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Recent
news from Iraq has engendered an inescapable, and
exquisite, paradox for the neoconservative backers
of the war in Iraq. Happily I want to draw it out.
Astonishingly, the very Iraqi government whose
supposed legitimacy the neocons want Americans to
support has now made a deal with the
neoconservatives’ worst devil, the ayatollahs’
regime in Iraq. Specifically, the Iraqi defense
minister made a high profile visit to Teheran last
week, during which he concluded a deal with the
mullahs. According to the terms of that deal, Iran
will now begin training Iraq’s very own supposedly
pro-American armed forces.
Let’s be clear, so we can enjoy the irony. On one
hand the neocons are burbling about regime change in
Iran, about bombing its nuclear facilities, even
about invading Iran. Their leading Iran specialists,
such as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise
Institute, consider Iran the heart of the so-called
“terror masters,” allegedly allies to Al Qaeda. On
the other hand, the neoconservatives want us to
continue to throw our boys’ lives and billions of
U.S. dollars for years to come behind supporting the
Shiite-run Iraqi regime that is now formally allied
to Iran. What gives?
The problem in Iraq, and the centerpiece of the
quagmire there, is that the United States is stuck
deep in the quicksand of Iraq’s theocratic regime
run by two Shiite fundamentalist parties, Al Dawa
(whose leader is now Iraq’s prime minister) and the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
Both have been strongly supported by Iran since the
1980s, and still have close links to Iran’s clergy.
Iran created and trained SCIRI’s paramilitary force,
the 20,000-strong Badr Brigade, which is fast
becoming the core of Iraq’s fledgling armed forces.
So the new agreement between Iran and Iraq just
formalizes a long-standing alliance between Teheran
and Iraq’s Shiite paramilitaries. It guarantees that
Iran will maintain and expand its worrisome role in
Iraq for years to come.
Common sense, it seems, would indicate that the
United States ought to start worrying more about the
threat to U.S. interests from the Shiite
fundamentalists like SCIRI and Dawa, especially as
their alliance with Iran comes more clearly into
focus. Instead of locking ourselves into support for
the illegitimate (and U.S.-installed) government of
Iraq, we ought to be seeking a deal with the largely
Sunni resistance in Iraq. Many Sunnis, including
moderate, secular nationalist ones who are the core
of resistance in Iraq, consider SCIRI and Dawa to be
cats’-paws for Iran -- and they’re mostly right.
Quietly, SCIRI, Dawa, and the even more fanatical --
and Iran-linked -- forces of junior Shiite cleric
Muqtada Sadr are busily transforming Iraqi society
in areas they control into Iran-like theocracies. A
terrifying report in the New York Times, from a
correspondent in Basra, described in great detail
how thuggish Shiite gangs are imposing
extreme-right, religious orthodoxy on Iraq’s
second-largest city. The fanatics are attacking
liquor stores, movie houses, video stores, and
barber shops (because barber shops shave beards).
Worse, they are assassinating secular political
leaders and Sunnis. Where is the neoconservative and
Bush administration criticism of such terrorism?
President Bush -- and his neoconservative allies --
insist that America will persevere in supporting
Iraq’s regime and in combating the insurgency. By so
doing, they are creating space every day for Shiite
fanatics to consolidate their grasp on southern Iraq
and parts of Baghdad. Only too late, it seems, will
they realize that they are creating a monster there.
The only reason that these fanatics, led by SCIRI
and Dawa, don’t openly turn against the United
States is that if they did, their ersatz regime in
Baghdad would collapse overnight. Only the power of
140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq allows the Shiite regime
to maintain its grip on power. Whenever SCIRI and
Dawa feel that they can stand on their own two feet
in a looming, tri-cornered civil war pitting Shiites
against Sunnis against Kurds, they will boot the
U.S. out, and the real civil war in Iraq will begin.
Ironically, most Iraqi Shiites are not fanatics.
They don’t support the fundamentalist Shiite
parties. For generations, they’ve been secularized,
and many Iraqi Shiites consign religion to a modest
place, acknowledging the separation of mosque and
state. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the
Shiites fought bravely on Iraq’s side, while SCIRI
and Al Dawa fought for Iran. With every passing day,
however, the Shiite fundamentalists are gaining in
Iraq. There is a slim chance that secular Iraqi
Shiites could establish a working arrangement with
like-minded secular Sunnis, including former
Baathists, and with the Kurds, who have no use for
the Shiite fundamentalists. Unfortunately, it is
getting late. And the ultimate irony is that the
United States is supporting a regime in Baghdad that
is drawing strength from a regime next door in Iran
that calls America the Great Satan. The silence from
the neoconservatives on this paradox is deafening.
www.huffingtonpost.com
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