Page 2 of 4 A real success story in the
US's Iraq: Iran By Peter Galbraith
Saddam. Two weeks later, the
Shi'ites in southern Iraq did just that. When
Saddam's Republican Guards moved south to crush
the rebellion, Bush went fishing and no help was
given. Only Iran showed sympathy. Hundreds of
thousands died, and no Iraqi Shi'ite I know thinks
this failure of US support was anything but
intentional.
In assessing the loyalty of
the Iraqi Shi'ites before the war, the war's
architects often stressed how Iraqi Shi'ite
conscripts fought
loyally for Iraq in the
Iran-Iraq War. They never mentioned the 1991
betrayal. This was understandable: at the end of
the 1991 war, Wolfowitz was the No 3 man at the
Pentagon, current Vice President Dick Cheney was
the defense secretary, and, of course, George W
Bush's father was the president.
Iran and
its Iraqi allies control, respectively, the Middle
East's third- and second-largest oil reserves.
Iran's influence now extends to the borders of the
Saudi province that holds the world's largest oil
reserves. Bush has responded to these strategic
changes wrought by his own policies by strongly
supporting a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and
by arming and training the most pro-Iranian
elements in the Iraqi military and police.
Beginning with his 2002 State of the Union
speech, Bush has articulated two main US goals for
Iran: (1) the replacement of Iran's theocratic
regime with a liberal democracy, and (2)
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Since events in Iraq took a bad turn, he has added
a third objective: gaining Iranian cooperation in
Iraq.
The Bush administration's track
record is not impressive. The prospects for
liberal democracy in Iran took a severe blow when
reform-minded president Mohammad Khatami was
replaced by the hardline - and somewhat erratic -
Mahmud Ahmadinejad in August 2005. (Khatami had
won two landslide elections that were a vote to
soften the ruling theocracy; he was then prevented
by the conservative clerics from accomplishing
much.)
At the time Bush first proclaimed
his intention to keep nuclear weapons out of
Iranian hands, Iran had no means of making fissile
material. Since then, however, Iran has defied the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the
United Nations Security Council to assemble and
use the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium. In
Iraq, the Bush administration accuses Iran of
supplying particularly potent roadside bombs to
Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents.
To
coerce Iran into ceasing its uranium-enrichment
program, the Bush administration has relied on UN
sanctions, the efforts of a European negotiating
team, and stern presidential warnings. The
mismanaged Iraq war has undercut all these
efforts. After seeing the US go to the UN with
allegedly irrefutable evidence that Iraq possessed
chemical and biological weapons and had a covert
nuclear program, foreign governments and publics
are understandably skeptical about the veracity of
Bush administration statements on Iran. The Iraq
experience makes many countries reluctant to
support meaningful sanctions not only because they
doubt administration statements but because they
are afraid Bush will interpret any Security
Council resolution condemning Iran as an
authorization for war.
With so much of the
US military tied up in Iraq, the Iranians do not
believe the US has the resources to attack them
and then deal with the consequences. They know
that a US attack on Iran would have little support
in the US - it is doubtful that Congress would
authorize it - and none internationally. Not even
the British would go along with a military strike
on Iran. Bush's warnings count for little with
Tehran because he now has a long record of tough
language unmatched by action. As long as the
Iranians believe the US has no military option,
they have limited incentives to reach an
agreement, especially with the Europeans.
The administration's efforts to change
Iran's regime have been feeble or feckless. Bush's
freedom rhetoric is supported by Radio Farda, a
US-sponsored Persian-language radio station, and a
US$75 million appropriation to finance Iranian
opposition activities including satellite
broadcasts by Los Angeles-based exiles. If only
regime change were so easily accomplished!
The identity of Iranian recipients of US
funding is secret, but the administration's
neo-conservative allies have loudly promoted US
military and financial support for Iranian
opposition groups as diverse as the son of the
late shah, Iranian Kurdish separatists, and the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which is on the US State
Department's list of terrorist organizations.
Some of the Los Angeles exiles now being
funded are associated with the son of the shah,
but it is unlikely that either the MEK or the
Kurdish separatists would receive any of the $75
million. US secrecy - and that the administration
treats the MEK differently from other terrorist
organizations - has roused Iranian suspicions that
the US is supporting these groups either through
the democracy program or a separate covert action.
None of these groups is a plausible agent
for regime change. The shah's son represents a
discredited monarchy and corrupt family. Iranian
Kurdistan is seething with discontent, and Iranian
security forces have suppressed large anti-regime
demonstrations there. Kurdish nationalism on the
margins of Iran, however, does not weaken the
Iranian regime at the center. While the US State
Department has placed the Kurdish Workers' Party
(PKK - a Kurdish rebel movement in Turkey) - on
its list of terrorist organizations, Pejak, the
PKK's Iranian branch, is not on the list and its
leaders even visit the US.
The MEK is one
of the oldest - and nastiest - of the Iranian
opposition groups. After originally supporting the
Iranian revolution in 1979, the MEK broke with
Khomeini and relocated to Iraq in the early stages
of the Iran-Iraq War. It was so closely connected
to Saddam that MEK fighters not only assisted the
Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq War but also helped Saddam
put down the 1991 Kurdish uprising. While claiming
to be democratic and pro-Western, the MEK closely
resembles a cult.
In April 2003, when I
visited Camp Ashraf, its main base northeast of
Baghdad, I found robotlike hero worship of the
MEK's leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi; the
fighters I met parroted a revolutionary party
line, and there were transparently crude efforts
at propaganda. To emphasize it being a modern
organization as distinct from the Tehran
theocrats, the MEK appointed a woman as Camp
Ashraf's nominal commander and maintained a
women's tank battalion. The commander was clearly
not in command and the female mechanics supposedly
working on tank engines all had spotless uniforms.
Both the US State Department and Iran view
the MEK as a terrorist group. The US government,
however, does not always act as if the MEK were
one. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US
military dropped a single bomb on Camp Ashraf. It
struck the women's barracks at a time of day when
the soldiers were not there. When I visited two
weeks later with an American Broadcasting Co
camera crew, we filmed the MEK bringing a
scavenged Iraqi tank into their base. US forces
drove in and out of Camp Ashraf, making no effort
to detain the supposed terrorists or to stop them
from collecting Iraqi heavy weapons.
Since
Iran had its agents in Iraq from the time Saddam
fell (and may have been doing its own scavenging
of weapons), one can
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