WASHINGTON - A US State
Department official's assertion in late December
that Iran had exerted a restraining influence on
Iraqi Shi'ite militia violence signaled a major
divergence of views between Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates over how to portray Iran's role in Iraq.
In an interview with the Washington Post
published on December 23, David Satterfield, a
senior advisor to Rice and coordinator for Iraq,
attributed to Iran a deliberate decision to help
calm the situation in Iraq rather than to inflame
it. Satterfield told the
Washington Post that the
decline in the number of attacks by Mahdi Army
militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr since August "has to
be attributed to an Iranian policy decision" and
suggested that the policy decision had been made
"at the most senior level".
Satterfield
did not say that the new Iranian policy line was
permanent, but he insisted that there had been
such a "consistent and sustained diminution in
certain kinds of violence by certain kinds of
folks" that it could not be explained solely on
the basis of internal factors in Iraq.
US
Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker also told the Post
that "the freeze on JAM [the Iraqi acronym for the
Mahdi Army] operations that began four months ago
would not exist without Iranian approval".
Those positive descriptions of the recent
Iranian role in Iraq came just after Gates had
refused to endorse such an assessment. At a press
conference on December 21, Gates was asked whether
he had "seen any additional or more current
information to suggest maybe Iran is playing a
more constructive role in trying to seal its
border from arms shipments and so on?"
He
replied, "No, not yet."
Significantly,
however, Gates also passed up the opportunity to
say that Iran was playing a "destabilizing role"
in Iraq. Instead he said simply that the "jury is
out" on the issue.
Gates mentioned the
success of military operations against the Mahdi
Army as well as the "ceasefire that has been put
in place" as factors in the decline in attacks and
said, "[W]e don't have a good feeling ... or any
confidence in terms of how to weigh these
different things."
These differing views
on whether Iran has been playing a positive role
in Iraq are the first clear evidence of a split
between Gates and Rice over how to deal with Iran.
Rice's State Department is now leaning toward
treating Iran as something other than an outright
enemy in regard to Iraq, whereas Gates is not
ready to soften the administration's position of
casting suspicion on Iranian intentions.
Gates was the last administration official
to denounce Iran in harsh terms over Iraq,
declaring in a speech at a Persian Gulf security
conference on December 8 in Bahrain, "Everywhere
you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment
instability and chaos, no matter the strategic
value or cost in the blood of innocents."
That rhetoric was almost certainly aimed,
however, at avoiding a stampede away from the
administration's efforts to pressure Iran on its
uranium enrichment program in the wake of the
stunning publication of the national intelligence
estimate's conclusion that Iran had abandoned
covert nuclear weapons work in 2003.
Gates
hinted in comments to reporters when he arrived in
Bahrain that he was much less certain of the
Iranian intention than his rhetoric at the
conference would have suggested. He mentioned the
call by Shi'ite Mahdi Army leader Muqtada for a
ceasefire as a key factor in the improved security
in the Baghdad area, along with the reduction in
attacks by armor-piercing rounds which had long
been blamed on Iran.
Gates appeared to
suggest that he did not rule out an Iranian
contribution to the improvement, saying it was
"too early to tell" whether the reduction in
militia attacks since August was due to successful
military efforts to disrupt Mahdi Army networks or
"what the Iranians may or may not be doing".
The State Department's decision to
acknowledge that Iran has contributed to the
reduction in violence in Iraq has no doubt been
influenced by Iranian political figures and
officials who work closely with the US Embassy to
oppose the Mahdi Army and who have been insisting
for months that Iran was helping to restrain
Muqtada.
Iraqi Islamic Council Chairman
Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, whose party is the key
Shi'ite political ally in the US effort to weaken
the Mahdi Army, met with Rice on November 30 and
told her that Iran plays a positive role in
establishing security in Iraq, according to the
Tehran Times. Al-Hakim was quoted as saying,
"There are documents proving that Iran has
supported Iraq."
Iraqi Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari, who had argued both publicly and
privately last autumn that Iran was behind
Muqtada's August 29 ceasefire, met with Rice two
days before the Satterfield and Crocker
interviews.
The implication of the advice
of the anti-Muqtada, pro-Iranian Iraqis is that
the US can use Iran to further weaken Muqtada and
the Mahdi Army.
The State Department
strategy recognizes that the Mahdi Army, which
poses the main threat to the George W Bush
administration's plan to maintain an indefinite US
military presence in the country, is too strong to
be suppressed by US or Iraqi military forces. And
it would seek an end to the accusations against
Iran regarding Iraqi Shi'ite militias that have
been issued regularly by US civilian and military
officials throughout 2007.
Crocker told
the Post he was prepared to make the inference of
a helpful Iranian role in the reduction of
operations by the Shi'ite militias when he meets
with Iran in the next round of talks.
The
Defense Department's view of Iranian policy is
influenced primarily by the perspective of the US
military command in Baghdad. General David
Petraeus also recognizes that there must be a
political strategy to weaken Muqtada's forces.
However, he and his staff have been
focusing more on the fact that the Mahdi Army is
continuing to attack US and Iraqi security forces
in the Shi'ite provinces of Qadisiyah, Babil and
Dhi Qar, as stated in the latest Pentagon report.
The military command continues to insists
that the "Shi'ite extremists and rogue elements"
of the Mahdi Army are "Iranian-backed".
That analysis clearly implies that the US
should not back away from the accusations of
Iranian export of weapons to and manipulation of
Shi'ite militias that the US command has been
making for nearly a year.
Given Bush's
penchant for letting agencies with conflicting
policies work things out themselves rather than
impose a policy decision, the State and Defense
Departments may continue to carry out their own
policy lines on the subject of Iran's role in Iraq
until a new development resolves the differences.
That will introduce another layer of
contradictions into an extraordinarily murky
policy toward the Iran-Iraq complex of issues.
Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy. 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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