Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi
oil By M K Bhadrakumar
In the highly competitive world of
international politics, nation states very rarely
miss an opportunity to crow about success stories.
The opportunity comes rare, mostly by default, and
seldom enduring. By any standards of showmanship,
therefore, Tehran has set a new benchmark of
reticence.
By all accounts, Iran played a
decisive role in hammering out the peace deal
among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week
of human killing on the Tigris River ended on
Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they
must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps
silent about its role.
The deal was
brokered after negotiations in the holy city of
Qom in Iran involving the two Shi'ite factions -
the Da'wa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi
Council (SIIC) - which have been locked
in
conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army in southern Iraq. It appears that one
of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian
security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani,
commander of the Quds Force of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally
mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations.
Suleimani is in charge of the IRGC's operations
abroad.
US military commanders routinely
blame the Quds for all their woes in Iraq. The
fact that the representatives of Da'wa and SIIC
secretly traveled to Qom under the very nose of
American and British intelligence and sought Quds
mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge
political message. Iran signals that security
considerations rather than politics or religion
prevailed.
But the politics of the deal
are all too apparent. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally
supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army,
was not in the loop about the goings-on. As for US
President George W Bush, he had just spoken
praising Maliki for waging a "historic and
decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he
said was "a defining moment" in the history of a
"free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very
foolish.
But why isn't Tehran in any hurry
to claim victory? After all, rubbishing the Bush
presidency has been the stuff of Iranian rhetoric.
Perhaps, Iranians had shut down over Nauroz new
year festivities. They do take the joyful advent
of spring very seriously. Or maybe, Suleimani's
involvement makes the subject a no-go area for
public discussion. Third, Iranians should know
better than anyone that the intra-Shi'ite
rivalries are far too deep-rooted to lend
themselves to an amicable settlement in a day's
negotiations.
The turf war in the Iraqi
Shi'ite regions has several templates. Iraq's
future as a unitary state; the parameters of
acceptable federalism, if any; attitude towards
the US; control of oil wealth; overvaulting
political ambitions - all these are intertwined
features of a complex matrix. Therefore, the
fragility of the newfound peace is all too
apparent. Tehran will be justified in estimating
that it is prudent to wait and watch whether peace
gains traction in the critical weeks ahead.
But the most important Iranian calculation
would be not to provoke the Americans
unnecessarily by rubbing in the true import of
what happened. Tehran would be gratified that in
any case it has made the point that it possesses
awesome influence within Iraq. Anyone who knows
today's anarchic Iraq would realize that
triggering a new spiral of violence in that
country may not require much ingenuity, muscle
power or political clout.
But to be able
to summarily cry halt to cascading violence, and
to achieve that precisely in about 48 hours, well,
that's an altogether impressive capability in
political terms. In this case, the Iranians have
managed it with felicitous ease, as if they were
just turning off a well-lubricated tap. That
requires great command over the killing fields of
Iraq, the native warriors, and the sheer ability
to calibrate the flow of events and micromanage
attitudes.
Conceivably, Tehran would have
decided with its accumulated centuries-old Persian
wisdom that certain things in life are always best
left unspoken, especially stunning successes.
Besides, it is far more productive to leave
Washington to contemplate over happenings and draw
the unavoidable conclusion that if it musters the
courage to make that existential choice, Iran can
be an immensely valuable factor of stability for
Iraq.
But it wasn't a matter of political
symbolism, either. Tangible issues are involved.
Questions of vital national interests. Clearly,
Tehran had genuine concerns over the developing
situation in southern Iraq close to its border.
Tehran viewed the flare-up involving the Shi'ite
factions with great disquiet. This was apparent
from the speech by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who
led the prayer sermon in Tehran on Friday. He
bemoaned, "Iraq is currently entangled in many
problems." But Jannati explicitly didn't take
sides between the warring factions.
On the
one hand, he advised the Mahdi Army ("Iraqi
popular armed forces") and Maliki ("Iraqi popular
government") to hold talks. But he also advised
the "popular armed forces present in Basra" (read
Badr Organization, Da'wa, the smaller Fadhila
party, etc.) to intervene with the "Iraqi popular
government". Third, Jannati also called on Maliki
to "heed the [popular] forces' views and solve
problems eventually in a way that would be to the
interest of all."
Curiously, he criticized
the silence on the part of the Muslim world -
"especially the Organization of the Islamic
Conference" (OIC) - over the "enormous brutality
and oppression in Iraq". He said, "It is not clear
why Muslim states, especially the OIC, do not show
any reaction against so much injustice and
oppression in Iraq, while such measures could be
easily prevented through unity and solidarity."
The remark contained a barely disguised barb aimed
at Saudi Arabia for hobnobbing with the US. (US
Vice President Dick Cheney had visited Riyadh and
Baghdad barely one week before Maliki launched the
offensive in Basra.)
Yet, all in all,
Jannati politely refrained from expressing Iran's
complete disapproval of the conduct of Maliki in
carrying out the offensive as part of the US game
plan to establish control of Basra, which is the
principal artery for American oil majors to
evacuate Iraqi oil. The Sadrists oppose the
current plans for opening up the nationalized
Iraqi oil industry to foreign exploitation.
However, the day after Jannati spoke,
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali
Hosseini came down hard on the Maliki government.
He deplored the use of American and British air
power against the Sadrist militia - "waves of
US-UK air raids on civilians". He called on the
Shi'ite factions to end the fighting as "continued
fighting only serves the interests of the
occupiers ... and give pretexts to occupiers to
continue their illegitimate presence" in Iraq.
Most important, he called for negotiations
- which had already commenced in Qom by that time
- "in a friendly and goodwill atmosphere". As for
the Maliki government, Hosseini expressed the hope
it would "exercise wisdom, cooperation, mutual
understanding, patience, calm and contacts with
Iraqi political leaders to overcome the current
crisis period". Plainly put, Hosseini asked Maliki
not to be dumb enough to sub-serve US interests
and to realize where his own political interests
lay. He pointedly drew a line of distinction
between Maliki and the powerful Iraqi Shi'ite
leadership.
The Iranian accounts of the
fighting have shown a distinct sympathy for the
Sadrist militia, highlighting that the Mahdi Army
was being "unfairly singled out" for attack by
government forces; that the Sadrists' quarrel with
Maliki was that he "refused to set a deadline for
US and coalition troops to leave"; that US troops
were providing the government forces with
"intelligence, surveillance and occasional air
strikes and raids"; and that Iraqi troops were
refusing to obey orders to fight the Sadrist
militia. The Iranian official news agency quoted
Muqtada as comparing Maliki to Saddam Hussein.
"Under Saddam's rule, we complained about how the
government distanced itself from the people and
operated under dictatorial terms. Now the
government is also dealing with people on such
terms," he was quoted as saying.
Out of
the dramatic developments of the past week,
several questions arise, the principal being that
the Bush administration's triumphalism over the
so-called Iraq "surge" strategy has become
irredeemably farcical, and, two, US doublespeak
has become badly exposed. What stands out is that
Washington promoted the latest round of violence
in Basra, whereas Iran cried halt to it. The
awesome influence of Tehran has become all too
apparent. How does Bush come to terms with it?
What has happened is essentially that Iran
has frustrated the joint US-British objective of
gaining control of Basra, without which the
strategy of establishing control over the fabulous
oil fields of southern Iraq will not work. Control
of Basra is a pre-requisite before American oil
majors make their multi-billion investments to
kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq.
Iraq's Southern Oil Company is headquartered in
Basra. Highly strategic installations are
concentrated in the region, such as pipeline
networks, pumping stations, refineries and loading
terminals. The American oil majors will insist on
fastening these installations.
The game
plan for control of Basra now needs to be
reworked. The idea was to take Basra in hand now
so that the Sadrists would be thwarted from taking
over the local administration in elections in
October - in other words, to ensure the political
underpinning for Basra. All indications are that
the Sadrists are riding a huge wave of popular
support. They have caught the imagination of the
poor, downtrodden, dispossessed masses in the
majority Shi'ite community. They are hard to
replace in democratic elections. The sense of
frustration in Washington and London must be very
deep that Basra is not yet fastened. Time is
running out for Bush to make sure that his
successor in the White House inherits an
irreversible process in the US's Iraq policy.
Indeed, in his first comments, British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown initially refused to
say on Tuesday whether the government's plans to
cut the number of troops in Iraq to 2,500 from
4,000 were on course. He simply said British
troops were facing "difficulties" in Basra. This
was followed by Defense Secretary Des Browne
saying that return of 2,500 troops from southern
Iraq this spring had been placed on hold
indefinitely.
Bush hasn't yet spoken. US
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put on a brave
face, saying first-hand information was limited,
but based on that, "they [Iraqi troops] seem to
have done a pretty good job". To be sure, Cheney
must be furious that Tehran torpedoed the entire
US strategy for Big Oil. He has had a hard time
shepherding the pro-West Arab regimes in the
region, especially Saudi Arabia, up to this point.
Besides, nothing infuriates Cheney more
than when US oil interests are hit. Thus, the most
critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran
standoff may have just begun. Last week, five
former US secretaries of state who served in
Democratic and Republican administrations - Henry
Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher,
Madeline Albright and Colin Powell - sat at a
round-table discussion in Athens and reached a
consensus to urge the next US administration to
open a line of dialogue with Iran.
M K
Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat
in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years,
with postings including India's ambassador to
Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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