[Marxism] Very useful item on Iran-US relations from Nv Review Books

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I had not realized that the Iran rulers offered to cobble together a
non-religious government for Iram if Washington would call off its dogs.
Today, they are more confident. The US occupation of Iraq has been weighed
in the  balance and found wanting.
Rred

Volume 54, Number 15 . October 11, 2007
 Review
The Victor?
By Peter W. Galbraith
Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United
States
by Trita Parsi
Yale University Press, 361 pp., $28.00

1.
In his continuing effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush
traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to speak to the annual convention of
the American Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian threat should the
United States withdraw from Iraq. Said the President, "For all those who ask
whether the fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups
backed by Iran control large parts of the country."

On the same day, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a
militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, battled
government security forces around the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite
Islam's holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the city and fifty-one
died.

The US did not directly intervene, but American jets flew overhead in
support of the government security forces. As elsewhere in the south, those
Iraqi forces are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded,
trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When US forces ousted Saddam's regime
from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from
Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration's failure to plan for
security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.


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In the months that followed, the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) appointed Badr Organization leaders to key positions in Iraq's
American-created army and police. At the same time, L. Paul Bremer's CPA
appointed party officials from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI) to be governors and serve on governorate councils throughout
southern Iraq. SCIRI, recently renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council
(SIIC), was founded at the Ayatollah Khomeini's direction in Tehran in 1982.
The Badr Organization is the militia associated with SCIRI.

In the January 2005 elections, SCIRI became the most important component of
Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition. In exchange for not taking the prime
minister's slot, SCIRI won the right to name key ministers, including the
minister of the interior. From that ministry, SCIRI placed Badr militiamen
throughout Iraq's national police.

In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he
warned would be a disastrous consequence of a US withdrawal from Iraq: the
takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. And
while the President contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the
tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran
than in southern Iraq.

Iran's role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its
permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically
engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian
ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it
happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's
central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a
single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian
Iraqis it supported-by then established as the government of Iraq-as much
power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the US nor Iran
succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want to see the
central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic,
political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link
the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from
southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive
military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official
in Iraq's Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq's
daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of
Iraq's production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised
to the Iraqi army. With the US supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of
billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no
reason to invest its own resources.


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Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory
is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman
Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin
demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands.
For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that
line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam
Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq
dominated by Iran's allies.) The 2003 US invasion of Iraq accomplished what
Khomeini's army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the
borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a
Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments;
but so is Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, which is home to most of the
kingdom's Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is
unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The US Navy has
its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia's
oil is under the Eastern Province.

America's Iraq quagmire has given new life to Iran's Syrian ally, Bashir
Assad. In 2003, the Syrian Baathist regime seemed an anachronism unable to
survive the region's political and economic changes. Today, Assad appears
firmly in control, having even recovered from the opprobrium of having his
regime caught red-handed in the assassination of former Leb-anese Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, Hezbollah enjoys greatly enhanced stature
for having held off the Israelis in the 2006 war. As Hezbollah's sponsor and
source of arms, Iran now has an influence both in the Levant and in the
Arab-Israeli conflict that it never before had.

The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war
began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's
Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling
the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the
Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western."
Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi
Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that,
unfortunately, had no connection to reality.

Iran's bond with the Iraqi Shiites goes far beyond the support Iran gave
Shiite leaders in their struggle with Saddam Hussein. Decades of oppression
have made their religious identity more important to Iraqi Shiites than
their Arab ethnic identity. (Also, many Iraqi Shiites have Turcoman,
Persian, or Kurdish ancestors.) While Sunnis identify with the Arab world,
Iraqi Shiites identify with the Shiite world, and for many this means Iran.

There is also the legacy of February 15, 1991, when President George H.W.
Bush called on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Two weeks
later, the Shiites in southern Iraq did just that. When Saddam's Republican
Guards moved south to crush the rebellion, President Bush went fishing and
no help was given. Only Iran showed sympathy. Hundreds of thousands died and
no Iraqi Shiite I know thinks this failure of US support was anything but
intentional. In assessing the loyalty of the Iraqi Shiites before the war,
the war's architects often stressed how Iraqi Shiite conscripts fought
loyally for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. They never mentioned the 1991
betrayal. This was understandable: at the end of the 1991 war, Wolfowitz was
the number-three man at the Pentagon, Dick Cheney was the defense secretary,
and, of course, Bush's father was the president.

Iran and its Iraqi allies control, respectively, the Middle East's third-
and second-largest oil reserves. Iran's influence now extends to the borders
of the Saudi province that holds the world's largest oil reserves. President
Bush has responded to these strategic changes wrought by his own policies by
strongly supporting a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and by arming and
training the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military and police.

2.
Beginning with his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush has
articulated two main US goals for Iran: (1) the replacement of Iran's
theocratic regime with a liberal democracy, and (2) preventing Iran from
acquiring nuclear weapons. Since events in Iraq took a bad turn, he has
added a third objective: gaining Iranian cooperation in Iraq.

The administration's track record is not impressive. The prospects for
liberal democracy in Iran took a severe blow when reform-minded President
Mohammad Khatami was replaced by the hard-line-and somewhat erratic -Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad in August 2005. (Khatami had won two landslide elections which
were a vote to soften the ruling theocracy; he was then prevented by the
conservative clerics from accomplishing much.) At the time President Bush
first proclaimed his intention to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands,
Iran had no means of making fissile material. Since then, however, Iran has
defied the IAEA and the UN Security Council to assemble and use the
centrifuges needed to enrich uranium. In Iraq, the administration accuses
Iran of supplying particularly potent roadside bombs to Shiite militias and
Sunni insurgents.

To coerce Iran into ceasing its uranium enrichment program, the Bush
administration has relied on UN sanctions, the efforts of a European
negotiating team, and stern presidential warnings. The mismanaged Iraq war
has undercut all these efforts. After seeing the US go to the United Nations
with allegedly irrefutable evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and
biological weapons and had a covert nuclear program, foreign governments and
publics are understandably skeptical about the veracity of Bush
administration statements on Iran. The Iraq experience makes many countries
reluctant to support meaningful sanctions not only because they doubt
administration statements but because they are afraid President Bush will
interpret any Security Council resolution condemning Iran as an
authorization for war.

With so much of the US military tied up in Iraq, the Iranians do not believe
the US has the resources to attack them and then deal with the consequences.
They know that a US attack on Iran would have little support in the US-it is
doubtful that Congress would authorize it-and none internationally. Not even
the British would go along with a military strike on Iran. President Bush's
warnings count for little with Tehran because he now has a long record of
tough language unmatched by action. As long as the Iranians believe the
United States has no military option, they have limited incentives to reach
an agreement, especially with the Europeans.

The administration's efforts to change Iran's regime have been feeble or
feckless. President Bush's freedom rhetoric is supported by Radio Farda, a
US-sponsored Persian language radio station, and a $75 million appropriation
to finance Iranian opposition activities including satellite broadcasts by
Los Angeles-based exiles. If only regime change was so easily accomplished!

The identity of Iranian recipients of US funding is secret but the
administration's neoconservative allies have loudly promoted US military and
financial support for Iranian opposition groups as diverse as the son of the
late Shah, Iranian Kurdish separatists, and the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK),
which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Some of
the Los Angeles exiles now being funded are associated with the son of the
Shah but it is unlikely that either the MEK or the Kurdish separatists would
receive any of the $75 million. US secrecy-and that the administration
treats the MEK differently from other terrorist organizations-has roused
Iranian suspicions that the US is supporting these groups either through the
democracy program or a separate covert action.


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None of these groups is a plausible agent for regime change. The Shah's son
represents a discredited monarchy and corrupt family. Iranian Kurdistan is
seething with discontent, and Iranian security forces have suppressed large
anti-regime demonstrations there. Kurdish nationalism on the margins of
Iran, however, does not weaken the Iranian regime at the center. (While the
US State Department has placed the PKK-a Kurdish rebel movement in Turkey-on
its list of terrorist organizations, Pejak, the PKK's Iranian branch, is not
on the list and its leaders even visit the US.)

The Mujahideen-e-Khalq is one of the oldest-and nastiest-of the Iranian
opposition groups. After originally supporting the Iranian revolution, the
MEK broke with Khomeini and relocated to Iraq in the early stages of the
Iran-Iraq War. It was so closely connected to Saddam that MEK fighters not
only assisted the Iraqis in the Iran- Iraq War but also helped Saddam put
down the 1991 Kurdish uprising. While claiming to be democratic and
pro-Western, the MEK closely resembles a cult. In April 2003, when I visited
Camp Ashraf, its main base northeast of Baghdad, I found robotlike hero
worship of the MEK's leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi; the fighters I met
parroted a revolutionary party line, and there were transparently crude
efforts at propaganda. To emphasize its being a modern organization as
distinct from the Tehran theocrats, the MEK appointed a woman as Camp
Ashraf's nominal commander and maintained a women's tank battalion. The
commander was clearly not in command and the women mechanics supposedly
working on tank engines all had spotless uniforms.

Both the US State Department and Iran view the MEK as a terrorist group. The
US government, however, does not always act as if the MEK were one. During
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military dropped a single bomb on Camp
Ashraf. It struck the women's barracks at a time of day when the soldiers
were not there. When I visited two weeks later with an ABC camera crew, we
filmed the MEK bringing a scavenged Iraqi tank into their base. US forces
drove in and out of Camp Ashraf, making no effort to detain the supposed
terrorists or to stop them from collecting Iraqi heavy weapons. Since Iran
had its agents in Iraq from the time Saddam fell (and may have been doing
its own scavenging of weapons), one can presume that this behavior did not
go unnoticed. Subsequently, the US military did disarm the MEK, but in spite
of hostility from both the Shiites and Kurds who now jointly dominate Iraq's
government, its fighters are still at Camp Ashraf. Rightly or wrongly, many
Iranians conclude from this that the US is supporting a terrorist
organization that is fomenting violence inside Iran.

In fact, halting Iran's nuclear program and changing its regime are
incompatible objectives. Iran is highly unlikely to agree to a negotiated
solution with the US (or the Europeans) while the US is trying to overthrow
its government. Air strikes may destroy Iran's nuclear facilities but they
will rally popular support for the regime and give it a further pretext to
crack down on the opposition.

>From the perspective of US national security strategy, the choice should be
easy. Iran's most prominent democrats have stated publicly that they do not
want US support. In a recent open letter to be sent to UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon, the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji criticizes both the Iranian
regime and US hypocrisy. "Far from helping the development of democracy," he
writes, "US policy over the past 50 years has consistently been to the
detriment of the proponents of freedom and democracy in Iran.... The Bush
Administration, for its part, by approving a fund for democracy assistance
in Iran, which is in fact being largely spent on official institutions and
media affiliated with the US government, has made it easy for the Iranian
regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them
with impunity."

Even though they can't accomplish it, the Bush administration leaders have
been unwilling to abandon regime change as a goal. Its advocates compare
their efforts to the support the US gave democrats behind the Iron Curtain
over many decades. But there is a crucial difference. The Soviet and East
European dissidents wanted US support, which was sometimes personally costly
but politically welcome. But this is immaterial to administration
ideologues. They are, to borrow Jeane Kirkpatrick's phrase, deeply committed
to policies that feel good rather than do good. If Congress wants to help
the Iranian opposition, it should cut off funding for Iranian democracy
programs.

Right now, the US is in the worst possible position. It is identified with
the most discredited part of the Iranian opposition and unwanted by the
reformers who have the most appeal to Iranians. Many Iranians believe that
the US is fomenting violence inside their country, and this becomes a
pretext for attacks on US troops in Iraq. And for its pains, the US
accomplishes nothing.
[snip'




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