Freed Iranians highlight US-Iraq conflict
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The release on Friday of five Iranians held by the United States
military in Iraq for two-and-a-half years highlights the long-simmering
conflict between the US and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the
role of its Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) there.
For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W Bush administration
before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington
steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilize the
Iraqi regime.
But high-ranking Shi'ite and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki had never shared the US view of
the IRGC or of the Iranian role. They have acted on the premise that Iran is
interested in ensuring that a friendly Shi'ite regime would remain in power.
United States State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed concern that the
five Iranian detainees being released were "associated with" the Quds Force of
the IRGC and could endanger US troops in Iraq.
The idea that the Quds Force was fighting a "proxy war" against US and Iraqi
troops was the justification for the Bush administration's decision in late
2006 to target any Iranian found in Iraq who could plausibly be linked to the
IRGC.
Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007
raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the
Kurdistan capital of Irbil. The US military, hinting that it actually had
little information about the Iranians seized, said they were "suspected of
being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces".
Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the US officials to
understand that the Iranians seized in Irbil were not part of a "clandestine
network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to
Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that
institution is responsible for controlling Iran's borders.
After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the US military from a hotel in the
Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a US military spokesman made the
spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all
Iranian operations inside Iraq.
Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC affiliation, but Jalal Talabani,
the Kurdish president of Iraq, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian
official of the neighboring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a "commercial
mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the
government of Kurdistan".
Although Farhadi had indeed been a military commander at one time, the Kurds
pointed out that he was now carrying out only civilian functions.
Iraqi officials also rejected the idea that the IRGC's Quds Force itself was
hostile to the Iraqi regime. They had personal relationships with the Quds
Force commander, Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, and they acknowledged that
he had ties with all the Shi'ite factions in Iraq.
They knew that Iran had trained officers of Shi'ite nationalist cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and provided some financial support to Muqtada. But they
also believed that the purpose of that relationship was to exert influence on
Sadr in the interest of peace and stability.
After Muqtada declared a unilateral ceasefire in late August 2007, the Maliki
regime, including Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, argued publicly and
privately to Bush administration officials that Iran had used its influence on
Sadr to get him to agree to such a ceasefire. They used the argument to urge
the Bush administration to release the Iranian detainees.
Even the Bush administration itself was divided sharply over the Iraqi
government argument that Iranian influence on Sadr was benign. The State
Department was inclined to accept the Iraqi argument, and privately urged the
release of the five in fall 2007.
In December 2007 the State Department's coordinator on Iraq, David Satterfield,
went so far as to agree publicly that the Sadr ceasefire "had to be attributed
to an Iranian policy decision".
But General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, strongly resisted
that conclusion, insisting that it was US military operations against Muqtada's
Mahdi Army that had brought about the ceasefire. The internal debate was
resolved in favor of Petraeus, and the five Iranian detainees were not
released.
A series of events in 2008, however, showed that the Iraqi regime was much more
comfortable relying on personal relationships with the Quds Force than on US
military might to deal with the problem of the Mahdi Army.
First, Maliki refused in March to allow US ground forces to participate in an
operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Then, only a few days into the
battle, the government turned to the Iranian Quds Force commander, General
Qassem Suleimani, to lean on Muqtada and broker a ceasefire in Basrah only a
few days into a major battle there.
Iraqi President Talabani met with Suleimani Mar. 28-29, 2008 at an Iran-Iraq
border crossing and asked him to stop the fighting in Basra. Suleimani
intervened to bring about a ceasefire within 24 hours, according to a report by
McClatchy Newspapers April 28, 2008.
And in a second meeting a few days later, revealed by Scott Peterson of the
Christian Science Monitor on May 14, 2008, Suleimani called Sadr the biggest
threat to peace in Iraq. The Quds Force commander vowed to support the Maliki
regime and referred to "common goals with the United States".
In a gesture to Washington, Suleimani asked Talabani to tell Petraeus that his
portfolio included not only Iraq but Gaza and Lebanon, and that he was willing
to send a team to Baghdad to "discuss any issue" with the US.
Petraeus refused to talk with Suleimani, according to Peterson's account,
supposedly on the ground that his offer was part of an Iranian bid to become an
"indispensable power broker" in Iraq and thus establish Iranian influence
there.
But Petraeus understood that Suleimani had indeed achieved just such a position
of power in Iraq as arbiter of conflict among Shi'ite factions. "The level of
their participation, centrality of their role, should give everyone pause,"
Petraeus told journalist and author Linda Robinson. "The degree to which they
have their hands on so many lines was revealed very starkly during this
episode.”
In late April, Petraeus tried to get the Maliki regime to endorse a document
that detailed Iranian efforts to "foment instability" in Iraq. But instead an
Iraqi government delegation returned from Iran in early May saying they had
seen evidence disproving the US charges.
Then, Maliki again used Suleimani to reach an agreement with Muqtada which
ended a major military campaign in Sadr City just as the United States was
about to launch a big ground operation there but also allowed government troops
to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.
Within weeks, the power of the Mahdi Army had already begun to wane visibly.
Militia members in Sadr City were no longer showing up to collect paychecks and
the Iraqi army had taken over the Mahdi Army headquarters in one neighborhood.
The Maliki regime saw that Suleimani had made good on his word. Maliki then
began calling for the withdrawal of all US troops by the end of 2010. He had
opted to depend on Iranian influence rather than US protection.
Nevertheless, the US military has continued to maintain the pretense that it is
pushing back Iranian influence in Iraq. The successor to Petraeus, General Ray
Odierno, continues to denounce Iran periodically for aiding Shi'ite insurgents.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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