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5 Iran and the failed US
Iraq policy By Henry C K Liu
arms, 100 anti-tank missiles
provided by Israel were sent to Iran. Hundreds
more were sent the following month, fully paid for
in cash by Iran. Three hostages were released as a
result of the arms-for-hostages deal.
Since the funds from the arms sales to
Iran were secretly and illegally funneled to the
US-backed Contras fighting to overthrow the
Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, the episode came
to be
known as the "Iran-Contra
affair". It would become the biggest crisis in
Reagan's presidency, with details fully documented
in the "Final Report of the Independent Counsel
for Iran/Contra Matters".
In the same
Frontline interview, Robert Oakley, former
US State Department coordinator for
counter-terrorism during the 1980s, said of the
Beirut Embassy bombing: "It was primarily the
Iranians; the Syrians were sort of a secondary
player, if you will, a facilitator more than a
principal. The Iranians wanted to drive us out of
Lebanon. The Iranians also wanted to create a
Hezbollah party, that is, a party based on the
Shi'ite Islamic movement in Lebanon, which would
be their tool for Islamizing Lebanon, hopefully
turning it into an Islamic state similar to Iran
... We began to apply a series of pressures to
states supporting terrorism. One was Iraq, and
they stopped."
In response to suspected
Iranian involvement in causing US casualties in
Lebanon, the US tilted toward Iraq. Donald
Rumsfeld, as Reagan's special envoy, was
photographed on December 20, 1983, shaking hands
with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on the
official visit.
Declassified National
Security Document 26 records that after further
high-level policy review, Reagan issued National
Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114 dated
November 26, 1983, concerning specific US policy
toward the Iran-Iraq War. The directive reflected
the administration's priorities: calling for
heightened regional military cooperation to defend
oil facilities and measures to improve US military
capabilities in the Persian Gulf, and directing
the secretaries of state and defense and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take
appropriate measures to respond to tensions in the
area. It stated: "Because of the real and
psychological impact of a curtailment in the flow
of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international
economic system, we must assure our readiness to
deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting
that traffic."
The document did not
mention chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or
Iraqi possession of them.
Document 28
records that soon thereafter, Rumsfeld (who had
served in various positions in the administrations
of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford,
including as Ford's defense secretary, and at this
time headed the multinational pharmaceutical
company G D Searle & Co) was dispatched to the
Middle East as a presidential envoy. Rumsfeld's
December 1983 tour of regional capitals included
Baghdad, where he was to establish "direct contact
between an envoy of president Reagan and president
Saddam Hussein", while emphasizing his personal
"close relationship" with the US president.
Document 31 records that Rumsfeld met with
Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of
mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and
Syria, and US efforts to find alternative routes
to transport Iraqi oil - its facilities in the
Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and
Iran's ally Syria had cut off a pipeline that
transported Iraqi oil through its territory.
Rumsfeld made no reference to concerns for nuclear
or chemical weapons, according to detailed notes
on the meeting. The US re-established diplomatic
relations with Iraq four years into the Iran-Iraq
War, in November 1984, which had been severed 17
years earlier after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war
Yet less than two decades later, Iraq was
invaded in March 2003 in a new war orchestrated by
Rumsfeld, again as secretary of defense, on the
ground, among others, that it was a
terrorist-sponsoring state in possession of
weapons of mass destruction, including chemical
weapons that had been openly used during the
Iran-Iraq War.
Iran views Iraq as first
line of defense From the perspective of
Iran being the next target in the US agenda of
transformation by regime change, Tehran logically
regards a US-occupied Iraq as a first line of
defense and thus will try to prevent the United
States from establishing effective control there.
Iran thus will work to keep Washington tied down
in a no-win, no-exit situation in Iraq through
close support for Iraq's majority Shi'ite
constituent. As US hostility toward Iran escalates
toward military action, Tehran can be expected to
step up its effort to shape Iraqi Shi'ite strategy
and policy alternatives regarding the future
political landscape in Iraq and its role in the
region.
Iran will take every opportunity
to prevent the US from stabilizing the sectarian
violence in Iraq and from influencing Iraqi
foreign policy into renewed hostility toward Iran.
Toward this end, Iran will seek to keep Washington
in a no-win situation of not being able to
withdraw its troops quickly and also not being
able to stay in Iraq for as long as needed to
impose "democracy" without paying an unbearably
high cost. In the end, under this strategy, the US
will be bled so weak that its capacity to
influence political developments in the region,
much less to reach the fantasy goal of advancing
US national interest via the imposition of
democracy through regime change, will be sharply
curtained, if not by an unsustainable overtax of
its military resources, at least by an inevitable
loss of will through fatigue in divisive domestic
politics. The path to this scenario is to fan and
escalate sectarian violence in US-occupied Iraq
through Iran's spiritual influence on Iraq's large
Shi'ite constituency.
It is, however, a
risky strategy for Tehran. Overt Iranian
intervention in southern Iraq provides credibility
to Washington's accusation of Iranian meddling in
Iraq's internal affairs. Such an accusation, if
proved, would justify even more hostile US
pressure against Iran and neutralize international
reservation about a US military attack on it. This
is especially true if US plans for troop
withdrawal from the current quagmire in Iraq is
hampered by Iranian intervention to frustrate US
strategy of shifting from military to political
control of Iraq.
Further, as a legacy of
British "divide and rule" strategy after the fall
of the Ottoman Dominion, Iraq's Shi'ite population
has been scattered into many separate communities
of varied secular interests. Iraq's diverse
Shi'ite population is far from ideologically
homogenous, divided into many overlapping factions
that speak with often competing voices, at times
tribal, at other times schismatic, and at still
other times nationalistic and pan-Arab. The
different Iraqi Shi'ite factions do not
automatically obey orders from Tehran with the
same degree of unquestioned compliance. Many Iraqi
Shi'ites regard Najaf in Iraq, not Qom in Iran, as
the more authentic seat of Shi'ite exegetic
scholarship, theological authority and secular
influence.
The fall of Saddam's
Sunni-dominated, secular, pan-Arab Ba'athist
regime in Iraq causes fundamental reverberations
in Iranian domestic theocratic politics as well as
regional geopolitics in the context of
centuries-old Persian-Arab nationalistic conflict.
Ba'athist Iraq strengthened Shi'ite
solidarity Ironically, when the Iraqi
Ba'ath Party under Saddam Hussein, supported by
secular Sunnis, moved to suppress the intrusion of
religion into politics by dismantling the Shi'ite
clergy in the seats of theological learning in
Iraq, it unwittingly strengthened the claim of the
Iranian Shi'ite ecclesiastic elite as true
defenders of the faith and holy theological
guardians, thus enhancing the doctrinal relevance
and leadership of Qom in the greater Shi'ite
world.
During the years of Ba'ath Party
rule, many Iraqi Shi'ite leaders were forced to
take refuge in Iran, making it natural for Iran to
claim ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of
Islamic statism as orthodox Shi'ism rather than
the traditional "quietist" school, which believes
in a separation between religion and politics and
between ecclesiastical and political authority.
Quietism was discredited by reality on the ground
as a suicidal theology.
Both
opportunity and problems for Iran With a
majority Shi'ite government in place in postwar
Iraq as a result of US-imposed democracy, Najaf,
together with Karbala, can be expected to regain
their theological significance at the
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