[NYTr] The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

NY Review of Books via Info Clearing House - Sep 29, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18780.htm

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. 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.

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.

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. 3.

For eighteen years, Iran had a secret program aimed at acquiring the
technology that could make nuclear weapons. A.Q. Khan, the supposedly
rogue head of Pakistan's nuclear program, provided centrifuges to
enrich uranium and bomb designs. When the Khan network was exposed,
Iran declared in October 2003 its enrichment program to the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), provided an accounting
(perhaps not complete) of its nuclear activities, and agreed to suspend
its uranium enrichment. Following the election of Ahmadinejad as
president in 2005, Iran announced it would resume its uranium
enrichment activities. During the last two years, it has assembled
cascades of centrifuges and apparently enriched a small amount of
uranium to the 5 percent level required for certain types of nuclear
power reactors (weapons require 80 to 90 percent enrichment but this is
not technically very difficult once the initial enrichment processes
are mastered).

The United States has two options for dealing with Iran's nuclear
facilities: military strikes to destroy them or negotiations to
neutralize them. The first is risky and the second may not produce
results. So far, the Bush administration has not pursued either option,
preferring UN sanctions (which, so far, have been more symbolic than
punitive) and relying on Europeans to take the lead in negotiations.
But neither sanctions nor the European initiative is likely to work. As
long as Iran's primary concern is the United States, it is unlikely to
settle for a deal that involves only Europe.

Sustained air strikes probably could halt Iran's nuclear program. While
some Iranian facilities may be hidden and others protected deep
underground, the locations of major facilities are known. Even if it is
not possible to destroy all the facilities, Iran's scientists,
engineers, and construction crews are unlikely to show up for work at
places that are subject to ongoing bombing.

But the risks from air strikes are great. Many of the potential targets
are in populated places, endangering civilians both from errant bombs
and the possible dispersal of radioactive material. The rest of the
world would condemn the attacks and there would likely be a virulent
anti-US reaction in the Islamic world. In retaliation, Iran could wreak
havoc on the world economy (and its own) by withholding oil from the
global market and by military action to close the Persian Gulf shipping
lanes.

The main risk to the US comes in Iraq. Faced with choosing between the
US and Iran, Iraq's government may not choose its liberator. And even
if the Iraqi government did not openly cooperate with the Iranians,
pro-Iranian elements in the US-armed military and police almost
certainly would facilitate attacks on US troops by pro-Iranian Iraqi
militia or by Iranian forces infiltrated across Iraq's porous border. A
few days after Bush's August 28 speech, Iranian General Rahim Yahya
Safavi underscored Iran's ability to retaliate, saying of US troops in
the region: "We have accurately identified all their camps." Unless he
chooses to act with reckless disregard for the safety of US troops in
Iraq, President Bush has effectively denied himself a military option
for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program.

A diplomatic solution to the crisis created by Iran's nuclear program
is clearly preferable, but not necessarily achievable. Broadly
speaking, states want nuclear weapons for two reasons: security and
prestige. Under the Shah, Iran had a nuclear program but Khomeini
disbanded it after the revolution on the grounds that nuclear weapons
were un-Islamic. When the program resumed covertly in the mid-1980s,
Iran's primary security concern was Iraq. At that time, Iraq had its
own covert nuclear program; more immediately, it had threatened Iran
with chemical weapons attacks on its cities. An Iranian nuclear weapon
could serve as a deterrent to both Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons.

With Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf War, the Iraqi threat greatly
diminished. And of course it vanished after Iran's allies took power in
Baghdad after the 2003 invasion. Today, Iran sees the United States as
the main threat to its security. American military forces surround
Iran—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia, and on the Persian Gulf.
President Bush and his top aides repeatedly express solidarity with the
Iranian people against their government while the US finances programs
aimed at the government's ouster. The American and international press
are full of speculation that Vice President Cheney wants Bush to attack
Iran before his term ends. From an Iranian perspective, all this smoke
could indicate a fire.

In 2003, as Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance shows, there was enough
common ground for a deal. In May 2003, the Iranian authorities sent a
proposal through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, for
negotiations on a package deal in which Iran would freeze its nuclear
program in exchange for an end to US hostility. The Iranian paper
offered "full transparency for security that there are no Iranian
endeavors to develop or possess WMD [and] full cooperation with the
IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments." The
Iranians also offered support for "the establishment of democratic
institutions and a non-religious government" in Iraq; full cooperation
against terrorists (including "above all, al-Qaeda"); and an end to
material support to Palestinian groups like Hamas. In return, the
Iranians asked that their country not be on the terrorism list or
designated part of the "axis of evil"; that all sanctions end; that the
US support Iran's claims for reparations for the Iran–Iraq War as part
of the overall settlement of the Iraqi debt; that they have access to
peaceful nuclear technology; and that the US pursue anti-Iranian
terrorists, including "above all" the MEK. MEK members should, the
Iranians said, be repatriated to Iran.

Basking in the glory of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, the Bush
administration dismissed the Iranian offer and criticized Guldimann for
even presenting it. Several years later, the Bush administration's
abrupt rejection of the Iranian offer began to look blatantly foolish
and the administration moved to suppress the story. Flynt Leverett, who
had handled Iran in 2003 for the National Security Council, tried to
write about it in The New York Times and found his Op-Ed crudely
censored by the NSC, which had to clear it. Guldimann, however, had
given the Iranian paper to Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney, now
remembered both for renaming House cafeteria food and for larceny. (As
chairman of the House Administration Committee he renamed French fries
"freedom fries" and is now in federal prison for bribery.) I was
surprised to learn that Ney had a serious side. He had lived in Iran
before the revolution, spoke Farsi, and wanted better relations between
the two countries. Trita Parsi, Ney's staffer in 2003, describes in
detail the Iranian offer and the Bush administration's high-handed
rejection of it in his wonderfully informative account of the
triangular relationship among the US, Iran, and Israel, Treacherous
Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.

Four years later, Iran holds a much stronger hand while the
mismanagement of the Iraq occupation has made the US position
incomparably weaker. While the 2003 proposal could not have been
presented without support from the clerics who really run Iran, Iran's
current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made uranium enrichment the
centerpiece of his administration and the embodiment of Iranian
nationalism. Even though Ahmadinejad does not make decisions about
Iran's nuclear program (and his finger would never be on the button if
Iran had a bomb), he has made it politically very difficult for the
clerics to come back to the 2003 paper.

Nonetheless, the 2003 Iranian paper could provide a starting point for
a US–Iran deal. In recent years, various ideas have emerged that could
accommodate both Iran's insistence on its right to nuclear technology
and the international community's desire for iron-clad assurances that
Iran will not divert the technology into weapons. These include a
Russian proposal that Iran enrich uranium on Russian territory and also
an idea floated by US and Iranian experts to have a European consortium
conduct the enrichment in Iran under international supervision. Iran
rejected the Russian proposal, but if hostility between Iran and the US
were to be reduced, it might be revived. (The consortium idea has no
official standing at this point.) While there are good reasons to doubt
Iranian statements that its program is entirely peaceful, Iran remains
a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its leaders,
including Ahmadinejad, insist it has no intention of developing nuclear
weapons. As long as this is the case, Iran could make a deal to limit
its nuclear program without losing face.

>From the inception of Iran's nuclear program under the Shah, prestige
and the desire for recognition have been motivating factors. Iranians
want the world, and especially the US, to see Iran as they do
themselves—as a populous, powerful, and responsible country that is
heir to a great empire and home to a 2,500-year-old civilization. In
Iranian eyes, the US has behaved in a way that continually diminishes
their country. Many Iranians still seethe over the US involvement in
the 1953 coup that overthrew the government of democratically elected
Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstated the Shah. Being
designated a terrorist state and part of an "axis of evil" grates on
the Iranians in the same way. In some ways, the 1979–1981 hostage
crisis and Iran's nuclear program were different strategies to compel
US respect for Iran. A diplomatic overture toward Iran might include
ways to show respect for Iranian civilization (which is different from
approval of its leaders) and could include an open apology for the US
role in the 1953 coup, which, as it turned out, was a horrible mistake
for US interests.

While President Bush insists that time is not on America's side, the
process of negotiation—and even an interim agreement—might provide time
for more moderate Iranians to assert themselves. So far as Iran's
security is concerned, possession of nuclear weapons is more a
liability than an asset. Iran's size—and the certainty of strong
resistance—is sufficient deterrent to any US invasion, which, even at
the height of the administration's post-Saddam euphoria, was never
seriously considered. Developing nuclear weapons would provide Iran
with no additional deterrent to a US invasion but could invite an
attack.

Should al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization succeed in detonating
a nuclear weapon in a US city, any US president will look to the
country that supplied the weapon as a place to retaliate. If the origin
of the bomb were unknown, a nuclear Iran—a designated state sponsor of
terrorism—would find itself a likely target, even though it is
extremely unlikely to supply such a weapon to al-Qaeda, a Sunni
fundamentalist organization. With its allies now largely running the
government in Baghdad, Iran does not need a nuclear weapon to deter a
hostile Iraq. An Iranian bomb, however, likely would cause Saudi Arabia
to acquire nuclear weapons, thus canceling Iran's considerable manpower
advantage over its Gulf rival. More pragmatic leaders, such as former
President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, may understand this. Rafsanjani,
who lost the 2005 presidential elections to Ahmadinejad, is making a
comeback, defeating a hard-liner to become chairman of Iran's Assembly
of Experts for the Leadership (Majles-e Khobrgran Rahbari), which
appoints and can dismiss the Supreme Leader.

At this stage, neither the US nor Iran seems willing to talk directly
about bilateral issues apart from Iraq. Even if the two sides did talk,
there is no guarantee that an agreement could be reached. And if an
agreement were reached, it would certainly be short of what the US
might want. But the test of a US–Iran negotiation is not how it
measures up against an ideal arrangement but how it measures up against
the alternatives of bombing or doing nothing. 4.

US pre-war intelligence on Iraq was horrifically wrong on the key
question of Iraq's possession of WMDs, and President Bush ignored the
intelligence to assert falsely a connection between Saddam Hussein and
September 11. This alone is sufficient reason to be skeptical of the
Bush administration's statements on Iran.

Some of the administration's charges against Iran defy common sense. In
his Reno speech, President Bush accused Iran of arming the Taliban in
Afghanistan while his administration has, at various times, accused
Iran of giving weapons to both Sunni and Shiite insurgents in Iraq. The
Taliban are Salafi jihadis, Sunni fundamentalists who consider Shiites
apostates deserving of death. In power, the Taliban brutally repressed
Afghanistan's Shiites and nearly provoked a war with Iran when they
murdered Iranian diplomats inside the Iranian consulate in the northern
city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Iraq's Sunni insurgents are either Salafi
jihadis or Baathists, the political party that started the Iran–Iraq
War.

The Iranian regime may believe it has a strategic interest in keeping
US forces tied down in the Iraqi quagmire since this, in the Iranian
view, makes an attack on Iran unlikely. US clashes with the Mahdi Army
complicate the American military effort in Iraq and it is plausible
that Iran might pro-vide some weapons—including armor-penetrating
IEDs—to the Mahdi Army and its splinter factions. Overall, however,
Iran has no interest in the success of the Mahdi Army. Moqtada al-Sadr
has made Iraqi nationalism his political platform. He has attacked the
SIIC for its pro-Iranian leanings and challenged Iraq's most important
religious figure, Ayatollah Sistani, himself an Iranian citizen. Asked
about charges that Iran was organizing Iraqi insurgents, Iran's Deputy
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the Financial Times on May 10,
"The whole idea is unreasonable. Why should we do that? Why should we
undermine a government in Iraq that we support more than anybody else?"

The United States cannot now undo President Bush's strategic gift to
Iran. But importantly, the most pro-Iranian Shiite political party is
the one least hostile to the United States. In the battle now underway
between the SIIC and Moqtada al-Sadr for control of southern Iraq and
of the central government in Baghdad, the United States and Iran are on
the same side. The US has good reason to worry about Iran's activities
in Iraq. But contrary to the Bush administration's
allegations—supported by both General David Petraeus and Ambassador
Ryan Crocker in their recent congressional testimony—Iran does not
oppose Iraq's new political order. In fact, Iran is the major
beneficiary of the American-induced changes in Iraq since 2003.

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