Why would Bush side with the Shias in Iraq and draw up war plans that entail quickly seizing Iran's southwestern Khuzestan Province, where most of Iran's oil reserves and refineries are located? Khuzestan has a majority Shia Arab population that has close links with their ethnic and religious brethren in Iraq.
Bush is supposedly siding with the Shias in Iraq and going to war with their close brethren, the Shias in Iran.
Bush may have plans to significantly diminish the clout of the Shias in the entire region in which case the constitution will be changed back to reflect a more secular Iraq.
This plan would be a countermove to Iran’s:
While America has been so dangerously and wastefully tied down in Iraq, Iran has been moving to form the diplomatic, political and military imprint of a kind of "Shiite Internationale" among the region's Shia populations.
This would take in all the followers of the Shia sect of Islam, from the 60 percent of Iraq, to the oil-rich eastern regions of Saudi Arabia, to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrilla/political control of Lebanon. #msg-7370262
Just speculating…
-Am
Reference: US concessions to Islamists on the role of religion in Iraqi law marked a turn in talks on a constitution, negotiators said on Saturday, as they raced to meet a 48-hour deadline under intense US pressure to clinch a deal.
US diplomats, who have insisted the constitution must enshrine ideals of equal rights and democracy, declined comment. Shia, Sunni and Kurdish negotiators all said there was accord on a bigger role for Islamic law than Iraq had before. But a secular Kurdish politician said Kurds opposed making Islam not ‘a’ but ‘the’ main source of law - a reversal of interim legal arrangements – and subjecting all legislation to a religious test.
“We understand the Americans have sided with the Shias,” he said. “It’s shocking. It doesn’t fit American values. They have spent so much blood and money here, only to back the creation of an Islamist state. I can’t believe that’s what the Americans really want or what the American people want.” http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-8-2005_pg7_42
August 10, 2005 -- U.S. prepared to grab Iran's southwestern majority Arab and oil-rich province after saturation bombing of Iranian nuclear, chemical, and command, control, communications & intelligence (C3I) targets. According to sources within the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND), the Bush administration has drawn up plans to hit Iran's nuclear, other WMD, and military sites with heavy saturation bombing using bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons.
The Bush war plans for Iran also entail quickly seizing Iran's southwestern Khuzestan Province, where most of Iran's oil reserves and refineries are located. Khuzestan has a majority Shia Arab population that has close links with their ethnic and religious brethren in Iraq. #msg-7313828
Threats won't work and accusations don't help. But soft diplomacy -- and the lessons of history -- could make a difference.
By Fariborz Mokhtari, FARIBORZ MOKHTARI is a professor at the Near East South Asia Center of the National Defense University in Washington. This essay represents his opinion, not that of the university or the United States
IRAN'S NUCLEAR POLICY is more about nationalism and pride than weapons and energy. If the United States' policy toward Iran ignores the national pride of the Iranian people, it could cause lasting repercussions that will set back relations between Iran, the United States and U.S. allies for a long time to come.
The United States would be prudent to avoid the mistake the British made in 1951, when they turned a question of oil royalties into a groundswell of Iranian nationalism. Washington may now be creating exactly such a reaction with its suggestion that Iran should be required to import fuel for its reactors rather than be allowed to have access to a nuclear fuel cycle of its own.
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Such a requirement would make Iran a consumer, completely dependent on the nuclear market. That's not likely to sit well with the people of Iran, because they have learned the hard way not to trust foreign suppliers of essential resources.
In 1975, Iran purchased 10% of France's Eurodif uranium enrichment plant for $1 billion — yet despite its shareholder stake in the plant, Iran has received no uranium from it to date. A German company — possibly due to pressure from the United States — backed away from its contract with Iran to build the Bushehr nuclear power plant, and Germany revoked export licenses for equipment for the plant that Iran had already purchased. During the Iran-Iraq war, Washington cut off Iran's supply of parts for its U.S.-made warplanes and, at the same time, shared sensitive aerial reconnaissance on troop movements with Iraq. Given this history, the Iranians' desire to be self-reliant is not unreasonable.
BUT THAT is only part of the problem with U.S. policy toward Iran. Washington continues to accuse Iran of using its nuclear program as a cover for bomb making, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency found no direct evidence to support such a charge. The much-heralded "smoking gun" — highly enriched uranium traces discovered in June 2003 at two sites in Iran — was later debunked; the enriched uranium was found to have entered Iran on contaminated equipment purchased from Russia and Pakistan, thus confirming Iran's official explanation.
Lost in the rhetoric is the truth that Iran needs a way to deter its perceived enemies. Its security concerns are real and legitimate. The country is surrounded by U.S. bases and troops. Instability in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iraq feeds its security apprehensions. If Pakistan's government and its nuclear arsenal were to fall into the wrong hands, it would be menacing to Iran. And Iran's Arab neighbors, with few exceptions, proved unreliable (and in some cases, hostile) when Saddam Hussein's forces invaded the country, even remaining deafeningly silent as Iraq showered the Iranians with Scud missiles and chemical warheads.
Frankly, Iran cannot afford to develop only conventional deterrence against such threats, and it will not rely on imported armaments again. Which may explain why Iran's rulers would desire an alternative deterrent: limited nuclear weapons coupled with domestically manufactured missiles.
Still, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who has negotiated with Iran's rulers for months, says that although they will not give up the right to a nuclear program, they will allow the agency to monitor it to assure it would not turn into a weapons program.
Iran's clerical rulers are a fraternity of cunning ideologues, but they are not suicidal. Talk of regime change and military attack from abroad only stiffens the clerics' hold on power, making them more inflexible. And Iranians, proud of their history as one of the world's oldest nations and profoundly nationalistic, would support the regime, even though it is unpopular, if the country were attacked.
Rather than threatening Iran, the United States should recognize that the way to change its policy is through soft diplomacy and education. It is crucial to distinguish the Iranian people from their clerical rulers. The people, especially Iranian youth, must be cultivated and persuaded that the best hope for their national ambitions does not lie with the policies of the regime. If the people are persuaded, their rulers will follow, and Iran's policies will change.
WASHINGTON - Anyone who still believes that the US neo-conservatives who led the drive to war in Iraq are diabolically clever, geostrategic masterminds should now consider Iran's vastly improved position vis-a-vis its US-occupied neighbor.
Not only did Washington knock off Tehran's arch-foe, Saddam Hussein, as well as the anti-Iranian Taliban in Afghanistan, but, with the near completion of a new constitution that is likely to guarantee a weak central government and substantial autonomy to much of the Shi'ite south, it also appears that Iran's influence in Iraq - already on the rise after last spring's inauguration of a pro-Iranian interim government - is set to grow further.
"The new constitution will strengthen the hand of the provincial forces in the south, which are pro-Iranian," according to University of Michigan Iraq expert Juan Cole, who notes that the state structure authorized by the draft charter would amount more to a
confederation than a federal system.
Moreover, Cole told Inter Press Service, the constitutional ban on any law that contravenes Islamic law will likely give Shi'ite clerics significant power over the state, moving Iraq much closer to the Iranian model.
"While there's no clerical dictator at the head of government as in Iran, if you had five ayatollahs on the Supreme Court who were striking down laws because they contravened Islam, that's pretty close to the Iranian system," he said.
In a recent colloquium for The Nation magazine, Shibley Telhami, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution, noted, "No one in Washington would have imagined that with all the human and financial costs of the war, the United States would find itself supporting a government ... [with] close ties to Iran and that would conclude a military agreement with Tehran for the training of Iraq forces, even as nearly 140,000 US troops remained on Iraq soil."
This, indeed, was not how it was supposed to turn out for neo-conservatives who had argued that the gratitude of Iraqis for their "liberation" from Saddam would result in the installation of a secular, pro-Western government that would permit its territory to be used for US military bases as yet another pressure point - or possible launching pad - against an increasingly beleaguered and unpopular Islamic republic (and Syria, too) next door.
When US troops, however, were not in fact greeted in Iraq with the "flowers and sweets" that they predicted, and an unexpected Sunni insurgency began to seriously challenge the occupation, neo-conservatives were unfazed.
By empowering the majority Shi'ites through elections, they argued, the US would create a democratic model that would prove irresistible for the increasingly disillusioned Iranian masses who - with political and possibly paramilitary support from the US - would rise up and overthrow the theocracy.
"Such a government supported by Iraq's Shi'ite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical dictatorship," argued the neo-conservatives' top Iran expert, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, in a Wall Street Journal column in December before the January 30 Iraq elections brought to power the Ibrahim Jaafari government.
But while Gerecht was confidently predicting that a Shi'ite government in Baghdad and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf would ring the death knell of the mullahs in Tehran, other analysts saw an altogether different scenario.
"The real long-term geopolitical winner of the 'war on terror' could be Iran," concluded a September 2004 report by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Britain's most influential foreign policy think-tank.
"The Iranians have so much control over what happens in Iraq," one of the authors, Gareth Stansfield, told USA Today then. "The United States is only beginning to realize this."
Contrary to Gerecht's predictions that influence, if not control, has only strengthened since the January elections, which were won by the Shi'ite coalition headed by Jafaari's Da'wa party and, most especially, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In addition to getting the most votes in the federal election, it swept nine out of the 11 provinces, including Baghdad province, where there are substantial Shi'ite populations.
"In 1982, Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini created [SCIRI], whose members included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the current SCIRI leader and Jaafari, Iraq's current prime minister," Cole told The Nation's colloquium. "Khomeini dreamed of putting them in power in Baghdad. Bush and [Pentagon chief Donald] Rumsfeld have fulfilled that dream."
Since coming to power, these officials broke entirely with the frosty relationship with Iran carried out by the government of transitional prime minister Iyad Allawi and initiated what could only be described as warm, if not, fraternal relations with the Islamic republic.
Accords were struck between the two countries covering military aid and cooperation, major infrastructure projects - including the construction of an oil pipeline that will send Iraqi oil to Iran for refining - an airport in the holy city of Najaf for Iranian pilgrims and other aid programs, including schools, medical clinics and mosques.
Last month's three-day visit by Jaafari to Tehran, where he was warmly received by Iran's top leaders, including its new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, was capped by a reverential pilgrimage to the tomb of Khomeini in a gesture that could not have been interpreted as a good sign, even by Gerecht and other neo-conservatives.
"It was a love-fest," according to Cole.
And, as noted by a senior US diplomat in the Wall Street Journal last week, the recent audience with Sistani granted to Iran's outgoing foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, "didn't exactly please us", particularly because the ayatollah, widely considered the single-most influential leader in Iraq today, has refused to meet with any US official since the invasion.
Meanwhile, Iranian intelligence is reported to have so thoroughly penetrated Iraq's security forces and militias - many of whose members were trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard - that the US military has restricted its own intelligence-sharing practices with its Iraqi charges, according to officials here.
Indeed, as acknowledged by Gerecht, many Iraqi government leaders had lived for years, in some cases decades, in Iran and been supported there by the government. Even Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president in the government, was dependent to a great extent on Iranian support during Saddam's reign.
While Cole does not entirely discount Gerecht's thesis that a Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad, operating under the influence of Sistani's quietest views of Islam's relationship to the state, could eventually act as a counter-model to Tehran and thus undermine support for the clerical regime, he doesn't rule out that the Iranians, who have shown a growing willingness to confront the US since January's elections, have the neo-conservatives to thank for their good fortune so far.
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