"Washington has lost a
valuable opportunity to nurture and support a key
counterweight to Iranian influence among Shi'ites
in the Arab world," lament Danielle Pletka and
Gary Schmitt of the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute in an op-ed for the
Washington Post. They subsequently call on the
Barack Obama administration to bulk up its already
grossly overloaded staff at the gigantic US
embassy in Baghdad. But in these few words, the
two writers fleshed out a more fundamental concern
for hawkish
pundits in the Middle East:
the fear of a "Shia Crescent" of Iranian-backed
regimes in Bagdad, Beirut, and Damascus linking
the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in
Iraq in ways it never could have with Saddam
Hussein in power, the country will be more able to
contest US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
The grim irony, notes Ted Galen Carpenter, is that
by invading Iraq in 2003, "the United States has
paid a terrible cost - some $850 billion and more
than 4,400 dead American soldiers - to make Iran
the most influential power in Iraq". Few, if any,
of the war's architects and boosters will now
concede this, even as they raise alarm over Iran's
influence in Iraq.
Looking
East But where today's neo-conservatives
see an encroaching Iranian Islamist threat in the
Middle East, an older guard has reached back to
the not-so-distant Cold War past for parallels.
Notably, many leading neo-conservative lights hold
out hope that Iraq can be turned into an Arabian
version of post-war South Korea and Japan.
Prominent neo-conservatives draw heavily
on the memory of America's seizure of Japanese
hegemony in Asia after 1945. The United States
worked steadfastly with post-war Japanese and
South Korean governments to build the two
countries up as buffers to Soviet and Chinese
influence during the Cold War - efforts that were,
by Washington's standards at least, quite
successful. Despite challenges from a resurgent
China, the Pacific Ocean was (and still is) an
American lake.
In a 2010 op-ed for the New
York Times, leading Iraq war agitator Paul
Wolfowitz invoked this history explicitly,
treading breezily past US support for
authoritarian South Korean regimes. "The United
States stuck with South Korea even though the
country was then ruled by a dictator and the
prospects for its war-devastated economy looked
dim," he wrote. Wolfowitz noted that Iraq's
struggling democracy and central location were not
unlike South Korea's during the Cold War.
However unseemly, there is some truth to
Wolfowitz's recollection. It may be impossible to
imagine a fifth column of South Korean agitators
helping Pyongyang take over Seoul today, but
during the Cold War this was a real concern for
the United States. So Washington chose to prop up
feudalistic landlords and former Japanese
collaborators as Seoul's ruling class, stiffening
South Korea's sinews against the appeal of the
North Korean model with a glut of military and
economic support. Today, Japan and South Korea
remain firmly within the US fold.
Moreover, these alliances continue despite
the brutal wars that spawned them. US-led forces
laid waste to the Korean peninsula with saturation
bombing in the 1950s, but Washington could always
count thereafter on "our men in Seoul". Japan is
an even more extreme case. After several years of
firebombing and blockading the country, the United
States annihilated two of the Japan's cities with
nuclear weapons. And yet Japan plays host to US
troops even today.
Those who fear that the
United States "lost Iraq" because Barack Obama
went through with the US withdrawal schedule
negotiated by President George W Bush are clearly
thinking about longer-term issues of American
hegemony (see Mitt Romney's foreign policy white
paper and list of advisers for good examples of
this kind of thinking). It's simple logic, really:
everything with Iraq keeps coming back to the
dual-track policy of containment and rollback the
United States has pursued against Iran. Iraq is a
vital piece of this strategy; Juan Cole's map of
American bases around Iran is unimpeachable
evidence of this.
American
neo-conservatives may hope that a US-buttressed
military-political establishment in Iraq could
form a bulwark against a potential "Shia Crescent"
led by Iran, just as South Korea and Japan helped
stem the red tide spreading through East Asia
during the Cold War. They may even have some
reason to hope that Iraqis will overlook their
resentment over the immensely destructive US war
on the country.
Wishful
thinking Just as in South Korea and Japan,
there are Iraqis who see the United States as a
partner - or at least as a cash cow that can be
milked by exploiting US jitters about Iran. In
contrast to most Iraqi politicians, who have been
almost uniformly opposed to an ongoing US military
presence in Iraq, there are Iraqi military
officers who wanted to maintain ties with the US
military because they doubted their own forces
could keep the peace.
There are always
people within a country's security establishment
who can be made into agents of American influence.
But in Iraq, the United States is confronting a
much less homogeneous society than in South Korea
or Japan, and it faces a much better equipped
rival for hegemonic influence in Iran. As
Washington's influence in Baghdad recedes,
Tehran's hidden hands in Iraq are coming to the
fore.
It's not that Iran doesn't have its
own baggage to contend with in Iraq as it vies
with the United States for influence - Iran wasn't
winning Iraqi hearts and minds, after all, when
the two countries were busy destroying each other
in the 1980s. But a key distinction for Iraqis
between that war and the US invasion was that the
Iran-Iraq War was launched by their own Saddam
Hussein, driving thousands of Iraqi Shi'ite
refugees into Iran by the end of the 1980s. By all
appearances, America's war on Iraq was purely
voluntary and imposed on Iraqis from the outside.
Moreover, Iran has from at least 1982 on been
working to build up its own agents of influence in
Iraq's security and religious establishments.
Most importantly, an Iraqi alignment with
Iran is the result not only of two decades of
Iranian intrigue, but also of two decades of US
sanctions, war, and occupation. Especially since
the US occupation, Iraqis have viewed Iranian
machinations in Iraq - and even Iran's quiet
participation in Iraq's horrific sectarian
violence - as just another symptom of a plague
brought by the US invasion.
A lack of
options Suppose Obama came into office
determined to overturn the withdrawal agreement
and keep US troops in Iraq. What tools would he
have to force Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
to reverse himself in the face of an angry Iraqi
public and threats by some Shi'ite groups to take
up their arms again if the US military presence
continued? What could Obama do to "reclaim the
partnership with Maliki", as Danielle Pletka and
Gary Schmitt ask?
The answer is
surprisingly little, mainly because the US-Iraqi
relationship was never a partnership to begin
with. It was, from the start, an occupation. The
US presence in Iraq - where it tried not just to
police the country but at times even had
Provincial Reconstruction Teams stand in for civil
society - meant that Maliki had little agency of
his own. Additionally, holdouts like the Sadrists,
Sunni tribal militias, and the Badr Brigades had
little reason to lay down their arms; it was fight
or collaborate, and they chose to fight.
But ever since the United States enabled
Maliki to build his own security forces, electoral
bloc, and bureaucracy - and thus achieve an
understanding with members of the "insurgency" -
he has found other people he can depend on to
bolster his rule. He doesn't need US forces to
intimidate, capture, or kill people for him; his
own people are quite capable of doing that.
Far from being run out of the country
after detaining hundreds of former Ba'athist
officials this winter, Maliki has apparently
managed to use such heavy-handed actions to his
advantage. As paper by the neo-conservative
Institute for the Study of War recently noted, "It
is clear that Maliki has come out as the winner .
. . He has made it more difficult for his Shi'ite
rivals to dissent while simultaneously confining
his Sunni opponents in a position suitable for
exerting pressure and exploiting divisions within
their ranks." For all of the rampant disunity and
criminality of the Iraqi government, its
leadership has been able to achieve ever-greater
independence from its US backers.
Most
importantly, Iraq has little reason to sully an
important relationship with its Iranian neighbor
just to please Washington. Moreover, it's uneasy
about having such a long border with a regime
change target and has no wish to get involved with
the nuclear question that so preoccupies Israel
and the United States. "Iraqis," Adil Shamoo
notes, "can tell the difference between mutually
beneficial programs and those that create the
impression that the US is powerful and can do what
it wants in Iraq".
Out of
cards Even "our man in Iraq" Ahmed Chalabi
- who swept back into the country by way of
Langley, Virginia after a decade of agitating for
US-led regime change in exile - wanted the United
States out of Iraq because he thought it would be
political suicide to keep associating with the
country that paid his organization $335,000 a
month during the first year of the occupation.
If the United States could not secure
gratitude from a man who spent over a decade
working with the CIA to overthrow Saddam Hussein,
then from whom in Iraq can it call in any favors?
Short of sectarian violence reaching the level it
did in 2005, gratitude is the only thing that
would compel Iraqi officials to reverse course,
let US troops back in, and focus their foreign
policy efforts on a dual-track policy of rollback
and containment against Iran.
Unfortunately for neo-conservatives, Iraq
is no South Korea or Japan, and "gratitude" seems
to be in short supply.
Paul
Mutter is a fellow at Truthout.org, as well as
a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus,
Mondoweiss, The Arabist, and Salon. He is
currently on leave from NYU's graduate program in
journalism and international affairs.
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