What’s
Wrong Today:
Great
is the guilt of an unnecessary war- John Adams
With Iran’s
President Hassan Rouhani conducting a charm offensive in and around the UN and
Secretary of State Kerry meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif to see if there is a way to end the protracted conflict over Iran’s
nuclear program, it is useful to remember that the real victor in the 2003 war
between the US and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government was the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
Dexter
Filkins has an article in the New Yorker that
says just that. While it may not be news to some, the article describes how
Iran both engineered the new Iraqi government and the withdrawal of US forces from
Iraq.
The
article profiles the little-known Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, a division of
the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps. From Filkins:
command of the Quds Force fifteen years ago, and he has sought to reshape the
Middle East in Iran’s favor, working as a power broker and as a military force:
assassinating rivals, arming allies, and…directing a network of militant
groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The US Department of the
Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime,
and for abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the
outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations. “Suleimani is the
single most powerful operative in the Middle East today,” John Maguire, a
former CIA officer in Iraq, told [Filkins] “and no one’s ever heard of him.”
Suleimani
was a division commander in the Iran-Iraq War while still in his twenties. His
power comes mostly from his close relationship with the Supreme Leader of Iran,
Ayatollah Khamenei, who refers to Suleimani as “a living martyr of the
revolution.”
Filkins continues:
Suleimani had sent operatives into Iraq to cultivate Shiite militias, so, when
Saddam fell, he already had a fighting force in place: the Badr Brigade, the
armed wing of a Shiite political party called the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But another Iranian-backed
militia—the Mahdi Army, headed by the populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—began
confronting the Americans. Suleimani found Sadr unpredictable and difficult to manage,
so the Quds Force began to organize other militias that were willing to attack
the Americans. Its operatives trained fighters in Iran, sometimes helped by
their comrades in Hezbollah.
Suleimani
began an aggressive campaign of sabotage against the US forces. In 2004, the
Quds Force began flooding Iraq with lethal roadside bombs that the Americans
referred to as EFP’s, for “explosively formed projectiles”, able to penetrate
armor. The EFP’s began to wreak havoc on
American troops, accounting for nearly 20% of combat deaths.
Iran’s
offensive in Iraq proved successful in both stressing US forces and building a
stronger domestic opposition to US occupation.
Suleimani’s
campaign against the US crossed the Sunni-Shiite divide. Early in the war,
Suleimani encouraged the head of intelligence for the Assad regime to
facilitate the movement of Sunni extremists through Syria to fight the
Americans.
As it
turned out, the Iranian strategy of abetting Sunni extremists backfired
horrendously: shortly after the occupation began, the same extremists began
attacking Shiite civilians and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. It was a
preview of the civil war to come.
A diplomat
told Filkins:
Middle East…Suleimani wanted to bleed the Americans, so he invited in the
jihadis, and things got out of control.
In
December, 2010, the formation of a new government, led by Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki was announced. The country had been without a
government for nine months, after parliamentary elections ended in an impasse.
At the time of the election, there were still nearly 100,000 American troops in
the country, and the US was still hoping to leave a residual force behind.
Filkins
reports:
deal that brought the Iraqi government together was made by Suleimani. In the months
before…Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him…and
extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his preferred candidate.
According to Filkins, there were the two conditions that Suleimani imposed
on the Iraqis. The first was that Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of the
Iranian regime, become President. The second was that Maliki and his coalition
partners insist that all American troops leave the country. Filkins reports an
Iraqi leader as saying:
Americans”…A ten-year relationship, down the drain.
That
spelled the end of US influence and the emergence of Iranian dominance in Iraq.
So the end result of George W. Bush’s ill-advised and poorly managed war in Iraq was to empower Iran to become an even greater regional power.
And
Suleimani? What is he up to now? Filkins reports that Suleimani’s greatest
achievement may be that he persuaded the Iraqi government to allow Iran to use Iraqi airspace to fly men and munitions to Syria:
flights are overseen by the Iraqi transportation minister, Hadi al-Amri, who is
an old ally of Suleimani’s—the former head of the Badr Brigade, and a soldier
on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War
And
Suleimani controls Iraqi politics by paying officials and by subsidizing
newspapers and television stations. Filkins quotes a former senior Iraqi
official:
have yet to see one Shia political party not taking money from Qassem Suleimani…He’s
the most powerful man in Iraq, without question.
So,
the Charge of the Lightweight Brigade
by Mr. Bush ended with his identified enemy in the “Axis of Evil” being in defacto
control of Iraq. Yet, as recently as April of this year, Bush is reported
as saying about Iraq: “I’m comfortable with what I did.”
“Shock
and Awe!” “Let’s Roll!” Let’s hear a golf clap for George W. Bush’s foreign
policy.
And since
then, we have pivoted to Asia, well, except for that Syria thing.
Another
winner in the Iraq war has been China. The New
York Times has reported that China is now Iraq’s biggest oil customer. From the NYT:
the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise
Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington.
“They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”
China buys
nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and
is angling for an even bigger share, bidding
for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.
Chinese state-owned companies are pouring more than $2 billion a year and
hundreds of workers into Iraq, and are showing a willingness to play by the new
Iraqi government’s rules and to accept lower profits to win contracts.
Didn’t
we go to war to preserve access to oil?
So, the
end state is that China is ensconced in Iraq and engaging in shuttle diplomacy
and business deals with Iran. Russia now takes a much more active role inside
Syria. At this rate, stability in the Middle East may be possible after all,
with the US relegated to the sidelines along with its problematic bedfellows,
Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Attack of
the killer “B’s”: Bush, Bibi, Bandar ― They deserve each other, but in reality,
America deserved much better.
