US demands Iran rein in Shi'ite militias
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A little-noticed statement by US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker
after last week's US-Iran meeting revealed that the main demand of the George W
Bush administration to Iran is not to stop supplying weapons to Shi'ite
militias but to use its influence with Shi'ites in Iraq to reduce their attacks
on occupation forces.
That demand, which belies official assertions of certainty that the Iranian
government is providing arms to the militias, is consistent with other evidence
that the Bush administration was primarily
concerned with getting Iranian assistance in restraining its Shi'ite allies
when its campaign over Iranian arms began early this year.
Crocker told reporters after the July 24 meeting on Iraq that he had held Iran
responsible for Shi'ite militia attacks in Iraq, and that the US administration
expects Iran to do something to reduce those attacks. He said he had "made very
clear" to the Iranian diplomats "that over the roughly two months since our
last meeting we've actually seen militia-related activity that could be
attributed to Iranian support go up and not down".
Then Crocker added, "We made it clear to the Iranians that we know what they're
doing [and] it's up to them to decide what they want to do about it."
The US diplomat's deliberate shift of focus away from the flow of arms to the
Shi'ite militias to the number of attacks carried out by those groups strongly
suggests that the Bush administration was never actually convinced that Iran
was providing arms to its fellow Shi'ites in Iraq. If the administration were
really concerned primarily with Iran's involvement in providing arms to the
Shi'ites, it would certainly have taken advantage of the bilateral talks to
focus on the demand for an end to that flow.
By issuing an open-ended invitation to Iran to "decide what they want to do
about" the Shi'ite operations, however, the administration was clearly
signaling that it really wants Iran to intercede with armed Shi'ite groups in
Iraq to get them to exercise restraint.
Crocker's interest in Iran's ability to restrain armed Shi'ite groups is in
line with an important speech last October by Under Secretary of State Nicholas
Burns, the department's senior policymaker on Iran, which made it clear that
the administration really wanted Iran to use its influence with the Shi'ites to
calm the situation in Iraq.
After accusing Iran of providing "very sophisticated arms" to Shi'ite
"insurgents" and "terrorists", Burns said, "We expect that Iran, given its
obvious interest in Iraq, and given the degree of influence that it has over
parts of the Shi'a community in Iraq, is going to now decide to act
differently."
Burns was quite explicit about the primary demand on Iran. He went on to say,
"Can you really say that Iran is using its political influence over some of the
Shi'ite political groups to send a message of unity, of a unitary state and a
unity among the three major groups competing for political power in Iraq? I
don't see that Iran has used its influence in that way."
The Burns speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on October 11 came only a
few days after Bush authorized the capture of members of Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps, to create what senior officials described to the
Washington Post's Karen DeYoung as "a sense of vulnerability among Iranian
leaders".
In January, when the new, more aggressive policy against Iran was announced,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began talking about the need for "leverage"
on the Iranians "before we engage with the Iranians". If negotiations with Iran
were to begin "right now", Gates lamented, "we would be the supplicant".
That sequence of events indicates that the publicity campaign around the
alleged Iranian provision of arms to the militias was only a part of the larger
strategy for increasing the pressure on Iran. For Gates and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice - but not for Vice President Dick Cheney - the objective was
to get Iran's cooperation on its Iraqi Shi'ite allies.
Iran's support for Shi'ite militias in Iraq is generally believed to reflect
its interest in maintaining good relations with all Shi'ite factions in the
country.
Despite a Bush administration policy to emphasize the charge of Iranian
official complicity in the supply of arms, there were telltale signs from the
beginning that the Iranian arms charge was a political operation that reflected
the neo-conservative penchant for creating evidence to serve the policy
objective. Asked on February 3 whether there was evidence that the government
in Tehran was behind the weapons obtained by Shi'ite militias in Iraq, Gates
replied: "I don't know that we know the answer to that question."
The final presentation of the case for official Iranian involvement in the
weapons traffic on February 11 came only after weeks of wrangling within the
administration. Gates and Rice let it be known to reporters in early February
that they had rejected the first version of the case, and that they were
concerned about a repetition of the infamous case for war against Iraq
presented by former secretary of state Colin Powell in February 2003, which
turned out to be based on a series of falsehoods.
Since the February 11 press conference in Baghdad, in which military briefers
admitted that the charge of Iranian official involvement in sending weapons to
Shi'ites in Iraq was "an inference", the administration has offered no further
claim of evidence supporting the charge.
The chief of the Shi'ite militia group that carried out a spectacular attack on
a joint provincial compound in Karbala in January and a Hezbollah operative who
was in liaison with the group were both captured on March 22. But the US
command had apparently learned nothing from interrogating them that would
indicate that the group had arrangements with the Quds Force - a component of
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps - for obtaining arms.
The news spokesman for the military command, Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner,
suggested to reporters in a July 2 briefing that the two prisoners had
implicated the Quds Force in connection with the planning of the January
attack. But the carefully chosen wording used by Bergner - that the two
prisoners "state that senior leadership within the Quds Force knew of and
supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack" - raises more questions
than it answers about Iran's relationship with the leadership of the Shi'ite
militia.
Despite that highly ambiguous language and the absence of any further detailed
information, the New York Times and Associated Press, among other media
outlets, published sensational stories saying Bergner had accused the Quds
Force of direct involvement in planning the January attack. Unnoticed by
reporters at the briefing was Bergner's failure to claim that either of the two
most important Shi'ite detainees provided evidence of any Iranian arms supply
to or training of the Shi'ite group in question.
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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