[Mb-civic] FW: Will Iran Win the Iraq War?

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From: Shahla Samii <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:33:41 -0500
Subject: Will Iran Win the Iraq War?

  2004 Tuesday 14 December

Will Iran Win the Iraq War?

The Wall Street Journal
  Reuel Marc Gerecht

  Today in Washington there are many within the foreign-policy
establishment expressing their fear -- and hope -- that America's
entanglement in Iraq may well compromise the Bush administration's
ability to confront the Islamic Republic's quest for nuclear weapons.
If it chose to, Tehran -- so the theory goes -- could make life
enormously difficult for the U.S. in Iraq through its clandestine
networks and Shiite allies.

  The U.S. simply cannot entertain the possibility of pre-emptively
striking clerical Iran's nuclear-weapons facilities for fear of
producing a two-front, hopeless mess in Iraq, where the Shiites have so
far overwhelming refused to join the Sunni insurgency. The
administration needs thus to become more "realist" and "pragmatic" in
its approach to the clerical regime, and follow the European lead in
using commercial carrots to alter clerical Iran's nuclear behavior.

  But does this reasoning make sense? Are Iraq and Iran so intertwined
that America is essentially handcuffed in its dealings with Tehran's
mullahs? In all probability, not at all. Indeed, the current interplay
between the peoples of Iraq and its eastern neighbor actually ought to
encourage the Bush administration to be more hawkish toward the
clerical regime's growing interference in Iraq and pursuit of nuclear
weapons.

  * * *

  The strongest trump playing in favor of America and against Iran is
Iraqi nationalism. Nationalism is easily the most successful European
export to the Middle East, rearranging, subordinating, and sometimes
eliminating older ties of faith, family and tribe. Iraq's Shiites are
the progenitors of modern Iraqi nationalism. They, much more than their
Sunni Arab compatriots, who were the driving force behind pan-Arabism
in Mesopotamia, have shaped an Iraqi Arab identity which is distinct
from the Sunni Arabs to the west and Shiite Iranians to the east.

  Iraqi Shiites, especially their clergy, do have a long relationship
with Iran . Traditionally, the most promising Iranian religious
students and clerics have studied at the seminaries of Najaf and
Karbala to perfect their knowledge of Arabic and their exegesis of
religious texts. Clerical Iraqi and Iranian families have often
intermarried -- though there is much less intermarriage now than there
was in the early 20th century before highly nationalist dictatorships
in both countries started forming contemporary identities.

  Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's pre-eminent divine, is of Persian
birth and early education. Many of his closest, oldest advisers are
also of Iranian ancestry and education. Iraq's once-great Shiite
merchant families inevitably have Iranian members. As was once typical
of the cosmopolitan, Westernized Shiite merchant class, the Iraqi
National Congress's Ahmed Chalabi, a product of an Iraqi-Persian
family, doesn't recoil from Iranian mullahs, as do most upper-class
Sunni Baghdadis.

  But association among the Shia should never be viewed as ideological
sympathy. The Iraqi Shia retain enormous bitterness toward the U.S. for
the failure of President George H.W. Bush to aid them during the great
rebellion of '91, when the Shiites and Kurds rose up against Saddam
Hussein after the first Gulf War. Tens of thousands of Shiites were
slaughtered. But this bitterness also extends to Iran's clerical
regime, which did virtually nothing to help their Iraqi "brethren."

  There has been a sentiment among many Iraqi Shiites -- and it never
has been much more than sentiment even among the most devoutly
religious -- that Iran is supposed to look after the Iraqi Shia, to
help them in times of trouble as would an uncle. The Iran-Iraq war from
1980 to 1988 frayed, if not ended, this sentiment. Rare are the
instances of Iraqi Shiite protests at Saddam's war with Iran . The
Baathist Orwellian tyranny had much to do with this, but there is also
the undeniable truth that neither Shiite party really wanted to bleed
for the other. Nationalism and modern Arabism had become the biggest
parts of the Iraqi Shiite identity.

  And Iranians usually don't waste much time expressing their
disappointment in the Iraqi Shia, given the damage the war did to Iran
, that Iraq's army was majority Shiite, and that Saddam's elite Sunni
Republican Guards were on several occasions near the cracking point.
When the Iraqi Shia felt Saddam's wrath in '91, there was more than a
little schadenfreude on the Persian side. The truth be told, Tehran's
clerical regime didn't mind the status quo in Iraq in the '90s: a
weakened Saddam that couldn't invade Iran but could keep Iraq's Shiite
community, especially its clergy, quiescent and uncompetitive with the
Islamic Republic.

  Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's
primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized,
incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government.
Such a government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger
aimed at Tehran's clerical dictatorship. Intra-Shiite squabbles do
matter, and this one between Iraqi clerics who believe in one man, one
vote and those who believe in theocracy is an enormous difference of
opinion. We should not be fooled by the publicly cordial relations that
usually exist between clerics of Najaf and Tehran. Najaf's position on
democracy is an explicit negation of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's and his
associates' right to rule Iran .

  The clerical regime is currently handcuffed to Iraq's democratic
process and timetable. All of the principal groups through which Iran
hopes to exercise influence in Iraq -- the Iranian-created Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Dawa (or
"Islamic Call") party, and the Sadriyyin, followers of Muqtada al Sadr,
the young clerical firebrand who has been engaged in a spiritual
tug-of-war with the country's traditional clergy -- are committed now
to the election process. Iran has probably been pouring money into
Iraq, to all three of these Shiite groups, which don't share much
affection for each other, and in the case of the Dawa and the
Sadriyyin, have had distinctly mixed, often hostile, emotions about
things Iranian. Both the Dawa and the Sadriyyin have regularly
belittled Grand Ayatollah Sistani for his "Persianness" and snarled at
clerical Iran's habit of talking down to the Iraqi Shia.

  Tehran's motivation in giving aid to these parties is to encourage
some dependency and, more important, keep the three most provocative
Shiite groups in the forefront of Iraqi politics. Some of the Dawa rank
and file and the young, streetwise men behind Sadr are, like the Baath
Party that made them, explosively violent, easily as tough and
potentially as fierce as the Baathists and Sunni militants who are so
doggedly trying to shred civil society and unleash sectarian conflict.

  Iraq's Sunni minority is anxious about the creation of a Shiite-led
country, which is unavoidable if Iraq goes democratic. The Shia who
scare the Sunni Arabs the most are SCIRI, the Dawa and the Sadriyyin.
All three groups convey to Sunni Arabs, and to the Sunni Kurds, a
certain Shiite intensity. Though all three have been remarkably
well-behaved toward their Arab Sunni compatriots -- given how many Arab
Sunnis were complicit in barbaric behavior toward the Shia, the number
of revenge killings has been astonishingly small -- the three probably
seem to Arab Sunnis as the Shia least likely to forgive them for their
Baathist guilt.

  Iranian support for these groups increases the odds for implanting in
Iraq sectarian politics and conflict. What clerical Iran ideally wants
to see next door is strife that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. The
Sadriyyin are philosophically closest to the Lebanese Hezbollah, but
they aren't in ideology, organization, or loyalty to Tehran, nearly as
"evolved." The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which Iran's ruling
mullahs view as their greatest -- only -- foreign success, required a
civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics have
an American invasion. What they lack is civil war.

  Tehran is trying to align itself with a variety of often contradictory
parties because it cannot overtly oppose the democratic process in
Iraq, in which an increasing number of Iraqi Shiites are passionately
invested. Like Washington, Tehran really doesn't know what is going to
happen on Jan. 30 and after, though it no doubt hopes that Sunni Arabs
abstain from voting en masse, thereby supercharging sectarianism. If a
civil war could be provoked, Iraq's democratic experiment and moderate
Shiite religious establishment would probably both collapse. If the
neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can be
physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared,
disruptive forces in Iranian politics -- Western-oriented Iranian youth
and pro-democracy dissident clerics -- can be further weakened. The
more the Americans bleed next door, and the clerical regime definitely
believes America is on the run in Iraq, the less likely they'll have
the will to take out Iran's nuclear program.

  * * *

  In Iraq, the U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni
insurgency before it can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry
Shiite political identity willing to do to the Arab Sunnis what the
Baath once did to the Shia. If such an identity is born, it is most
unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must thus ensure that the
democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence, keeps on
rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain
much traction inside the country. SCIRI, the Dawa and the Sadriyyin are
not puppets controlled by Tehran; the rising power of southern Iraq's
Shiite tribes, which historically have looked askance at clerical
direction from any quarter, will further frustrate Iranian influence.

  Persians stick out in Iraq like sore thumbs (very few Iranians can
speak Arabic with any facility). They must have Iraqi surrogates to
advance their interests, which are in opposition to those of most
Iraqis. The U.S. could bomb uranium-enrichment facilities in Iran and
it's much more likely Washington will see protests in the anti-Shiite
Sunni Arab world than among Iraq's Shiites. This is a paradox that
Washington should understand. If we don't, a nuclear-armed Iranian
theocracy is likely to win in Iraq, and beyond.

  Mr. Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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