Peter Galbraith on Iran and Iraq

Peter Galbraith has a long piece on Iran in the upcoming 10/11/07 New York Review of Books, which appears also at TomDispatch for 09/18/07. (NYRB puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks, so TomDispatch is a more permanent link.) Galbraith is reviewing Trita Parsi's new book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007).

Galbraith has a been a partisan of Iraqi Kurds, which one should keep in mind in his analyses of the Iraq War. But he's very well-informed about that war and makes perceptive observations about a central dilemma in the Cheney-Bush Middle East policy. Iran and the United States shared perceived common interests in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime in Iraq.

Yet the administration still manages to see Iran as the central bogeyman in the Middle East. The German journalist Peter Scholl-Latour entitled a 2005 book that dealt largely with the Bush policies in the "war on terror" and the Iraq War, Weltmacht im Treibsand. Bush gegen die Ayatollahs (World Power in Quicksand: Bush Against the Ayatollahs). He explains that even though Bush's military actions have been directed primarily against Sunni targets (Saddam's regime, the Taliban, Al Qa'ida), that the administration's outlook is dominated by its perceptions of radical Islam stemming from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its strategic perception that Iran is the root of America's problems in the Middle East.

Galbraith describes this central problem well with relation to the Iraq War:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran's allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini's army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom's Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The U.S. Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia's oil is under the Eastern Province.

America's Iraq quagmire has given new life to Iran's Syrian ally, Bashir Assad. In 2003, the Syrian Baathist regime seemed an anachronism unable to survive the region's political and economic changes. Today, Assad appears firmly in control, having even recovered from the opprobrium of having his regime caught red-handed in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, Hezbollah enjoys greatly enhanced stature for having held off the Israelis in the 2006 war. As Hezbollah's sponsor and source of arms, Iran now has an influence both in the Levant and in the Arab-Israeli conflict that it never before had. (my emphasis)

And he observes that the foolish optimism of the neocon ideologues - and their soulmates in war like Dick Cheney - had a ludicrous expectation of the effect the conquest of Iraq would have on Iran:

The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western." Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality.

Galbraith also points out that the lead party in the current Iraqi government is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), previously called Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and that it has far closer affinities with Iran than "Mookie's boys", Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM). He writes:

The United States cannot now undo President Bush's strategic gift to Iran. But importantly, the most pro-Iranian Shiite political party is the one least hostile to the United States. In the battle now underway between the SIIC and Moqtada al-Sadr for control of southern Iraq and of the central government in Baghdad, the United States and Iran are on the same side. The U.S. has good reason to worry about Iran's activities in Iraq. But contrary to the Bush administration's allegations - supported by both General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in their recent congressional testimony - Iran does not oppose Iraq's new political order. In fact, Iran is the major beneficiary of the American-induced changes in Iraq since 2003.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, iran, iran war, peter galbraith