Page 5 of
5 Iran and the failed US Iraq
policy By Henry C K
Liu
postwar puppet regime.
The Sadr movement wants an Islamic republic in
Iraq, albeit independent from Iran, run by
patriotic devotees who bravely risked death to
stay in the troubled homeland to keep the
resistance going for decades, not cowards who fled
the country to curry favor from infidel Western
imperialism. The Sadr movement also repelled an
attempt to infiltrate Sadr City by the rival
Tehran-based Shi'ite Badr Brigade
of
the SCIRI.
US occupation plays into
Iran strategy Yet despite all the
sectarian divides, one aim unites all Iraqi
Shi'ite clerics: they all want the US out of Iraq
soon if not immediately. This aim conflicts with
Iran's tactical objective of keeping the US tied
down in Iraq.
A successful US withdrawal
from Iraq would free up military resources and
restore US political will to focus on Iran. On the
other hand, a hopelessly deteriorating quagmire in
Iraq may force to US to seek an alternative path
to victory by widening the war with an attack on
Iran, or instigate an internal coup by supporting
Iranian dissident groups. Thus Iran's strategy for
Iraq is neither US withdrawal nor escalation, just
a slow bleed to drive home the awareness of
superpower impotency to the whole world.
Ironically, the US views such tactics as
supportive of its aim to stay in Iraq with reduced
cost in terms of troop casualties to realize an
impossible dream of a democratic Middle East. As
long as incidents of violence and death decline in
number from an unacceptable peak, the war party in
the US can claim progress while falling into a
long-term trap of strategic defeat. It was a trap
the US hawks fell into in Vietnam, in which North
Vietnam led the US high command into deluding
itself that it was making statistical progress
from previous low points while marching steadily
toward final defeat.
The US has yet to
learn that it is not possible for a superpower to
win a local war unless it also wins the peace
within 90 days. After that, "cut and run" is the
only sensible strategy. Political objectives are
not automatically served by a rudderless military
victory. Alexander the Great defeated the
numerically larger Persian army but failed to
conquer Persia even with the imposition of mixed
marriages between his Greek commanders and women
of Persian royalty. In fact, Persia changed
Alexander more than he changed Persia. The key
problem with the US "war on terrorism" is its
projected long time frame. Patriotic adrenaline
has a very short life span in a democracy,
particularly in the US political culture, where
attention-deficit syndrome rules.
The
SCIRI is an offshoot of the revolutionary Da'wa
al-Islamiyya Party founded in the late 1950s.
Baqir al-Hakim was forced abroad to Tehran in 1982
by Saddam's persecution of key Da'wa figures. The
SCIRI has a paramilitary wing of some 15,000 armed
fighters, trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards
and commanded by Baqir's brother, Abd al-Aziz
al-Hakim, who has succeeded his assassinated
brother as head of the SCIRI. The Hakims are close
to Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, successor to
Khomeini as Supreme Leader in Iran.
The
SCIRI cooperated with the CIA and participated in
forming the INC and was rewarded with 15 of 65
seats on the provisional Governing Council formed
at the Iraqi opposition meetings in London in
December 2002, three months before the US invasion
of Iraq. Key SCIRI figures also attended US State
Department planning meetings on overthrowing
Saddam, and made press statements about their
negotiations with the office of then secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld about a role for the Badr
Brigade to fight alongside US troops during the
invasion. Since the Bush administration had
earlier labeled SCIRI's backers in Iran as part of
the "axis of evil", Rumsfeld's open and ready
willingness to cooperate with the allegedly evil
Iran against Iraq, a former US ally and war enemy
of Iran, was mind-boggling in its cynicism.
US apprehension over SCIRI-Iran
ties Beginning in January 2003, belated US
apprehension over the danger of Iranian influence
in a "democratic" Iraq caused the Bush
administration to break abruptly with the SCIRI.
US National Security Council official Zalmay
Khalilzad coordinated with the office of Vice
President Dick Cheney to dilute SCIRI influence
within the puppet INC, chaired by exiled alleged
charlatan bank fraud Ahmad Chalabi, hailed as the
"George Washington of Iraq" by his US neo-con
backers, to the embarrassment of students of US
history.
The INC chairman provided much of
the fabricated intelligence to support the US
pre-conclusion to invade Iraq, holding himself up
as "the force of democracy" with the help of the
media power of the Washington Post, predicting
that US invaders would be welcomed by liberated
Iraqi masses with hugs and flowers. Despite
massive US funding, the INC might have been
received in Washington and London as the
enlightened savior of an evil nation, but it had
no real spiritual influence or political followers
in Iraq as it was composed of returned exiles who
had been absent from Iraq for decades.
After the collapse of organized Iraqi
defense, US forces were greeted with
rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bomb from
relentless insurgent attackers. In the December
2005 Iraqi elections, the INC failed to win a
single seat in Parliament.
In meetings in
Turkey with anti-Saddam opposition groups in late
January 2003, less than two months before the
invasion, Khalilzad made known to the INC that the
US intended to have Iraq administered after the
"regime change" by a US proconsul, instead of
working through an Iraqi provisional government
dominated by Shi'ites, until an elective regime
more to US liking could be devised.
Feeling betrayed by a dramatic
anti-Shi'ite turn in US policy, SCIRI leader
Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim immediately denounced the
plan of a postwar US administration as equivalent
to a US colonial occupation, and threatened that
the Badr Brigade would attack US troops if they
overstayed their welcome. The US warned Iran not
to allow Badr Brigade forces into Iraq during the
US invasion that began on March 20, 2003. Yet by
April 17, two weeks before Bush gave his speech in
front of a huge "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard
the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, Badr Brigade
gunmen gained control of the town of Baquba near
the Iranian border, and the Badr Brigade allowed
SCIRI cleric Sayyid Abbas to occupy the mayor's
mansion in Kut. When US marines attempted to
intercede, a crowd of 1,200 townspeople gathered,
chanting slogans against INC leader Chalabi,
calling for a Shi'ite-controlled Islamic state for
Iraq, and an end to US occupation.
Abd
al-Aziz al-Hakim, deputy head of the SCIRI,
returned to Iraq from Iran on April 16, 2003,
arriving at Kut to roaring cheers to prepare the
way for his older brother Baqir's triumphant
return. In a press interview, the younger Hakim
pledged that the SCIRI would work with other
parties in the new Iraq. In Kut on April 18, Abd
al-Aziz said in an interview with Iranian
television: "We will first opt for a national
political system, but eventually the Iraqi people
will seek an Islamic republic system." He added
that the will of Shi'ites for an Islamic system
would prevail in democratic elections, since they
were 60% of the population. In one sentence, he
aptly explained why the US opted for proconsular
rule: to prevent Shi'ite control of Iraq.
On the same day, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim,
still in Tehran, called on Shi'ites to converge on
the shrine city of Karbala four days later, on
April 22, "to oppose a US-led interim
administration and defend Iraq's independence".
SCIRI spokesman Abu Islam al-Saqir said, "To the
Iraqi people, US domination is no better than the
dictatorship of the ousted brutal regime of Saddam
Hussein."
US proconsular rule in
Iraq The post of US proconsul, given the
benign title of director of reconstruction and
humanitarian assistance for Iraq, was first filled
in late January 2003, two months before the
invasion, by retired US General Jay Garner, who
had in 1990-91 had successfully conducted Gulf War
operations in northern Iraq with the cooperation
of the Iraqi Kurds. Garner was president of an
arms company that provided crucial technical
support to missile systems vital to the US
invasion of the country. Garner's arms-dealer
background caused concerns at the United Nations
and aid agencies already opposed to US
administration of Iraq outside UN authority.
On April 20, 2003, 11 days after Saddam's
statue was torn down in central Baghdad, Garner,
already waiting in Kuwait, went to Baghdad with
his small team. Garner was officially relieved by
the White House 16 days later, not for his
arms-dealership background, but for disagreement
over who should be allowed to run Iraq. He told
Frontline in an interview last August 11
that he was a lame duck the day he got to Iraq.
Garner wanted early elections, 90 days after the
fall of Baghdad, to produce a new government of
local politicians, not returned expatriates, to
run the severely damaged country and manage its
oil assets, while the White House was concerned
with Iranian influence on a democratically elected
Shi'ite majority as a result of the mindless US
de-Ba'athization policy.
Garner was
replaced on May 6, 2003, by Paul Bremer, State
Department veteran and expert in crisis
management. During two weeks of transition, Garner
tried in vain to water down the de-Ba'athization
order from Washington and to reconstitute the
disbanded Iraqi army. Bremer, a hard-driving
official by any standard, came to Iraq with
specific orders to purge thoroughly the Ba'ath
Party, a position adamantly insisted upon by
Israel-leaning neo-conservatives in the Bush
administration.
Bremer stayed as proconsul
for 13 months, until July 28, 2004, and managed to
delay general elections until December 2005,
providing time for the US to try against hope to
create a balance of forces in new Iraqi electoral
politics. The result was an anemic Iraqi
government with insufficient mandate to govern
effectively, with no effective police force or
nationwide security capability, not even in the
capital itself. The government survives only at
the mercy of the Sadr movement. Bremer, whom
critics hold responsible for many of the problems
in Iraq today, was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom by President Bush on December 14, 2004.
Da'wa Party Despite having sired
the SCIRI, the Da'wa al-Islamiyya Party itself
remains a separate organization, with a commitment
to Islamic government. It has London, Tehran and
Iraq-based factions, of which only the London
representatives have been willing to talk to US
authorities.
Many in the Iraqi Da'wa Party
are loyal to Lebanese Grand Ayatollah Muhammad
Hussein Fadlallah, who was born and educated in
Najaf and sought refuge in Lebanon in 1965.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, with which Fadlallah is not
directly affiliated, has threatened violence
against US troops in Iraq. Other than its Tehran
branch, Da'wa, like the Sadr movement, is oriented
toward indigenous Iraqi politics according to the
theories of Islamic government advocated by the
late Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.
Even moderate
Da'wa leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari refused to
cooperate with the US military administration,
boycotting the US-sponsored leadership meeting
near Nasiriyah on April 16, 2003, presided over by
US proconsul General Garner. Da'wa organized a
demonstration on April 15 at Nasiriyah to protest,
with thousands of demonstrators chanting: "No, no
Saddam! No, no United States!" and "Yes, yes for
Freedom! Yes, Yes for Islam", pitting Saddam
against freedom and the US against Islam. Placards
of "No one represents us in the conference" were
clearly seen on television worldwide.
On
April 19, Jaafari sent a letter to a meeting of
countries neighboring Iraq, calling for the
immediate establishment of a secular technocratic
provisional government, suggesting that Da'wa was
less theocratically oriented than other Shi'ite
factions. Among the Da'wa leaders in Nasiriyah was
newly returned former exile Muhammad Bakr
al-Nasri, a prominent cleric, said to be the
party's philosophical guide. Da'wa Party officials
were apprehensive that they would be marginalized
politically by the stronger paramilitary
capabilities of the SCIRI and the more aggressive
Sadr movement.
Tehran sees a potentially
powerful ally among Iraqi Shi'ites, notably the
SCIRI. The late Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim had long
advocated an Islamic republic for Iraq. Many had
compared his return to Iraq to that of Khomeini's
return to Iran. If Khomeini could overthrow the
CIA-installed shah in Iran, it would be a cinch
for Hakim to topple the puppet Iraqi provisional
government set up by the US. In the days following
the war, the Hakim tribe quickly established
itself as the largest and best-organized faction
in the Iraqi Shi'ite majority.
Abd
al-Aziz al-Hakim The rising influence of
the Hakim tribe soon caused alarm in Washington
because of its strong links to Iran.
While
Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim had repeatedly rejected
religious extremism, he also denounced the notion
of any foreign-installed government ruling Iraq's
fractious masses. On his return to Iraq, Baqir
denounced US-led occupation forces and demanded
their withdrawal from Iraq to allow Iraqis to
establish their own government in an Islamic
republic. Muhammad Baqir was assassinated on
August 29, 2003, at age 64. Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim,
brother of the assassinated ayatollah, joined the
US-backed Iraqi Governing Council, symbolizing the
willingness of some factions of the SCIRI to work
with the US occupation.
Young Shi'ites,
many from Baghdad's poor Sadr City slums, are
engaged in a power struggle with the more moderate
Shi'ites among the urban middle class to grab
control from both the Hakim tribe and senior
cleric Sistani. Muqtada al-Sadr is among Sistani's
most important rivals in Najaf. Tehran has been
heavily engaged in training and maintaining both
the Hakim militia and the Sadr Brigade.
The Iraqi Kurds The late
ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of the SCIRI had
warm relations with the Kurdish movements in Iraq
since his father, grand ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim,
spiritual leader of the Shi'ite world from 1955
until his death in 1970, gave a fatwa
forbidding the Iraqi army to fight against the
Kurds in Iraq.
A mutual agreement was
signed between the SCIRI and the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Masood Barzani,
which seeks an independent state for Kurds in
northern Iraq. A similar agreement was signed with
the PUK headed by Jalal Talabani, an offshoot of
the KDP. In 1996, the KDP collaborated with
Saddam's Iraqi army in an attempt to destroy the
PUK, which was supported by Iran.
In 1992,
during a meeting in Vienna, Barzani and Talabani
concurred with the CIA's newly created INC to set
up bases in Iraqi Kurdistan and build a liberation
army composed of returned exiled and defector
Iraqis. The Kurdish parties allowed the INC to
open an office in Salahaddin, 32 kilometers north
of the Kurdish regional capital Irbil, and began
beaming propaganda radio broadcasts into
government-administered Iraq, gathering
intelligence from Iraqi military deserters and
building up the region's own army. The aim was to
establish a new regime in northern Iraq that would
dovetail with Washington's interests in the
region.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the US
organized no-fly zones in Iraq, north of the 36th
parallel and south of the 32nd parallel. In April
1994, two US Air Force (USAF) F-15 aircraft,
operating in the no-fly zone to keep Saddam from
intervening in the continuing civil war between
the PUK, backed by Iran, and the KDP, backed by
Baghdad, shot down two US Army helicopters after
misidentifying them as Iraqi. This incident, with
its high death toll, highlighted dramatically the
complexities in dealing with Iraq in the aftermath
of the Gulf War.
In September 1996, the
KDP requested help from Saddam, who sent 40,000
troops, demonstrating that he was not deterred by
US warning against using military force in
northern Iraq. In an announcement of incoherent
logic, William Perry, US president Bill Clinton's
defense secretary, made clear that while no
significant US interests were involved in the
Kurdish factional conflict, maintaining stability
in the region as a whole was vital to US security
and there would be a US reaction. On September
2-3, US aircraft attacked Iraqi fixed
surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites and air-defense
control facilities in the south because, Perry
explained, the US saw the principal threat from
Iraq to be against Kuwait.
The Saudis were
increasingly unhappy about the suffering of the
Iraqi people after the Gulf War, which made it a
fertile ground for breeding al-Qaeda recruits.
They were also unhappy about US military presence
in the Sunni kingdom, the prime cause of al-Qaeda
terrorism. Riyadh declined to allow the USAF to
fly strike missions on Iraq from Saudi bases.
Unable to find bases in the region but determined
to do "something" to show Saddam he could not
attack the Kurds with impunity, the US and Britain
settled for pushing the northern boundary of the
southern no-fly zone to the 33rd parallel, just
south of Baghdad, and launching 44 cruise missiles
at Iraqi air-defense targets in the newly expanded
zone on September 3-4, 1996.
In a
Frontline interview by Elizabeth Farnsworth
on September 13, 1996, Perry said: "The larger
strategic interest [is] the threat that Iraq poses
to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia." Responding to
Farnsworth's query that Iraqi troops were invading
in the north, not moving south, Perry said:
The complication from the political
point of view is that they were invited by the
KDP, which is the Kurdish unit in that area. The
KDP is one and the PUK is the other Kurdish
faction. They've been fighting with each other.
And the KDP thought that they were going to be
able to gain an advantage with fighting Iraqi
troops on their side. I think that was a
strategic blunder on their part. They think they
can manipulate the Iraqis, and they'll find that
they're too powerful and too ruthless to be
manipulated. But in any event, they have made
that move, and that has complicated quite a bit
the actions that we could take ...
We do
not get involved in the military conflict, and
we do not send the troops in unless we see a
vital national interest involved. And our vital
national interest [in Iraq is in] the south, not
in the north ...
I think he [Saddam] has
laudable objectives. One of them certainly is to
regain control of northern Iraq, which he has
not had for the last five years. Another one is
to assert his military ascendency in the area to
give him a free hand to move into the south
either through coercive power or through actual
military - actual military power ...
Our
objectives, first of all are protecting our
vital strategic interest, which means protecting
our friends and allies in the region, Israel,
Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. Secondly, keeping
the free flow of oil from the Gulf, which is a
vital national interest to the United States and
indeed to the whole industrial world. Those are
the two primary vital national
interests.
Farnsworth then asked: "In
attacking Saddam Hussein for doing something which
he says was aimed at countering Iran [which
supports the PUK], are we likely to be seen as
helping further Iranian interests in the Middle
East?"
Perry responded: "The PUK has
received very limited support from Iran, including
some shelling across the border, including perhaps
a hundred or so trainees in the army. This is
correct. And this, I believe, Saddam Hussein has
used as a rationale for doing something he wanted
to do anyway, but there is no comparison between
what the Iranians did in support of the PUK, where
there are a hundred or so trainers versus the
40,000 troops and the 300 tanks which Saddam
Hussein sent in.
"His goal, it seems to me
quite clearly, immediate goal, is to regain
control of northern Iraq. And one of the greatest
- one of the groups that will suffer the most in
this [is] the KDP, which is the group that invited
him in the first place. But that's a lesson they
have yet to learn."
Perry went to the
region in September 1996 to build Kurdish support
for a US-backed strike against Saddam. The plan
was opposed by Saudi Arabia, which saw Saddam as
an effective factor in containing Shi'ite
influence, and by Turkey, which did not want to
encourage Kurdish separatism in Turkey.
On
September 9, the day after his return home, Perry
was again interviewed by Jim Lehrer of
Frontline, who asked that in view of the
fact that the Kuwaitis delayed 24 hours before
accepting 3,500 US troops, and the Saudis saying
they never would have allowed such troops into
their country, and the Turks having refused to
allow US planes to fly out of Turkish bases on
missions over Iraq, was the Gulf War coalition
falling apart? Perry denied that the coalition was
falling apart, adding that "the message to Saddam
Hussein is if you threaten our vital
national-security interests, you will be facing
military action from the United States".
Brian Knowlton of the International Herald
Tribune reported on September 9 from Washington
that president Clinton conceded that he could do
little about the fighting in northern Iraq but to
implore the warring Kurdish factions to return to
the negotiating table, since US-supported peace
talks had broken down earlier in the summer.
"I would still like to do more to help the
Kurds," Clinton was quoted as saying, "but
frankly, if you want the fighting to be ended, the
leaders of the various factions are going to have
to be willing to go back to the peace table and
talk it through." He said Washington's ability to
control events in Iraq was "limited".
The
US made it clear that it was not prepared to
intervene directly in the fighting, which Perry
described as a civil war between Kurds. Clinton
appealed to the two chief Kurdish factions to
avoid "any cavalier killing of civilians and
others who are not combatants in this". He did not
say what aid might be provided to members of the
US-backed opposition group that was now on the
run.
The Iraqi military's capture of Arbil
smashed the CIA-financed operation intended to
destabilize the government of Saddam Hussein,
trapped 200 members of the INC there, and led to
the execution of opponents of Saddam.
Former Saddam-era deputy prime minister
Tariq Aziz, brought before the Iraqi High Tribunal
to testify against six defendants accused of
genocide in the 1988 campaign against Iraqi Kurds
that included the use of poison gas, instead
denied that the Saddam Hussein government had
carried out any such attacks. Aziz insisted that
Iraq did not have the chemical weapons necessary
for the alleged gas attacks that killed 5,600
Kurds in northern Iraq, instead fingering Iran and
the PUK as the culprits.
Tehran was known
to have been continually supporting the PUK, whose
founder and secretary general, Jalal Talabani, was
elected president of Iraq on April 6, 2005. The
formerly Iran-based SCIRI found it expedient to
compromise with an emerging Iran-supported Kurdish
leadership to strengthen its hand in the
post-Saddam power structure.
US
befriends Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim Last
December 4 Bush, under pressure to calm sectarian
violence in Iraq, met with the head of SCIRI, Abd
al-Aziz al-Hakim, for the second time and
applauded his "commitment to a unity government"
for Iraq.
The president said: "Part of
unifying Iraq is for the elected leaders and
society leaders to reject the extremists that are
trying to stop the advance of this young
democracy. I appreciated very much his ... strong
position against the murder of innocent life."
Bush added: "This is a man whose family suffered
unbelievable violence at the hands of the
dictator, Saddam Hussein. He lost nearly 60 family
members, and yet rather than being bitter, he's
involved with helping the new government succeed."
What Bush did not say was that many of the
killings were carried out with US approval.
At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, president
George H W Bush urged Iraqis to topple the Ba'ath
regime, but the US did not back the Shi'ite
uprising that ensued in southern Iraq. Fear of
Iranian influence over Iraqi Shi'ites through the
SCIRI was a decisive factor in the US decision not
to support the uprising.
In the December
2005 elections, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim emerged as
the head of the Unified Iraqi Coalition (UIC) that
won 128 of 275 seats in the Council of
Representatives. The UIC includes the Islamic
Da'wa Party, the Islamic Virtue Party, the
Centrist Coalition Party, the Badr Organization,
the SCIRI, the Turkmen Islamic Union of Iraq, the
Justice and Equality Assembly, the Iraqi
Democratic Movement, the Movement of Hezbollah in
Iraq, the Turkmen Loyalty Movement, the Saed Al
Shuhada Islamic Movement, Al Shabak Democratic
Gathering, the Malhan Al Mkoter-Mr, the Islamic
Da'wa Party-Iraq Organization, the Reform and
Building Meeting, Al Sadriah Advertising, the
Justice Community, and the Iraq Ahrar.
As
head of both the UIC and SCIRI, Hakim went to
Tehran on February 5 to meet with Iranian Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Supreme National
Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani. Iranian
agencies reported that Khamenei told Hakim that
Iranian policy is "to support the Iraqi
government", and the unity of all Iraqis will
remove the need for the continued presence in Iraq
of foreign troops.
"The presence of
occupiers ... is one of the main reasons for
insecurity in Iraq," Khamenei said.
Hakim
said after meeting with Larijani that Iran-US
talks on Iraq "are undoubtedly very important and
Iraqi authorities want this". Islamic Republic
News Agency reported him saying that "political
haggling [between Iran and the US] will benefit
the entire region". Hakim said Iraqi authorities
are engaged in "very extensive activity" to assure
the release of Iranian diplomats arrested by US
forces in Irbil on January 11. He also met with
Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi,
who said: "The Americans must release Iranian
diplomats as soon as possible without any
excuses."
Ibrahim al-Jaafari - pro-Iran
prime minister of Iraq On April 7, 2005,
the Iraqi National Assembly appointed Ibrahim
al-Jaafari Iraq's first full-term postwar prime
minister.
Iraq's new interim government
had been trumpeted by the Bush administration as a
close friend and a model for democracy in the
region. In contrast, Bush had called Iran part of
an "axis of evil" and dismissed its elections as
frauds and its government as illegitimate. So the
US administration was less than pleased when the
first Iraqi prime minister, Jaafari, before he was
replaced by Nuri Kamel Mohammed Hassan al-Maliki,
deputy leader of the Islamic Da'wa Party and
deputy leader of the De-Ba'athification Commission
of the Iraqi Interim Government, led eight
high-powered cabinet ministers to pay a visibly
friendly visit to Tehran in July 2005. Upon
arrival in Tehran on a Saturday, Jaafari visited
the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic
Republic, the late Imam Khomeini and paid tribute
to him by laying a wreath on his tomb. On the
following Monday, Jaafari and his delegation met
with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution,
Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.
Jaafari's
July 2005 visit to Iran was a blow to the Bush
administration's strategic vision, but a sweet
triumph for Shi'ite theocracy. In the dark days of
1982, Tehran was asylum of choice for Iraqi
Shi'ite expatriates who had been forced to flee
Saddam Hussein's death decree against them to a
country with which Iraq was then at war. Ayatollah
Khomeini, the newly installed theocrat of Iran,
pressured the Iraqi expatriates to form an
umbrella organization, the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which he hoped
would eventually take over Iraq. Among its members
were Jaafari and Hakim. On January 30, 2005,
Khomeini's vision became reality, courtesy of the
Bush administration, when the Supreme Council and
the Da'wa Party won the Iraqi elections.
Jaafari, a Da'wa Party leader working for
an Islamic republic in Iraq, had been in exile in
Tehran from 1980 to 1989. A physician trained at
Mosul, the reserved and hesitant Jaafari, studied
Shi'ite law and theology as an auditor at the
seminaries of Qom. His party, Da'wa, was the home
of the SCIRI but in 1984 split with it to maintain
its autonomy.
Although neo-conservatives
such as Paul Wolfowitz maintained before the Iraq
war that Iraqis are more secular and less
interested in an Islamic state than Iranians, in
fact the theocratic ideas of Khomeini of Iran had
had a deep impact among Iraqi Shi'ites. In the
December 2005 elections, Iraqi Shi'ites put the
Khomeini-influenced SCIRI in control of seven of
the nine southern provinces, along with Baghdad
itself.
Jaafari's government did not
control the center-north or west of the country
and could not pump oil from Kirkuk because of
Sunni sabotage. The Rumaila oilfield in the south
lacks refining capability. Iraq does not have a
deepwater port on the Persian Gulf and needs to
replace inland "ports" such as Amman because of
poor security. An initiative toward the east could
resolve many of these problems, strengthening the
Shi'ites against the Sunni guerrillas economically
and militarily and so saving the new government.
Iran-Iraq relations had not been good
since the mid-1950s when Iraq was ruled by a
British-installed constitutional monarchy with a
fanatically pro-West, anti-communist prime
minister in the person of Nuri al-Said. The CIA
had put Mohammad Reza Shah back on the throne in
1953, deposing the democratically elected prime
minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had angered the
US when he nationalized the Iranian oil industry.
Ironically, when the shah came to power,
he kept Iranian oil nationalized, using oil
revenue to solidify his own power. In 1955, Said
and the shah both signed on enthusiastically to
the anti-communist Baghdad Pact, a US-sponsored
collective security agreement against the Soviet
Union and Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser of
Egypt. Nationalist reaction against the pact led
to a secular populist revolution that overthrew
the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, with Said's corpse
dragged in the street by angry mobs. Iraq
eventually came under the control of the
pan-Arabic Ba'ath Party.
Another populist
revolution overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979,
installing a theocratic government led by
Khomeini. Iran-Iraq relations reached their nadir,
as Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party and Khomeini's
Revolutionary Guards fought to a stalemate in
horrible war not seen since World War I. Jaafari's
2005 visit was partly designed to erase the bitter
legacies of that war.
Iraq's Eastern
Policy has religious overtones. Upon arrival in
Iran on a Saturday, Jaafari immediately made a
ceremonial visit to, and laid a wreath at, the
tomb of ayatollah Khomeini. In a meeting with Ali
Khamenei on the following Monday, Tehran Times
reported, Jaafari "called the late Imam Khomeini
the key to the victory of the Islamic Revolution",
adding, "We hope to eliminate the dark pages
Saddam caused in Iran-Iraq ties and open a new
chapter in brotherly ties between the two
nations."
Iran generously rewarded Jaafari
by offering to pay for three pipelines that would
stretch across the southern border of the two
countries. Under the deal, Iraq would ship 150,000
barrels a day of light crude to Iran to be
refined, and Iran would ship back processed
petroleum, kerosene and gasoline.
In
addition, Iran agreed to supply electricity to
Iraq, sell it 200,000 tons of wheat and allow the
use of Iranian ports to transship goods to Iraq,
plus $1 billion in foreign aid. All this
generosity looked to Washington like
influence-peddling.
Khamenei called for
the preservation of the territorial integrity of
Iraq and stepping up cooperation in policing the
borders of the two countries. The previous week,
Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi had made a
preparatory trip to Tehran, exploring the
possibility of military cooperation between the
two countries. At one point the two had appeared
to have reached an agreement that Iran would help
train Iraqi troops which immediately sent the
neo-cons in Washington going ballistic.
Immediate enormous pressure was applied on
Jaafari to back off this plan. The Iraqi
government abandoned it, on the grounds that an
international agreement had already specified that
out-of-country training of Iraqi troops in the
region should be done in Jordan. But the Iraqi
government did give Tehran assurances that it
would not allow Iraqi territory to be used in any
attack on Iran, without mentioning that the only
likely attacker was the US.
Iranian
leaders pressed Jaafari on the continued presence
in Iraq of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian
terrorist organization with ties to the Pentagon,
the Israeli lobby, and hawks in the US Congress.
The Hussein regime had used the MEK to destabilize
Iran. Jaafari promised that the MEK had been
disarmed and would not be allowed to conduct
terrorist raids from Iraqi soil.
Iraqi
Sunnis resist Iranian influence The warming
relations between Tehran and Baghdad greatly
alarms Iraq's Sunni Muslims. They know that
Iranian offers of help in training Iraqi security
officers, and Iranian professions of support for a
united, peaceful Iraq are code for the suppression
by Shi'ite troops and militias of the Sunni Arab
guerrilla movement.
Many Iraqi Sunnis
believe that the Sunni Arabs are the true
indigenous majority, but that millions of illegal
Iranian emigrants masquerading as Iraqi Shi'ites
have flooded into the country, skewing vote totals
in the recent elections. This belief makes them
especially suspicious of Shi'ite politicians
cozying up to the ayatollahs in Tehran. A recent
British Broadcasting Corp documentary reported
that the Sunnis of Fallujah despise Iraqi Shi'ites
even more than they do the US mercenaries, in part
because they view them as Persians. A recent CNN
report detailed the ongoing struggle between the
CIA and the new Shi'ite-run Iraqi intelligence
units for control of the Iraqi security apparatus.
US faces political defeat by
Iran Although the US maintains a facade of
welcoming good relations between Iraq and Iran,
the State Department, the Central Intelligence
Agency, and hawks in the Bush White House all hold
deep grudges against the Islamic Republic of Iran,
which is their prime target for regime change and
transformation. The fiasco of the Iraq war renders
the option of toppling the ayatollahs an
impossible dream.
Iran is well positioned
to score geopolitical advantage in Iraqi politics,
buoyed by high petroleum profits. Tehran's long
alliance with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, now
president of Iraq, gives Iran Kurdish support.
Bush has removed from power Iran's most powerful
and dangerous regional enemy in the person of
Saddam Hussein, and the secular, pan-Arabist
Ba'ath Party, something Iran was unable to do even
after eight years of bloody war, with the result
that Shi'ites came to power through elections in
Iraq, giving Iran a firm ally that will enhance
its reach into the Middle East through Hezbollah,
its other ally Lebanon. By invading Iraq, the US
faces geopolitical defeat not only in Iraq, but in
Iran and Lebanon as well.
At the end of
the Cold War, neo-conservatives advocated the use
of overwhelming military superpower to spread
democracy around the world. In 1992, Paul
Wolfowitz prepared a Defense Policy Guidance
Document that called for the use of US forces in a
preemptive and, if necessary, unilateral approach
to achieve a "new American century". Presidents
George H W Bush and Bill Clinton adopted instead
the traditional, pragmatic strategy of containment
toward Iraq.
In 1996, Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith and others of the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies argued
forcefully for the removal of Saddam by force. In
1998, the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC), chaired by William Kristol, sent a letter
to president Clinton again asking him to remove
Saddam by force. The letter was signed by 18
individuals, including Donald Rumsfeld, Perle,
Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton,
Wolfowitz, and others who later became the primary
advisers to President George W Bush.
In
the 1990 January/February issue of Foreign
Affairs, Condoleezza Rice stated that a Republican
foreign policy would "mobilize whatever resources
necessary" to remove Saddam. In September 2000,
the PNAC put forth a document called "Rebuilding
American Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources
for a New Century". This document serves as the
basis for the post-September 2001 foreign policy
of President Bush.
Nine days after the
events of September 11, 2001, the PNAC sent a
letter to Bush urging him "to remove Saddam
Hussein from power" as a part of any war on
terrorism. It is the height of irony that the "New
American Century" heralds the triumph of radical
Islamic theocracy in the Middle East.
Nuri al-Maliki - new Iraqi prime
minister In the December 2005 parliamentary
elections, the UIC plurality nominated Jaafari as
prime minister, but opposition from minority Sunni
and Kurdish factions prevented him from forming a
coalition government. On April 22, 2006, President
Jalal Talabani, Kurdish leader of the PUK, who
himself had been elected president on April 7,
2005, by the newly elected National Assembly,
removed Jaafari and replaced him with Nuri Kamel
Mohammed Hassan al-Maliki.
The ongoing
quagmire in Iraq has foreclosed the ability of
Bush administration hawks to carry out their
long-held dream of executing a regime change in
Iran, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear
ambitions. To the Iranian leadership, the lesson
of Iraq was not that it had nuclear ambitions, but
that it did not actually have nuclear capability,
which would have provided an effective deterrent
against US attack.
Of the three
governments of Bush's "axis of evil", Baghdad
represented "one down, two to go". Yet the whole
world can see that US approach to Pyongyang
abruptly changed from dictatorial intransigence to
flexible negotiation after the North Korean
nuclear test. The US is in no position to invade
Iran with ground troops both because of an already
overtaxed army and depleted political capital to
absorb high battle casualties. More critically,
the US now needs the help of Iran to disengage
from a guerrilla war that it cannot win and from
which it cannot run. The price of imposing
democracy in Iraq may well be an Islamic republic
of Iraq with a special relationship with Iran,
similar to the way the US and the UK are bound by
a special relationship cemented by two world wars.
US officials announced in late February
that they had agreed to hold the highest-level
contact with the Iranian authorities in more than
two years as part of an international meeting on
Iraq. The second of these discussions, scheduled
for early April, is expected to include Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and
Syrian counterparts. The first meeting took place
in Baghdad this month.
The announcement
from Baghdad and confirmed by Washington that the
US would take part in two sets of meetings among
Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran,
was a shift in Bush's avoidance of high-level
contacts with the governments in Damascus and
Tehran as a principle of "moral clarity". Last
December, the Iraq Study Group, a high-level
bipartisan commission, had urged direct,
unconditional talks with Iran and Syria, which
Bush immediately rejected and instead embarked on
the more confrontational approach.
"I
would note that the Iraqi government has invited
Syria and Iran to attend both of these regional
meetings," Rice told a Senate panel on February
27, in discussing the talks, which were to include
Britain, Russia, and a host of international
organizations and Middle Eastern countries.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
called anticipated US face-to-face contact with
Iran and Syria, two countries that the Bush
administration has accused of destabilizing Iraq,
"very significant", adding, "Iraq is becoming a
divisive issue in the region. Iraq can be helpful
to its neighbors also. It can provide a platform
for them to work out their differences."
Separating Iran nuclear issue from Iraq
issue Bush administration officials
characterize as a separate issue from Iraq Iran's
nuclear program, which Washington insists is aimed
at developing nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran
denies.
Cheney said in February that "all
options are still on the table" for Washington to
prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a
comment that heightened concern that the
administration was considering attacking Iran's
nuclear sites. One senior US administration
official was reported to have said that while some
Bush officials have advocated looking for ways to
talk to Iran and Syria, they did not want to
appear to be talking to either country from a
position of weakness. By ratcheting up the
confrontational talk, the administration official
said, the US was in more of a driver's seat.
"We became convinced that the Iranians
were not taking us seriously," said Philip D
Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to
Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to
take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."
Yet this appears to be for US domestic
consumption, where tough talk is part of the US
macho culture. Most professional diplomats from
participating governments scheduled to attend the
March and April meetings know that the US is in
fact coming to the talks from a position of
weakness because the record of US superpower
behavior since the end of the Cold War has always
been no talks except as a last resort.
The
ill-fated US adventure in Iraq has made Iran a
clear winner. Iraqi Shi'ite leaders know they need
Iranian support to contain the Sunni insurgents
and to restore Iraq's shattered economy. The US
has failed to achieve either of these basic
objectives of stability after more than three
years of occupation primarily because being
self-absorbed with its own superior "moral values"
prevents it from acquiring any real understanding
of the political dynamics and sectarian culture of
the region to be an effective player in the game.
The Iraq fiasco shows that the age of
superpower hegemony and invincibility is over. The
21st century is an age when a few thousand
insurgents with a clear purpose backed by handfuls
of AK-47s and grenade launchers can defeat by
attrition a superior occupying army with unmatched
and high-tech killing power. The flaw of the US
strategy of regime change is that the new regime
can be more problematic than the one it replaces.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a
New York-based private investment group. His
website is at www.henryckliu.com.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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