US-Iran Détente?

By last fall, top US officials had begun cautiously praising Sadrists for their forbearance. The Pentagon, which had spent most of last year blaming "JAM Special Groups," dropped all references to the JAM and lavished praise on Sadr's cease-fire. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, lauded Sadr personally for "working to rid his movement of criminal elements" and for making a "pledge of honor" to uphold the cease-fire announced in August. "The Sadr trend stands for service to the people," said Petraeus. And despite the fact that Sadr won't meet directly with US officials, a senior US officer in Baghdad told The Nation that the United States is in direct dialogue with leading Sadrists. "We've got ways in which we have opportunities to have discussion about overall, well, I don't want to say strategy, but--intent," he said.

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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