The great games over Iraq

Editor's note: I am moving over to the other blog.
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The US has signaled a dramatic shift in its Iraq policy, aimed at deterring Iran's "hegemony" and putting Washington in league with the anti-Iran Sunni alliance. Moscow and Beijing have their own imperatives, and destabilizing Iran is not one of them. Kaveh L Afrasiabi foresees a future in which local and international rivals clash head on in the region.

Jan 20, 2007

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

No doubt, we are now witnessing the dawn of a new great game over Iraq. A recent communique by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has stated its "collective desire to prevent Iraq from becoming a battleground for regional and international powers".

The irony, however, is that this communique is also signed by two "out of area" Arab states, Jordan and Egypt, whose inclusion in the security calculus of the Persian Gulf rattles Iran and fuels the growing rivalry between the Shi'ite power bloc and the Sunni Arabs led by Saudi Arabia.

Simultaneously, in a clue to the rather dizzying pattern of cross-cutting, paradoxical alliances and would-be alliances, the US has signaled a dramatic shift in its Iraq policy, aimed at deterring Iran's "hegemony", which puts Washington in league with the anti-Iran Sunni alliance precisely at a time when the US-Shi'ite alliance in Iraq is, while strained, still holding and there is no conceivable alternative to it, given the Shi'ite majority in the country. Or is there?

Shi'ites betrayed again?
Are they going to be betrayed again? This is a question increasingly on the mind of many Shi'ites in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere, who have a vivid memory of how then-US president George H W Bush betrayed Iraq's Shi'ites during the Gulf War in 1991 by first exhorting them to rebel against the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and, when they did in Basra, Najaf and Karbala, became complicit in their suppression.

The Americans not only failed to support them but, worse, by lifting the no-fly zone for Saddam's helicopters that airlifted troops to the rebellious south, the dictator's forces were given the green light by none other than the US Central Command chief at the time, General Norman Schwarzkopf. That little episode is barely mentioned in Schwarzkopf's memoir, A Soldier of Conscience.

From the vantage point of many Shi'ites in the region, the new accent on Iran in Iraq is a ruse for a change of heart in Washington toward the post-Saddam political process, and a prelude for a U-turn. Little wonder it took Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki more than two days to provide a tepid response to US President George W Bush's "new Iraq strategy", which ignores Maliki's own script for Baghdad security - the latter includes his appointment of a new commander for Baghdad, from the Shi'ite south and distrusted by the US generals.

"The US wants to have its cake and eat it too," a Tehran political analyst told the author, adding, "Bush is now appeasing the Sunni bloc and squeezing the Shi'ites and still wants to claim a continuity of US policy in Iraq when it is abundantly clear that discontinuity is gaining the upper hand."

Another point conveyed by this analyst concerned the US kidnapping of several Iranians at the consular office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. US officials have accused those Iranians of being from the Qods Group of the Revolutionary Guards and involved in subversive activities, a charge vigorously denied by Tehran.

A shade of Bosnia
"There is a shade of Bosnia here," explained the analyst, referring to the US-Iran cooperation in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the early 1990s, which saved the beleaguered Bosnian Muslims from Serbian atrocities, notwithstanding a United Nations arms embargo.

Then-US president Bill Clinton, urged by his top aides, authorized that cooperation, which involved "the Pentagon's own secret service" instead of the Central Intelligence Agency, as per a 1997 congressional document. According to that report, the United States was "very closely involved" in the Iranian arms pipeline to Bosnia through Turkey and Croatia, which involved small arms, mortars, anti-tank guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Indeed, the history of US-Qods cooperation in Bosnia and subsequently in Afghanistan is instructive, given the avalanche of negative commentaries in the US media that portray a completely adversarial relationship between the US and Iran. In 1996, Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the US House of Representative, set up a special committee to investigate US-Iran relations in Bosnia, which some US senators, including John Kerry, castigated as Clinton's version of the "Iran-Contra affair", with Kerry accusing Clinton of "turning a blind eye to Iranian shipments".

As a result of such political pressures, the Clinton administration shifted its policy toward the Iranians in Bosnia: the Revolutionary Guards' offices in Bosnia were ordered closed and, in one case reminiscent of the Irbil incident, US forces took over one of those liaison offices and temporarily apprehended several Iranians whom they accused of subversive activities.

Expelling the Iranians from Bosnia after they were no longer needed seemed like the right policy, and all the signs are that the US is inclined to repeat it in Iraq, irrespective of the stark differences relating to Iran's proximity to neighboring Iraq and the wealth of historical and religious ties.

But as stated above, in addition to Bosnia, the US military and the Qods Group cooperated in Afghanistan. In a conversation with the author in Tehran in the autumn of 2004, a Revolutionary Guard commander recalled his meeting with a top US general in a tent at Baghram Airport, where the two hammered out the number of northern front troops who would enter Kabul without causing much-feared bloodshed.

Turning to Iraq, the question is: What is the ultimate objective of the US? Clearly, the Bush administration has nullified the possibility of US-Iran cooperation in Iraq, as called for by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, opting instead for the path of hostility and confrontation. There is now open talk of "crossing into Iran" and smashing the Iranian networks inside Iraq, as if those networks are constantly working at cross-purposes with the US mission. But what exactly is the US mission in Iraq?

The facade of a self-imposed mission to "spread democracy" is wearing thinner by the hour, seeing how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not bother to invoke the word "democracy" once in her latest trip to Cairo and Riyadh, focusing instead on "stability" and raising the specter that "the Iranians are coming" - this from a specialist in Russia and the Cold War who is at home with Cold War posturing.

Handicapped by her lack of knowledge of Middle Eastern history and politics, Rice must now ponder the quick drift toward military confrontation with Iran in light of the nuclear standoff and the seemingly irresistible Israeli pressure to act now before Iran reaches "the point of no return". We must also add: before the Bush administration becomes a "lame duck" and is drawn by the president's own weakness into yet another foreign gambit by the weight of upcoming electoral politics.

Spring of military action
Various US pundits have openly opined that the first half of 2007 is the best time for military action against Iran, with that country internationally isolated, the Arab tide against Tehran at its all-time highest, and Iran's own house divided among competing factions unable to reach consensus on important foreign-policy priorities.

Bulking up its military presence by dispatching a fresh aircraft-carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as well as several nuclear-armed submarines, and sending Patriot missiles to the US-friendly states in the region, the Bush administration might actually gain in Iraq by subduing Iran militarily, ostensibly over the nuclear issue.

The problem with this rationale, however, is that it disregards the likelihood of Iranian retaliation in Iraq, regional "blowback", and the threats to the world economy posed by curtailed oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Concerning the last, the US has reportedly made contingency plans for the indefinite takeover of Iranian territory in Chah Bahar, which would deny Tehran its strategic leverage with Hormuz.

A limited war with Iran is, as pointed out by this author previously, likely to degenerate into a regional conflagration, substantially complicating the picture in Iraq (and Afghanistan as well), perhaps prompting the US to push for outright "regime change" in Tehran, despite the lack of troops necessary for even a limited, contained war. That would mean expanding the Iraq war to Iran, with several intended and unintended consequences, one of which is potentially depriving Russia of the Iranian buffer it now enjoys vis-a-vis the power of the US military machine.

It comes as no surprise, then, that in the midst of US-Russian common cause at the UN Security Council against Iran, Moscow has proceeded with the delivery of an air-defense system to Iran and is hinting at the sale of an even more advanced system in the future. Russia's national-security interests would be badly bruised by a US-Iran military showdown that would bring the intrusive Western superpower closer to Russia's (insecure) southern borders.

Nor would China benefit geostrategically from such an outcome, in light of that country's burgeoning energy relations with Iran today, further solidified by a new US$3.6 billion Tehran-Beijing agreement for liquefied natural gas.

In signing this LNG deal, the Chinese government had to ignore a blunt US warning not to proceed, with the foreign minister telling the US "not to meddle" in China's relations with Iran. Clearly, China could not have the same expectations about the nature of Iranian regime change after an unequal bout between the recalcitrant Iranians and the US.

In a word, the long-term geopolitical ramifications for both China and Russia are too serious to ignore by their policymakers. Moscow and Beijing have joined the bandwagon over US-led efforts to impose sanctions on Iran, overlooking their own previously stated insight that such sanctions would be a "prelude to war".

Indeed, how little time Washington has lost in following up Security Council Resolution 1737 with ratcheted-up military threats against Iran. Looking far ahead, this, in turn, raises another vexing question: Is the US-Iran rivalry the outer ring of a broader, new Cold War between the US and the countervailing powers of China and Russia?


Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.