Iraq, Iran, and the United States

By Selig S. Harrison  |  The Foreign Service Journal
Published March, 2010

The 2003 American invasion of Iraq aroused both anxiety and hope in Iran. The advent of U.S. military forces and bases on its western border posed a potential threat to its security. At the same time, the destruction of the Sunni-dominated Saddam Hussein dictatorship stirred expectations that the Shiite majority in Iraq would come into its own, at last, after five centuries of Sunni minority rule, and that Iraq would tilt toward Iran after U.S. forces left.

Seven years later, the Obama administration remains committed to the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. However, major uncertainties remain concerning our future role there and how it will affect Iran. Two key emerging issues have special importance in Iranian eyes. One is whether the U.S. Air Force will be able to continue using the bases it has developed in Iraq to deploy long-range bombers capable of striking Iran. The other is whether the United States will continue to tolerate the political dominance of Tehran-oriented Shiite political forces in Iraq, as it has done since the 2005 elections, or will work, instead, with Saudi Arabia to contain Iranian influence in Baghdad. Washington’s position on these little-discussed issues could well prove to be of critical importance in its ongoing effort to negotiate a modus vivendi with Iran. The centrality of Iraq in Iranian attitudes toward the United States was underlined to me repeatedly during three visits to Tehran in 2007 and 2008. On one of these trips, I attended a four-hour seminar with 15 Iranian specialists on Iraq from different government agencies, arranged at my request. “You know, we’ve been waiting for this moment since 1639,” commented Mahmoud Vaezi, a former deputy foreign minister who now directs the Center for Strategic Research, a think-tank affiliated with the Expediency Council, a government body headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. I didn’t know what had happened in 1639, but soon learned that it was the year in which the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin was signed. This was the treaty that defined the boundary between Safavid Persia and the advancing Ottoman Turks, who pushed Persia out of what was to become the modern state of Iraq. As Richard D. Frye observes in The Golden Age of Persia, “The separation of eastern and western Iran is evident, and throughout Iran’s history the western part of the land has been frequently more closely connected with the lowlands of Mesopotamia than with the rest of the plateau to the east of the central deserts.” Before 1639, Persia had extensive influence in Mesopotamia through local Shiite principalities. The Shia religious universe embraced parts of both Persia and Mesopotamia, and the Shia faithful commuted between religious centers on both sides, just as they do today. (An estimated four million Iranians visited Karbala and Najaf in Iraq last year and some two million Iraqis visited Qom in Iran.) After 1639, the Turks and, later, the British installed a succession of Sunni puppet regimes in Iraq. Then came Saddam Hussein’s Sunni dictatorship and his invasion of Iran in 1980, launched with U.S. help and encouragement. What Vaezi’s reference to 1639 meant was that for nearly five centuries, Iran has been hoping the day would come when Sunni minority rule would end in Baghdad, and Tehran would get back some of its old influence.

In Friendly Hands?

During the Foreign Ministry seminar, S.A. Niknam, who had been chargé d’affaires in the Iranian embassy in Baghdad for five years during the Iran-Iraq War, exclaimed: “How can you accuse us of ‘interfering’ in Iraq? You have come from 6,000 miles away with 160,000 soldiers. We are an immediate neighbor with a 1,000-mile border and intimate historical, religious and economic ties going back centuries. You helped Saddam against us in a war that cost us more than 300,000 lives, so naturally we want to be sure that Iraq is in friendly hands.” By a “friendly” Iraq, Iran means one dominated by its Shiite co-religionists, who make up about 62 percent of the population. Thus, Tehran was delighted when the United States, prodded by United Nations mediator Lakhdar Brahimi and Iraq’s pre-eminent Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, bowed to demands for elections in 2005 on terms that
assured the victory of the Shiite majority. Then and now, Iran has carefully avoided committing fully to any faction in Iraq’s internal Shiite power struggles. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security, also known as VEVAK, and other Iranian intelligence agencies have assisted militias maintained by both the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the vehicle of the Shiite mercantile and middle classes, and Moqtada al- Sadr’s urban populist movement. They have also worked closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s smaller Daawa Party, and have gradually increased their influence in the internal security agencies of his ISCI-linked regime. Soon after its 2003 invasion, the United States sponsored the creation of the National Intelligence Service, headed by a longtime anti-Saddam CIA ally, Mohammed Shahwani, a Sunni. Al-Maliki countered by installing an Iran-trained VEVAK protégé, Sheerwan al-Waeli, as head of the Ministry of National Security, and succeeded in replacing Shahwani with his own man in August 2009. Iranian concerns about the direction of U.S. policy have focused on the so-called “Sunni Awakening” that the George W. Bush administration promoted after the 2005 parliamentary elections. This amounted to the employment of some 91,000 mercenaries in Sunni militias under U.S. control in a program aimed at improving security that cost an estimated $150 million per year at its peak. Each fighter was nominally paid $300 a month. But as Steven Simon points out in his article in the May/June 2008 Foreign Affairs, the Sunni tribal sheiks involved took “as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent,” which meant that “commanding 200 fighters could be worth over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief.” Because the Sunni militias posed a direct challenge to the predominantly Shiite army that al-Maliki was building up, ISCI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim complained that “weapons should be in the hands of the government only, and the government alone should decide who gets them. The alternative will be perpetual civil war.” Pressure from al-Maliki eventually led to the termination of the program in return for promises that the demobilized fighters would be absorbed into his army. But this has yet to happen on any significant scale. In Baghdad, the principal legacy of the program is Sunni outrage that could lead to a rebirth of al-Qaida activity in Iraq. And in Iranian eyes, the Sunni Awakening has aroused deep suspicion that Washington is pursuing a conscious “divide and rule” strategy designed to build up a Sunni counterweight to Shiite power. The death of Supreme Council leader al-Hakim on Aug. 26, 2009, accentuated a power struggle within the Shiite leadership that could affect the stability of the Baghdad government, but it is not likely to weaken Iran’s political clout in Baghdad. Iran orchestrated the creation of a new Shiite coalition at a meeting last August that united the ISCI, al-Sadr’s forces and the Tanzimal- Iraq branch of Daawa in the new United Iraqi Alliance.

“A Disgraceful Pact”

Al-Maliki, like many other Shiite political leaders of his generation, spent the Iran-Iraq War years (1980-1988) in exile in Iran and has longstanding ties with VEVAK. Initially, he had Tehran’s blessing when he became prime minister, but relations suffered during the protracted struggle with the Bush administration in 2007 and 2008 over the terms of the security agreement under which the United States has pledged to withdraw all of its combat forces. When a draft U.S.-Iraq accord without a withdrawal timetable was signed on March 17, 2008, it remained a well-kept secret until nationalist critics within al-Maliki’s inner circle leaked it to Iranian diplomats and to the Iraqi media. The reaction in Tehran was explosive. On May 11, 2008, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hardline daily newspaper Kayhan, attacked the agreement in a vitriolic signed editorial titled “Iraq on the Edge.” He handed a copy to me during an hourlong interview this past June. “If you want to know what has been happening,” he said, “I suggest you read this.” Shariatmadari is the “Personal Representative of the Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is seen as his media spokesman. “How is it,” the editorial asked, “that the Maliki government took the first steps toward signing such a disgraceful pact in the first place?” The United States, it said, is using the treaty to “sow the seeds of discord” between al-Maliki and his coalition partner, al-Hakim, so that “the U.S. can put pro-American individuals in charge. It is amazing that al-Maliki failed to see such a conspiracy coming.” In a clear warning to the prime minister, the editorial added that if the treaty is implemented, Iraqis would replace his government with “another Islamist government.” Al-Maliki was summoned to Tehran for a three-day dressingdown (June 7-9, 2008) that led to his announcement, on June 13 in Amman, that negotiations with the United States had reached “a dead end and a deadlock.” Informants in government-affiliated think-tanks told me that he had had “difficult” meetings, as one put it, with Khamenei and with the Revolutionary Guard generals who oversee Iraqi policy. Soon thereafter, Iranian newspapers reported, al-Maliki’s defense minister signed a mutual security accord with his Iranian counterpart. It has never been made public. The deadlock between Baghdad and Washington ended when the Bush administration agreed that the projected security agreement would have a “time horizon.” And on Nov. 18, 2008, after haggling over seven drafts, a final version of the agreement was adopted, providing for the full withdrawal of U.S. combat forces by Dec. 31, 2011. To cover its retreat, the White House maintained that the success of the “surge” policy had enabled Iraq to stand on its own, releasing pent-up nationalist opposition to the presence of foreign soldiers. This, in turn, had supposedly compelled al-Maliki to insist on a withdrawal timetable so that his opponents could not use nationalism against him in the forthcoming elections. But what this explanation omitted was the crucial role that Iran had played in al-Maliki’s conversion. Alireza Sheikhattar, who was first deputy foreign minister  when I visited Tehran in June 2008, told me that Iran would not allow the continued operation of U.S. air bases that could make Iraq “a platform for harming the security of Iran and other neighbors. Why should the U.S. have air bases in Iraq?” Baghdad can take care of its own defense, he said, “and the Iraqis should have a real air force of their own. Why are they prohibited from having more than token aircraft and related facilities, even for civil aviation? They are not poor. They can purchase fighters and have their own aircraft for both internal and external security.”

Addressing Security Concerns

Wouldn’t this pose a potential security threat to Iran? Not if Iraq has a sovereign, democratic government, Sheikhattar said. “There is an absolute majority in favor of Iran” now that the Shiite government is in control, he assured me. Iraq is now seeking to buy 108 aircraft through 2011, including 36 late-model F-16 fighter-bombers from the United States. So far the Pentagon has not made a decision on the F-16s, but it has agreed to sell 24 U.S. attack helicopters and six C-130 transport planes to Baghdad. As if in reply to Sheikhattar, Admiral William J. Fallon, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, emphasized in a July 20, 2008, New York Times article that “control of Iraqi airspace” would be an “important component of the security agreement that would require clearheaded negotiations.” The final draft of the agreement gave “surveillance and control over Iraqi air space” to Baghdad. At the same time, Article 9, Section 2 of the accord permits U.S. aircraft “to overfly and conduct airborne refueling;” Articles 5 and 6 envisage the continued U.S. operation of bases by allowing U.S. forces the “access and use” of “some necessary facilities” after the withdrawal of combat forces; and Article 7 envisages the pre-positioning of equipment under U.S. control. The provision for airborne refueling was a major focus of contention in the negotiations on the accord, because it is viewed in Tehran as giving the U.S. Air Force unrestricted operational latitude that could be used for bombing or surveillance missions in Iran. Sheikhattar, now the Iranian ambassador to Germany, points in particular to the giant Balad Air Base north of Baghdad, just 74 miles away from the Iranian border and 429 miles from Tehran, where the U.S. Air Force currently bases two squadrons of F-16 fighter-bombers, each capable of carrying 24 tons of bombs. Balad has also been a launching pad for Qatar-based B-1 bombers and Predator unmanned espionage surveillance aircraft. Spread out over 15 square miles, Balad was second only to Heathrow Airport in London in the volume of its air traffic at the height of the war in Iraq. The expansion and modernization of the base has been steadily proceeding, with $87 million allocated to new construction in the fiscal 2007 budget and $58.3 million more in 2008. This has included hardening its two 11,000 foot runways, which will now be serviceable until 2014, and installing the latest lighting technology for night operations. “We’re good now for as long as we need to run it,” the Chief Air Force Engineer there, Lt. Col. Scott Hoover, told Associated Press correspondent Charles J. Hanley. “Ten years?” Hanley asked. “I’d say so,” he replied. The master plan for Balad’s expansion has served as a model for three other air bases near the Iranian border: Al-Asad, where $76 million in new construction is under way, Tallil and Al Kut. While denying that the United States wants “permanent bases,” Defense Department officials acknowledge that they hope for “long-term access.” And Articles 5, 6 and 7 of the security accord explicitly envisage a substantial U.S. presence and pre-positioned equipment and weaponry. Iran, for its part, will no doubt be carefully monitoring the type of long-range aircraft and surveillance capabilities that turn up at the bases along its borders and whether they are deployed there on a regular basis. The Iranians I met were reconciled to the continued presence of U.S. military personnel for training purposes following the withdrawal of combat forces, and even to U.S. participation in operations against al-Qaida and other Sunni extremist groups. But the future of the air bases will clearly be highly contentious and could well affect the Obama administration’s diplomatic effort to rule out an Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

Mutual Interests

What has been missing so far in the U.S. posture is a readiness to acknowledge that Tehran, too, has security concerns. This is especially clear in terms of the nuclear issue. It was a promise of security guarantees that led to Tehran’s willingness to suspend all uranium enrichment in November 2004, at the start of talks with the European Union on a permanent ban. And it was the Bush administration’s unwillingness to join in such guarantees that led to the breakdown of the talks and the resumption of enrichment. The language of the joint declaration that launched the negotiations was unambiguous. “A mutually acceptable agreement,” it said, would not only provide “objective guarantees” that Iran’s nuclear program is “exclusively for peaceful purposes” but would “equally provide firm commitments on security issues.” In addition to security guarantees relating specifically to military issues, Iran would be likely to seek broader guarantees in future negotiations ruling out U.S. support for overthrow of its government. The Obama administration has already sought to distance itself from the active support for “regime change” reflected in its predecessor’s overt democracy promotion and its covert support of disaffected ethnic minorities. Nevertheless, Iranian leaders have continued to warn against U.S. support for a “Velvet Revolution” amid the unrest that has followed the contested June 2009 elections. And it continues to accuse the United States of supporting Kurdish separatists as well as Jundullah, a Baluch separatist movement. Speaking at Bijar in Iranian Kurdistan on May 12, 2009, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that “unfortunately, across our borders, our western borders … money, arms and organization are being used by the Americans in fighting the Islamic Republic’s system.” Many journalists have long reported that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, gives arms to Pejak, an Iranian Kurdish separatist group. And New Yorker reporter Jon Lee Andersoninterviewed a senior Kurdish officialin 2008 who said that Pejak operatesout of bases in Iraqi Kurdistan with“covert U.S. support” to conductraids in Iran.Precisely because Tehran fearsKurdish separatism, Iran shares thegoal of a unified Iraq with the United States. It does notwant to see the Iraqi Kurds break away and link up with theKurds in Iran and Turkey.This shared opposition to the balkanization of Iraq and amutual interest in promoting its economic stability providethe basis for U.S.-Iranian cooperation in Baghdad — butonly if Washington is sensitive to Iranian security concernsand recognizes that Tehran views the maintenance of a“friendly” regime in Iraq as essential to its security.George W. Bush sharply limited U.S. options when heended five centuries of minority Sunni rule by deposing Saddam Hussein. Iraq will now be, willy-nilly, closer to Iran than to any other external power, and it would be self-defeating for the United States to fly in the face of this reality by aligning with Sunni interests in Baghdad. To be sure, the United States does have a moral obligation to do what it can to minimize persecution of Sunnis. But there is no escaping the hard reality that they will now have to adjust to Shia dominance, just as the Shias did for so long under Sunni rule. Ray Takeyh, a leading Iran scholar who has advised the Obama administration, puts it well. “The door to walk into a larger negotiation between the United States and Iran would be through Iraq,” he said, “where there is some coincidence of interests. But you can’t do that if your declared policy is to prevent a country next door from having any influence in the country that is right there.”

Selig S. Harrison visited Iran in June 2007 and in February and June 2008. As South Asia Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, and, later, as a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he did research there before the 1979 revolution and authored a study of its ethnic tension, In Afghanistan’s Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations (CEIP, 1980), as well as four other books on Asian affairs and U.S.-Asian relations. He is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy.

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