Iran Threat? Nobody Told the Iraqis…

The frontline of Washington’s new aggressive posture towards Iran, of course, is in Iraq. Bush has issued what Juan Cole has archly described as a ‘fatwa’ allowing U.S. troops to kill Iranian operatives, and warns that this provocative position could touch of a much wider and more tragic conflict. Cole also highlights what I think is the most important reality that is largely overlooked in U.S. media discussions over “Iranian meddling” in Iraq — the fact that Iran’s presence and influence in Iran is actually welcomed by the political leaders democratically elected by the majority of Iraqis. Both the Shiite and Kurdish leadership are longtime friends of Tehran, having cooperated actively against Saddam Hussein.

Bush loves to sell this fiction that “Iraqis voted for a government of national unity and now Iran and others are trying to subvert that.” That’s just a crock. Iraqis did not vote for “national unity” in the two democratic elections held since Saddam fell; they voted overwhelmingly by sect and ethnic group for parties committed to advancing sectarian and ethnic agendas, even if they made a rhetorical nod to the principle of national unity. (The basic idea of hegemony in politics is that you present your own sectional interests as the national interest — you’d think oligarchic Republicans would know that better than most!) So while U.S. politicians and pundits begin alleging that Prime Minister Maliki is committed to Shiite power, as if this was a hidden agenda, they’re ignoring the obvious: It’s not a hidden agenda at all; Shiite power was the very basis of his electoral coalition. And it governs in alliance principally with the Kurdish bloc, whose program is essentially Kurdish independence. Neither is particular sympathetic to Sunni concerns, having suffered under the Sunni elite in Saddam’s time. The Shiites insist on having a share of power in Baghdad commensurate with their demographic majority, and the Kurds don’t much care what’s going on in Baghdad as long as it doesn’t impinge on their de facto sovereignty in the north — but they are at odds with the Sunnis over the fate of disputed cities, most notably Kirkuk.

From the very outset, this democratically elected government was an obstacle to the realization of U.S. goals in Iraq, because it didn’t necessarily share them. Not in terms of the desired domestic political arrangements for a post-Saddam Iraq; not in terms of U.S. policy in the Middle East more widely; and certainly not on Iran. And with Iran now identified as the premier strategic threat, the U.S. objectives in the region had to be recallibrated, and suddenly the old Arab autocracies that were to be swept away in the “creative chaos” of the U.S. democratic revolution in the Middle East were now, instead, to be rehabilitated as the key “moderates” holding the line against the “extremism” represented by Iran and other Islamist elements. Those Arab autocracies are, of course, quite hostile to the Shiite-Kurdish regime in Baghdad, which is why they’ve been so non-commital in response to Condi’s latest “looking busy” tour of the region. Instead, they’re warning that they could send money, weapons and even troops to help the Sunnis.

Some of those regimes have urged the U.S. to do more to combat Iranian influence in Iraq, which the U.S. has lately shown a great eagerness to do. But, in case anybody failed to notice, Iraq’s government is not complaining about “Iranian meddling” in Iraq, but they are complaining about U.S. efforts to hound Iranian operatives there. Key Shiite and Kurdish leaders have bluntly criticized the U.S. for arresting Iranian diplomats in Erbil last week, and have warned it against doing so again. The Shiites, of course, have a long history of intimate ties with Tehran, but even the key Kurdish parties have a long history of close cooperation with Iran. And, as my colleague Andrew Butters notes, the looming conflict with the U.S. over Kirkuk (Washington may postpone a referendum on its status in order to maintain a hope of bringing the Sunnis into a new political accord in Baghdad) actually strengthens the Kurds motivation to make common cause with the likes of Syria and Iran. So, to the extent that the U.S. moves to confront Iran in Iraq, it quite simply parts ways with the Iraqi government. And then the question becomes what exactly the U.S. is doing in the country.

The extent to which the U.S. begins to confront Iran on Iraqi soil is more likely to hasten the day when Iraq’s leaders ask the U.S. to leave, whatever the consequences. The idea that Iraq can be stabilized without acknowledging substantial Iranian interest and influence in that country is another relic of the Bush-Cheney Iraq fantasy. Pursuing that fantasy now will only hasten the collapse of the U.S. hold on Iraq, and offer America the prospect of another unwinnable war.