Baghdad, March 3, 2007. The Iraqis find themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, as one official put it, meaning between the United States and Iran, or vice versa, depending on their point of view. Few governments have ever been in an odder diplomatic vise. Can a planned Baghdad conference including both Tehran and Washington help to loosen this grip?
The Shia parties that dominate the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have long-standing ties to Iran; most of their leaders at one time or another were exiles there, and during Saddam’s regime most of them could look only to their fellow Shia in Iran for support. The Shias’ holiest places, too, are not in Iran but in Iraq; even Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani– Iraq’s leading Shiite religious authority–remains a passport-holding Iranian citizen, though his clerical seat is Najaf. Saddam went to war against Iran, attacking without provocation across the southern border, and while Iran was no doubt pleased to see the Americans destroy his regime, they certainly never said so publicly. Recall that the United States in effect supported Iraq during the long Iran-Iraq war from 1980-1988; some of the chemical weapons Saddam used on Iranian troops with such abandon were sourced, apparently privately, but still, in the United States.
So we have this odd situation in which a Shia-dominated government depends completely for its security on the support of the United States and its 150,000 troops here, and will do so for some time to come, but also has very close relations with Iran, at almost every level. Meantime, Iran regularly denounces the Americans as occupiers and demands their withdrawal, while at the same time giving diplomatic and political support to a government that could not stand without them. As usual with Iran, watch what it does, not what it says. It calls for the destruction of Israel, and has done so since the days of Ayatollah Khomeini; but it has also never directly attacked Israel. (The only state to have done that since 1973 is Iraq, under Saddam in 1991.) One of the things Iran does is support some of the more radical elements within the Shia community, including Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army and other Shia extremists behind the death squads. That support, however, has been withdrawn lately–which may go farther to explain the drop in sectarian violence than even the increase in Iraqi troops on the ground in Baghdad as part of the Baghdad Security Plan. So far only a small portion of the promised additional American troops have hit the streets in Baghdad, and while the increased Iraqi presence is impressive–or at least creating impressive traffic jams–the fact is that Iraq’s death squads always operated with a great degree of collusion from Iraqi security forces, and their presence alone is hardly protection against death squads. A cooperative Iran in Iraq may prove far more effective, particularly in creating lasting security.
Everyone fears of course that the dispute between the United States and Iran over the Iran’s nuclear ambitions may end up being more than just words. It’s crazy to think that the Iranians don’t have a weapons program. And the Americans really are determined to stop the Iranians from obtaining those weapons, and hardline talk from some quarters in Washington–and allies in Israel–has to be deeply worrying to the government in Baghdad. It’s not clear how long it will take Iran to get the bomb, but they’ll probably have it before the Americans are able to leave Iraq (at least if they plan to leave it in one piece). Open conflict between Washington and Tehran can only mean a still worse mess in Iraq.
For the past year, the Americans have been trying to start a dialogue with Iran, publicly authorizing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to open talks on the narrow subject of Iraq and the Iranian role there. The Iranians rejected that and talks got nowhere as relations soured with the International Atomic Energy Agency amid fresh revelations about the degree of Tehran’s pursuit of nukes, and threats of action from the U.N. Security Council.
Now the Iraqi government has taken the matter in its own hands, proposing an international conference involving all its neighbors and the five permanent members of the Security Council. The first round is a week from now, March 10, with a follow up session probably in April, on a date to be announced later. Washington initially seemed caught by surprise, but Condi Rice, the Secretary of State, announced fairly readily that the U.S. would attend–how could it not? And Iran too is expected to do so. “The most important thing about this conference is that it’s an Iraqi conference,” said Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al Rubaie. “We are controlling the agenda, time, place and the discussion. There have been nine or ten [of these] neighbors conferences, always held in the neighboring capitals. We insisted this time it should happen in Iraq, they said for political and security reasons they were a little bit hesitant, but we added the Permanent 5, and they were encouraged so said OK.” Nukes will probably not be something the Iraqis would put on the agenda; the purpose is to discuss Iraq’s security and the impact that will have on neighboring countries. But with U.S. and Iranian officials at the same table, Iraqis officials are hoping, there’s room for a real break-through. “I think they will sit and they will look each other in the eye and they will talk,” Rubaie said.
“The goals of this conference are to approve the security plan, but also to send a message of reassurance to our neighbors that Iraq will not be part of any regional dispute,” said Sheikh Humam al Hamoudi, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Iraqi National Assembly. Hamoudi is one of the top officials in SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite party, and one that initially at least modeled its political world view on the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He too says he hopes to see the two gorillas in the room talk to each other. “If Iran is intervening in Iraq, it’s to hurt the Americans, not the Iraqis. They should be talking to each other. And there is a chance for this dialogue to happen; having a meeting like this coincides with some points of the Baker-Hamilton Report [the Iraq Study Group report that President Bush commissioned late last year, calling for more negotiation with Syria and Iran over Iraq]. Iraqis are very tired of this game of tug-of-war between Iran and the United States. Right or wrong, Iran has a role in Iraq, and that alone is reason enough to talk.”
