Iran, al Sadr, and the endgame?
By TigerHawk at 4/20/2008 08:45:00 AM
Even the New York Times, which has done its level best to promote the myth of Iraqi incompetence, acknowledges that the government has won the battle of Basra...
...but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.
Ah, yes. Iraqi ground troops wiped out the Mahdi Army in Basra, but they couldn't do it without our Air Force. Quagmire!
Anyway, it really does not matter what the editors on 43rd Street think. Iran knows a battlefield defeat when it sees one, and has obviously decided that Moqtada al-Sadr is such a loser that it rewrote history:
Why his fighters have clung to those fight-then-fade tactics is unknown. But American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi Army units trained and equipped by Iran had played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.
Whether to counter those allegations or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. He even called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.
“The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws,” Mr. Qumi said. “This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”
So why did Iran turn on al-Sadr, who is, after all, a volatile guy?
Iran has two great ambitions for post-occupation Iraq. First and foremost, it needs to ensure that the Shiites will remain in control in Baghdad so as to minimize the risk of another ruinous Iraq-Iran war. Second and less essentially, it wants sufficient freedom to operate in Iraq that it can use it as a base against other perceived threats to its security, including from Israel and Saudi Arabia. (Note that neither goal requires "stability," which everybody from the Iraq Study Group to the New York Times claims Iran wants without any actual evidence.) The best result from Iran's standpoint, then, is a Shiite government in Baghdad that is strong enough to keep the Sunnis in check and to prevent Kurdish independence but too divided to sustain Arab nationalism against the Iranians or to keep Iranian agents from having their way inside Iraq.
The United States responded to this by building up the Sunnis. We promoted and funded the Sunni "Awakening Councils," which had two benefits. Yes, they were critical in the defeat of the jihadis, without which there could be no peace in Iraq ever. The Councils also serve an important function in the semiotics of the war, for they signal to Iran that no Shiite government in Baghdad can be too weak, lest the United States supports a Sunni restoration. Iran seems to have understood this point, and from among the various Shiite factions it has chosen the government. Assuming that the Times article is factually sound, Kevin Drum's speculation seems right to me:
This gibes with other recent evidence (see here) that Iran might finally have decided to stop playing both sides and instead abandon Sadr and throw more of its weight behind ISCI and the current government. The current government is, after all, more pro-Iran than Sadr has ever been, so this is hardly unthinkable.
As always, it's hard to say what's really going on here. But it's possible that the ground is shifting. This might be good news, or it might be in the "be careful what you wish for" category. Stay tuned.
The United States also has two great (remaining) interests in post-occupation Iraq. The first is that the government of Iraq be sufficiently strong that transnational extremists cannot use Iraq to launch or otherwise sustain international terrorism. The second is that Iraq returns to its former position as a counterbalance to Islamic Republic. We would also prefer that the government of Iraq be fairly pluralistic and representative by the standards of the Arab world and that it permit permanent American bases, both of which would help interdict jihadis over the long run.
Given all of this, one can peer through the mist and discern the outlines of an endgame. Iran gets a relatively pro-Iranian Shiite government in Baghdad, but one that treats the Sunnis sufficiently well that they continue to play ball (and the Sunnis Arabs in the region do not fund a Sunni restoration). The United States promises not to support a Sunni restoration or Kurdish independence. In return for those promises, Iran and the government in Baghdad concede a substantial indefinite American military presence, the purposes of which would be to keep the Sunnis and the Kurds quiescent (by reassuring them), to interdict jihadis, and to guarantee Iran's implicit promise that it will not use Shiite Iraq to project power further into the region.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
Your superior wisdom is welcome in the comments.
