US-Iran Détente?
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This is the second of two articles about the Shiites in Iraq that were supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. The first appeared in the June 2007 issue of The American Prospect.
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Letter From Iran
Robert Dreyfuss: Iranians' attitudes toward Ahmadinejad range from sullen tolerance to bitter hostility.
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Shirin Ebadi: Don't Attack Iran
Robert Dreyfuss: The Nobel Prize-winning activist says US threats, regime-change rhetoric and efforts to promote democracy only give Iran's leaders an excuse to intensify repression.
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The Lessons of Basra
Robert Dreyfuss: The latest round of Iraq's Shiite vs. Shiite civil war was to have been Bush's defining moment. The result: utter humiliation for the US and the Iraqi government.
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Hothead McCain
Robert Dreyfuss: The GOP nominee favors unilateralism and "rogue state rollback."
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Is Iran Winning the Iraq War?
Robert Dreyfuss: Maybe. But Iraqis mistrust Iran as much as they do the United States.
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Nationalists Stirring in Iraq
Robert Dreyfuss: An emerging Sunni-Shiite coalition could change the face of Iraq--if the United States steps back and gets out of the way.
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Iraq: The Other Surge
Robert Dreyfuss: Across the political spectrum in Iraq, a nationalistic bloc is emerging to challenge the Kurdish and Shiite separatists who have held sway under US tutelage.
Even more surprising, perhaps, top US officials also began to praise Iran. Beginning late last summer, according to American officials, Iran began restricting the flow of weapons across the Iraqi border, following a pledge by Supreme Leader Khamenei to Maliki during the Iraqi prime minister's trip to Tehran. The State Department's Satterfield said last December, "We have seen such a consistent and sustained diminution in certain kinds of violence by certain kinds of folks that we can't explain it solely [by internal factors in Iraq].... We are confident that decisions involving the strategy pursued by the IRGC are made at the most senior levels of the Iranian government." In February Satterfield tempered his comments a bit, suggesting that Iran might be behind an uptick in rocket and mortar attacks in Basra.
There were other straws in the wind indicating the possibility of US-Iranian détente in Iraq. Ambassador Ryan Crocker announced in Baghdad that he would soon resume his dialogue with Iran's Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, a top officer in the IRGC who'd helped organize the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. There are rumors of stepped-up clandestine contacts between US and Iranian officials in various locations. And the US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate, released late last year, eased US pressure on Iran by revealing that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. None other than Ali Khamenei responded by saying, for the first time, that he could envision "having relations with America."
When The Nation asked US officers in Iraq about Iran's growing role there, the response was decidedly mild. "Obviously Iran has legitimate economic, political and diplomatic interests in Iraq that they ought to pursue, whether it's helping to generate power in the south or building up an Iraq here that they're comfortable with," said a senior US officer in Baghdad. "But what we're not going to tolerate is the direct militant-aligned activity that Iran has been responsible for." He went on: "They are going to be neighbors forever. They share a huge common border. Economic life across that border is pretty significant. And if all that takes place in an open and transparent way, there's no downside to it."
Can the United States make a deal with Iran to stabilize Iraq, with both Washington and Tehran ignoring their differences to support Maliki's government? Possibly. One scenario would have Washington, backed by Saudi Arabia, using its influence among the Sunnis, particularly in the burgeoning Awakening movement, to bring them to the table, while Iran would use its clout among the Shiites to convince Maliki and Hakim to make the concessions necessary to bridge the sectarian divide. That idea lay at the heart of the Iraq Study Group plan, the 2006 advisory panel chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton that Bush dismissed when he adopted the surge. The Baker-Hamilton plan called for negotiations with Iran (and Syria) to help stabilize Iraq.
But enormous obstacles remain.
First, Iran is very unhappy about America's efforts to build up the 100,000-strong Sunni Awakening militia. In an interview last fall with CNN, Ambassador Kazemi-Qomi explicitly warned against the US policy of arming the Sunnis, accusing Washington of "bringing back to power former killers and murderers." Instead, Kazemi-Qomi demanded that the United States continue to support the Badr-linked Iraqi security forces. "The United States should arm and help the government, the army and the police." Soon afterward, a wave of assassinations began to hit the leadership of the Awakening militia and, according to the New York Times, although Al Qaeda in Iraq is to blame for some of the killings, many of the assassins were drawn from the Badr Corps.
Second, recent Al Qaeda-style terrorist activity in and around Baghdad and continuing pressure on the JAM from Badr-linked Iraqi army and police units have prompted Sadr to warn that he might lift the cease-fire when it expires at the end of February. That could end the current relative calm in Iraq, just as surge-linked US brigades begin withdrawing.
Perhaps most important, Iraqi nationalists are already expressing their disdain for the idea of a US-Iran pact in Iraq. Iraqi nationalists--among them secular parties, Baathists, many Sunni parties, the Awakening movement and key Shiite blocs, including the Sadrists, despite their recent tilt toward Iran--are starting to coalesce around a program built on opposition to both the US military occupation and the Iranian political occupation. In addition, they are opposed to Al Qaeda and to separatists, especially the Kurds, who want an independent Kurdish region in the north, and to ISCI, which has called for a quasi-independent Shiite region in the south. If the United States were to begin a rapid drawdown of its forces in Iraq, chances are good that Iraqi nationalism would begin to reassert itself. In the end, many analysts say, the Iraqis will limit Iran's influence in Iraq--but only if the United States gets out of the way.
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