Creating an Iran-Iraq axis

Peter W. Galbraith

For at least 500 years, the eastern boundary of what is now Iraq has been one of the Middle East's great dividing lines. For centuries, it separated empires, civilizations, and the two main branches of Islam. Twenty-five years ago, a dispute over the location of a small part of the boundary--whether it should go in the Talweg of the Shatt al-Arab as the Iranians wanted or the eastern shore as the Iraqis wanted--ignited an eight year war that took more than a million lives and involved the first extensive use of chemical weapons since World War I.

Today, the border is less a barrier than a conduit of Iranian influence and ideology into Iraq and the Middle East. This represents an historic shift of seismic proportions that could have profound consequences for the Middle East, especially the Shi'ite majority Arab lands like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia's oil rich Eastern Province.

In the 2002 run up to the Iraq war, US President George W. Bush denounced an Iran-Iraq (and North Korea) axis of evil. It is deeply ironic that US actions created the modern Iran-Iraq axis--which certainly did not exist when Bush gave his speech--and bizarre that US policies continue to strengthen it.

The signs of Iran's influence are apparent, especially in the south of Iraq. During a visit to Basra in 2004, I noticed that the major monument to the Iran-Iraq war--some eighty bronze soldiers pointing accusingly toward Iran across the Shatt al-Arab--had been demolished by the local authorities. Where portraits of Saddam Hussein once were displayed near public buildings and at city entrances, I saw portraits of deceased Shi'ite clerics, including Ayatollah Khomeini, whose vindictive prolongation of the Iran-Iraq war cost the lives of several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers.

In the ongoing constitutional deliberations, Iraq's Shi'ite leaders are pushing to include Persians as a named minority in Iraq's constitution, a symbolically important recognition of a shift in Iraq's identity. Iraq's Shi'ite-led government publicly apologized for starting the Iran-Iraq war, a historically accurate statement that would have been unthinkable for the Sunni Arab nationalists who ruled Iraq from the country's founding until April 9, 2003.

Iraq's Shi'ite-led government has taken steps to tie the two countries closer together. In July, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari led a ten minister delegation to Tehran that concluded a number of agreements to bolster ties. The most striking is the agreement to construct an export oil pipeline from Basra to the Iranian port of Abadan, a measure that will give Iran a significant control over southern Iraq's most important strategic resource. Just before the Jaafari visit, Iraq's defense minister, himself a Sunni Arab, was in Tehran concluding an agreement on military cooperation that includes Iranian training of the Iraqi armed forces.

There is also a sinister side to Iran's enhanced role in Iraq. Iranian agents penetrate a significant part of Iraq's security and intelligence services, not totally surprising given that Iraq's interior minister is the former head of the Badr Corps, the Iranian created and funded military arm of Iraq's largest Shi'ite party, SCIRI. Like the Kurdish peshmerga, the Badr Corps provided serious--and heroic--resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime and is now being integrated into Iraq's security services and military. Iranians are said to play a role in the government of Basra--and in the shadowy Islamic militia whose word is now the law in parts of that city. I have also been told by a senior official in the Iraqi government that Iran is running hit squads inside Iraq, assassinating those they believe responsible for some of the excesses of the Iran-Iraq war, including air force pilots.

The major reason for Iran's rising influence in Iraq is, of course, the political triumph of the Shi'ite religious parties it sponsored for decades. Iraqi Shi'ites consider Iran a reliable friend, while almost every Shi'ite recalls how the first President Bush called for the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam during the first Gulf war, and then stood on the sidelines while Republican Guard units put down the Shi'ite uprising, leading to the massacre of as many as 300,000.

Oddly, the Bush administration seems to have noticed none of this. The neo-conservative authors of the Iraq war convinced themselves--and told everyone else--that, because Iraq's Shi'ites were Arabs, they would not come under Iran's influence. Even as the Shi'ites move to incorporate the marjah--Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric--into the constitution, administration defenders insist that the Shi'ites have no desire to create an Iranian style Islamic state.

In the critical days leading up to the adoption of an Iraqi constitution, the US is using its might to promote a centralized Iraqi state in full control of Iraq's financial resources (oil) and with a single military able to operate throughout the country. This puts the US at odds with Iraq's Kurds who insist on retaining their own military (the peshmerga, who were key US allies in the 2003 war) and having control over a share of Iraq's oil. The pro-western Kurds represent the one organized force that can resist the growing Iranian influence in the country. But, for President Bush, containing Iran appears to be more a rhetorical objective than an actual one.

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- Published 11/8/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org Used here with permission.

Peter W. Galbraith , a former US ambassador to Croatia, is senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. His most recent piece on Iraq, "Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic" appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.