Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Rapprochement with US Reinforces Iran Hand in Iraq
By Nicola Nasser*
The burgeoning
US-Iran rapprochement will only reinforce this trend to reinforce Iran hand in Iraq
Therefore, none seems more jubilant than Iraq by the latest indications of rapprochement
between the United States
and Iran
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in a statement issued by
his office on September 29 “hailed” what he described as “a great breakthrough”
and a “victory” in the US-Iran relations, said he was “very optimistic” and
pledged, according to Xinhua “that Iraq is ready to play a role to push
forward the positive development” between the very two countries, which have
been the “enemies” of Iraq and its war adversaries for decades now and which most
Iraqis hold responsible and accountable for their current miseries.
Al-Maliki’s Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, in an interview with The Associated Press in New
York the next day, revealed that Iraq played a “helpful role” in the
development; moreover it aspires to “serve as a bridge of
communication and understanding between the two,” he said.
Zebari was trying to take a credit that
the editorial of the Iranian Bahar daily on last August 23 attributed to
the Omani Sultan
Qaboos bin Said’s visit to Tehran earlier that month and to the “role Oman
has played” in the past between Iran and the West.
Zebari even seemed so keen to convince
the US administration to take “the leadership” of President Hassan Rohani, who
was elected in June, and his Iranian government “more seriously” because “they
are serious” and “not playing games,” contrary of course to the negative
reactions of the US Israeli and Arab GCC allies.
Writing in the British Financial Times on last
September 27, Geoff Dyer and Najmeh Bozorgmehr expected the US – Iran
The US – led military invasion of Iraq in 2003
pragmatically but counterproductively made the best use of the Iranian vengeance,
which was in the waiting for whatever window of opportunity might open to
revenge the ceasefire in the eight – year Iran – Iraq war, which the late leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of
Iran (IRI), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
lamented as “gulping the cup of poison.”
In hindsight, it is very clear now that Iran similarly made
its best to violate the ceasefire with Iraq and facilitate the US war on Iraq
as a continuation of the Iranian war by proxy; while American soldiers were
dying by the thousands and Washington was depleting its budget by billions of
tax-payer money spent on its war on Iraq, Iran was reaping the US harvest there
quietly but persistently.
When the last of the US troops withdrew from Iraq late in
2011, they left behind in Baghdad a US – engineered “peace process” led by the
same US – nurtured Iraqi “opposition” whom the US invading troops installed in
power eight years earlier, ignoring the fact that this was the same
“opposition” nurtured by Iran for a longer period all throughout the more than
three decades of late Saddam Hussein rule, who never severed their loyalty to
Iran during the US occupation of Iraq.
The real loyalty of the Iraqi rulers to either the US or Iran
US Ambivalent
Until recently, Iraq under PM al-Maliki was posturing
as tactically placating Iran
on Syria while committing
quietly to its Strategic Framework Agreement
(SFA), which al-Maliki signed with the
former US
Al-Maliki’s government was on record in its support of a
political negotiated settlement of the Syrian conflict and against any military
solution thereto as well as in its opposition to “foreign intervention” in
Syria, US strike whether “limited” or unlimited against it, arming Syrian
rebels or facilitating their mission with logistics, Arab League’s suspension
of its membership, imposing unilateral Arab, US and EU sanctions on the
country, and Arab League’s and US president Barak Obama’s calls for Syrian
president Bashar al-Assad to “step down,” thus allying itself with the Russia, China and Iran.
Raymond Tanter,
president of the US Iran Policy Committee, writing in The Hill on last
September 20, labeled the “The Baghdad regime” a “naysayer” and “evildoer” ally of the US and
wondered “of what value is one of the largest
U.S. embassies in the world if American diplomats cannot persuade the Iraqi
regime” to commit to its SFA accord.
Nonetheless, the US
On last September 14 Ramesh Sepehrrad noted in a UPI report
that, “More
often than not, Washington hesitates to hold Baghdad accountable” for its Syria
Early enough however, President Obama provided an explanation:
The difference
between the U.S. and Iraqi responses to the Syrian conflict were simply
"tactical disagreements," Obama said on December 12, 2011, quoted by
CBS News, adding he had “absolutely no doubt” that the Iraqi “naysaying” was “not based on considerations of what Iran
would like to see.” The US
Before the US-Russian latest deal on the Syrian chemical
weapons arsenal, Washington, pursuant to the SFA, asked Baghdad to monitor the
Iraqi airspace throughout the duration of the planned US strikes on Syria, to
prevent Iran from using it, an Iraqi military source told al-Arab London-based
daily on last September 10.
As recently as last August 15, al-Maliki’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, co-chaired
with his American counterpart, John Kerry, the meeting in Washington, D.C. of
the Political and Diplomatic Joint Coordination Committee (JCC), which was
established as a result of the SFA. They agreed to convene the next JCC in Baghdad
In the joint statement issued after the
meeting, “Both delegations emphasized their
commitment to close and ongoing security cooperation, noting in this regard the
Memorandum of Understanding on security cooperation signed at the Defense and
Security JCC in December 2012, the inaugural U.S.-Iraq Joint Military Committee
(JMC) hosted by U.S. Central Command in June 2013.”
However, this
US strategic confidence is
almost daily contested in Iraq
The Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi was in Tehran
on last September 26 signing with his Iranian counterpart Brigadier General Hussein
Dehqan a bilateral defense agreement, which the Iranian Rear Admiral Ali
Shamkhani said Iran was ready “to expand … at the strategic level in all fields,
according to www.tasnimnews.com
on the same day.
The previous day, Sarah
Bertin, a researcher at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington ,
D.C. , wrote, commenting on al-Dulaimi’s visit: “Iraq is once again drifting into Iran
A few days later the Fars news agency reported that the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) commander of Navy forces Ali Fadavi and
his Iraqi counterpart Ali Hussein Ali signed a MoU on naval cooperation
agreement.
Last October, the then Iranian Minister of Defense
Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi and al-Dulaimi signed a document of bilateral
cooperation in the defense field.
The bilateral agreement
on drilling cooperation signed in Ahwaz at the end of last month was the tip of
an iceberg of more than one hundred multi-faceted accords, including gas, oil,
energy and pipelines agreements worth billions of dollars, which Iraq signed
with Iran under the umbrella of the US occupation since 2003 and the umbrella
of the US-Iraq SFA after the withdrawal of the US troops from the country.
Turning Tactical Ties into Strategy
The quantity of the bilateral
Iraq - Iraql accords has rapidly turned into a relationship of strategic
quality, cemented by the pro-Iran parties and factions governing in Baghdad,
surrounded by a belt of a Shiite sectarian affiliation to the Persian eastern
neighbor and guarded by their sectarian militias, which have so far aborted the
evolution of a national army and central government by excluding other Muslim
sects from the failing “peace process” and alienating them to create and
justify their sectarian antithesis led by al-Qaeida.
“For obvious
reasons, the Iranians don’t talk publicly about what they are up to in Iraq,” but
“it is clear that Iran has the ability to wield considerable influence in Iraq
today,” Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East
Policy at the Brookings Institution, wrote last June 3.
According to an article presented by
Tehran Bureau, the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars and published late in November last year,
“Iran does not have an interest in Iraq pumping additional oil. It does not
want Iraq to have a close
relationship with the United States ,
the Arab states or with Turkey Iran also does not want Iraq Iran would like to have Iraq
Nonetheless, the US U.S.
To all indications, Iran and US, whether
in competition or cooperation, will continue for a long period to come to
compromise the sovereignty and independence of Iraq, but “One has to always
remember that throughout Iraq’s recent existence, it has been a very
nationalist country” and will not succumb to a status of a client state either
to the United States or to Iran, in view of the Washington-based, Tony
Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS), quoted by Al – Arabia satellite TV station on July 25 last year.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
