Page 1 of
4 A real success story in the US's
Iraq: Iran By Peter Galbraith
(This essay appears in the October 11
issue of the New York Review
of Books and is posted with the
permission of the editors of that magazine.)
In his continuing effort to bolster
support for the Iraq war, US President George W
Bush traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to
speak to the annual convention of the American
Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian
threat should the United States
withdraw from Iraq. Said the
president, "For all those who ask whether the
fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where
militia groups backed by Iran control large parts
of the country."
On the same day, in the
southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a
militia loyal to radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, battled government security forces around
the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shi'ite Islam's
holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the
city and 51 died.
The United States did
not directly intervene, but US jets flew overhead
in support of the government security forces. As
elsewhere in the south, those Iraqi forces are
dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia
founded, trained, armed and financed by Iran. When
US forces ousted Saddam Hussein's regime from the
south in April 2003, the Badr Organization
infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the
Bush administration's failure to plan for security
and governance in post-invasion Iraq.
In
the months that followed, the US-run Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) appointed Badr
Organization leaders to key positions in Iraq's
US-created army and police. At the same time, L
Paul Bremer's CPA appointed party officials from
the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI) to be governors and serve on governorate
councils throughout southern Iraq. The SCIRI,
recently renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council
(SIIC), was founded at ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini's direction in Tehran in 1982. The Badr
Organization is the militia associated with SCIRI.
In the January 2005 elections, the SCIRI
became the most important component of Iraq's
ruling Shi'ite coalition. In exchange for not
taking the prime minister's slot, the SCIRI won
the right to name key ministers, including the
minister of the interior. From that ministry, the
SCIRI placed Badr militiamen throughout Iraq's
national police.
In short, Bush had from
the first facilitated the very event he warned
would be a disastrous consequence of a US
withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part
of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. And
while Bush contrasts the promise of democracy in
Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now
substantially more personal freedom in Iran than
in southern Iraq.
Iran's role in Iraq is
pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its
permanent constitution in 2005, the US ambassador
energetically engaged in all parts of the process.
But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador
intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not
like. As it happened, both the Americans and the
Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's central
government.
While the Bush administration
clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people,
Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian
Iraqis it supported - by then established as the
government of Iraq - as much power as possible.
(Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the US nor
Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the
US and Iran want to see the central government
strengthened.)
Since 2005, Iraq's
Shi'ite-led government has concluded numerous
economic, political and military agreements with
Iran. The most important would link the two
countries' strategic oil reserves by building a
pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another
commits Iran to providing extensive military
assistance to the Iraqi government.
According to a senior official in Iraq's
Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000
barrels of Iraq's daily oil exports through Iran,
a figure that approaches 10% of Iraq's production.
Iran has yet to provide the military support it
promised to the Iraqi Army. With the US supplying
160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars
to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran
has no reason to invest its own resources.
Of all the unintended consequences of the
Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most
far-reaching. In establishing the border between
the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639,
the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the
boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and
Shi'ite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal
warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that
line but could not. (At the time, the
administration of US president Ronald Reagan
supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it
feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq
dominated by Iran's allies.)
The 2003 US
invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini's army
could not. Today, the Shi'ite-controlled lands
extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shi'ite
majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by
these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia's
Eastern Province, which is home to most of the
kingdom's Shi'ites. (They may even be a majority
in the province, but this is unknown as Saudi
Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The US
Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in
Bahrain, while most of Saudi Arabia's oil is under
the Eastern Province.
America's Iraq
quagmire has given new life to Iran's Syrian ally,
Bashir al-Assad. In 2003, the Syrian Ba'athist
regime seemed an anachronism unable to survive the
region's political and economic changes. Today,
Assad appears firmly in control, having even
recovered from the opprobrium of seemingly having
his regime caught red-handed in the assassination
of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. In
Lebanon, Hezbollah enjoys greatly enhanced stature
for having held off the Israelis in the 2006 war.
As Hezbollah's sponsor and source of arms, Iran
now has an influence both in the Levant and in the
Arab-Israeli conflict that it never before had.
The scale of the US miscalculation is
striking. Before the Iraq war began, its
neo-conservative architects argued that conferring
power on Iraq's Shi'ites would serve to undermine
Iran because Iraq's Shi'ites, controlling the
faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of
then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be
"an independent source of authority for the
Shi'ite religion emerging in a country that is
democratic and pro-Western". Further, they argued,
Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi
Shi'ites are Arabs and the Iranian Shi'ites
Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had
no connection to reality.
Iran's bond with
the Iraqi Shi'ites goes far beyond the support
Iran gave Shi'ite leaders in their struggle with
Saddam. Decades of oppression have made their
religious identity more important to Iraqi
Shi'ites than their Arab ethnic identity. (Also,
many Iraqi Shi'ites have Turkoman, Persian or
Kurdish ancestors.) While Sunnis identify with the
Arab world, Iraqi Shi'ites identify with the
Shi'ite world, and for many this means Iran.
There is also the legacy of February 15,
1991, when US president George H W Bush called on
the Iraqi people to rise up against
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
