the US occupation,
he became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East
adviser.
The neo-conservative plan for
invading Iraq reflected Wurmser's assumption that
the United States would not need to plan a long
military occupation of Iraq, because toppling
Saddam's regime would unleash the power of the
Iraqi Shi'ites.
But the political
realities in Iraq were nothing like Wurmser and
his allies imagined them. They had not counted on
the Sunnis mounting an effective resistance
instead of rolling over. Nor had they anticipated
that Shi'ite clerics of Iraq would demand national
elections and throw their support behind the
militant Shi'ite parties, the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Da'wa,
which had returned from exile in Iran in the wake
of the US overthrow of Saddam.
SCIRI and
Da'wa were not what the hardliners had in mind
when they thought about Shi'ite power in Iraq.
Their paramilitary formations had been created,
trained and nurtured by Iran's Revolutionary
Guards, and their views on international politics
were not known to be distinguishable from those of
the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The
neo-conservatives also knew that the Da'wa Party
was a terrorist organization. Its operatives were
behind the bombing of the US and French embassies
in Kuwait in 1983 in an effort to drive the US out
of that country. (One of the Shi'ites elected to
the Iraqi Parliament in December 2005, Jamal
Jaafar Mohammed, was said by the US Embassy
spokesman on Tuesday to be under investigation for
his participation in that bombing.)
When
Ahmad Chalabi's American enemies accused the
neo-conservative favorite of having spied for
Iran, and the National Security Council wrote a
policy paper called "Marginalizing Chalabi", the
neo-cons outside the government were livid.
Michael Ledeen wrote a column in the National
Review Online on May 28 pointing out that Abdul
Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, and Ibrahim
Jaafari of the Da'wa were still on the Iranian
payroll, but were nevertheless "in our good
graces".
Meanwhile, the AEI's Michael
Rubin began warning in the spring of 2004 that
Iran was consolidating its influence in Shi'ite
southern Iraq by funneling large amounts of money
into support for their Iraqi clients.
But
Wolfowitz, Feith and Wurmser, faced with a rising
tide of Sunni armed resistance, had already
decided they had to accept the pro-Iranian groups
as temporary allies against the Sunnis. When
Wolfowitz testified before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on May 18, 2004, he suggested
that the Bush administration had accepted the
continued existence of these Shi'ite militias as
long as they remained friendly to the United
States.
As for disarming them, he said,
"That is not part of the mission unless it is
necessary to bring them under control." Once the
US had been able to build an "alternative security
institution", he said, "then the militias can go
away".
The war planners in the Bush
administration had also decided that the militant
Shi'ites would get their election in January 2005,
which meant that a Shi'ite government would be
formed later that year. With those decisions, the
descent of Iraq into sectarian civil war became
unavoidable.
Throughout 2004 and the first
half of 2005, the Shi'ite militias took advantage
of the supportive policy of the United States to
consolidate their power in Baghdad and began
terrorizing Sunni communities. After the
government formed under the Da'wa Party's Ibrahim
Jaafari, the Shi'ite Badr Organization moved into
the Ministry of Interior, which became a vehicle
for state terror. Despite media coverage of
Shi'ite death squads operating freely in the
capital, the Bush administration refused to admit
there was any problem with Shi'ite militias.
Only in October 2005, after what must have
been a fierce internal struggle in Washington, did
the US Embassy began to oppose the Shi'ite effort
to force Sunnis out of the capital. By then it was
far too late. The genie of sectarian civil war
could not be put back in the bottle.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
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