Friday, December 30, 2005

The US-Shi'a alliance

The Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) has made available on their Web site the transcript of a 10/14/05 conference on "A Shia Crescent: What Fallout for the U.S.?"  The panel was moderated by Chas Freedom, president of MEPC and a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Other participants included Juan Cole of the University of Michigan; Ken Katzman of the Congressional Research Service; Karim Sadjadpour of the International Crisis Group; and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The theme of the discussion focuses on the fact that one major result of the Iraq War has been to empower the Shi'a majority in Iraq.  The panelists discussed various aspects of Shi'a politics and the possible implications for US interests in the future.

Freeman in his introduction talks about concerns of the (Sunni) Saudi regime in this regard:

The situation in Iraq, which we're discussing today, has become serious enough so that something almost unprecedented happened a couple of weeks ago, namely the Saudi foreign minister issued a public statement. Saudi press releases are oxymorons, as rare as unicorns in the woods, to be found only by virgins in the light of the full moon. (Laughter.) But Saud al-Faisal expressed his concern on two scores, one of which is of much wider concern than simply to Saudi Arabia, and that is that Iraq and the instability in Iraq and the multiple civil wars in Iraq may in fact be coming to resemble the 30-years' war in Central Europe, a struggle within Islam with the possibility of igniting a wider struggle throughout the fifth of the human race that adheres to the Muslim faith. Or, to put it a different way, that this may turn out to be, if it is not managed correctly, a 21st century version of the Spanish Civil War in which Spaniards, for their own reasons, began to kill each other, then drew in the support of others, and began a proxy war and rehearsal for a wider conflict in that case to define civilization within Christendom - in this case, possibly within the realm of Islam.

But the Saudis clearly also, despitetheir own fine relationship with Tehran, are concerned about a second issue, which is the possibility of Iranian domination of a weak and divided Shi'a-dominated Iraq. In a recent visit to the region, in fact, I found a dominant concern in the Gulf countries to be the possibility that the United States, by intervening as we did in Iraq, may inadvertently be creating a Shi'a crescent in the northern tier of the Arab world, which could offer Iran unique opportunities that it has not had for many years, to exercise a dominant role, and to exercise that role in ways that may be destabilizing to others.
(my emphasis)

Freeman later makes a comment about a continuing thread running through discussions like this one that MEPC has sponsored:

But then as many of you who have attended these sessions know, the theme song of these events as [the] Iraq [War] has unfolded has been that we invaded not Iraq but the Iraq of our dreams, a country that didn't exist, that we didn't understand. And it is therefore not surprising that we knocked the kaleidoscope into a new pattern that we find surprising. The ignorant are always surprised.  (my emphasis)

Cole talked about the recent history of the adherents of Ayatollah Sistani and those of the Sadr movement in Iraq. At one point, Saddam's regime seems to have promoted Momammad al-Sadr "as a local Arab cleric as an alternative to the Iranian tradition in Shi'aism".  Sistani was seen as more of an advocate of the "Iranian tradition".  Cole said:

But gradually it turned out that Saddam had things backwards, that Sistani, the Iranian, was anti-Khomenist and relatively quietist, and Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, who was coded as Arab - although the Sadrs have branches on both sides, Iran and Iraq, became increasingly militant. And he put forward what he called the "third way" between Khomenism and the Najaf tradition, but it looked to me an awful lot like Khomeinism. So although it's the third way, I think it tilts towards Khomeini in the sense that his vision of the good society was very, very strict puritan Islamic law imposed on everyone. So he gave a fatwa that Christian women have to veil. And he would upbraid his followers for wearing Western clothes. Some of his followers showed up at a mosque event in the '90s; their children were wearing OshKosh B'Gosh clothing. And he said, why are you giving money to the imperialists? Don't you know they're trying to destroy us? And so Sadeq al-Sadr set up this network of Hezbollah-style clinics and mosques and social services, and was extremely critical of the regime. And of course in 1999 he was killed, he and his two older sons, for defying Saddam. (my emphasis)

Katzman talked about the evolution of American views on radical Islam. It first came on to most Americans' radar in the context of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and there it was radical Shi'a Islamism. Because Iran and Shi'a radicalism more generally were seen as a particular danger to US interests, one of the US responses was to back Saddam's Iraq in its long and bloody war with Khomeini's Iran.

In his 1982 memoirs Keeping Faith, Jimmy Carter described his policy at the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 as one of urging restraint and trying to achieve a cease-fire, in significant part because of fears that war fever might make it more like that Iran would harm the American embassy hostages they held then. He also wrote, "We had no previous knowledge of nor influence over this move [Iraqi threats to invade Iran], but Iran was blaming us for it nevertheless."

Gary Sick, who was Carter's principal White House aide on the Iranian hostage crisis, agreed that the Carter administration had not encouraged the Iraqi invasion of Iran. He argues that an alleged meeting between National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Saddam Hussein to plot the attack was a myth. But he also writes in October Surprise (1991):

Was this just a case of Iranian paranoia? Yes and no. Although Iranian suspicions of a secret Brzezinski-Saddam meeting were patently untrue, Brzezinski was the leading advocate within the U.S. government for exerting political, diplomatic, and military pressure on Iran to release the hostages. It is also true that during the summer of 1980 Iraq was seriously considering restoring diplomatic relations with the United States. According to Saddam Hussein, "The decision to establish relations with the U.S. was taken in 1980 during the two months prior to the war between us and Iran," but Iraq postponed the decision "when the war started ... to avoid misinterpretation." Finally, the leaders in Iran were no doubt aware that the United States was maintaining contact with a number of Iranian exiles in Europe, some of whom were independently providing advice and encouragement to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. The United States was not involved in their discussions with Iraq, but the Iranians would never believe that.

But as the war began to go badly for Iraq and Iran started winning, by early 1983 the Reagan administration became alarmed by the prospects, which might include disruption of oil exports from the region.  So they began a heavier diplomatic tilt against Iran and for Iraq.  That included initiating in late 1983 Operation Staunch to reduce arms imports from other countries to Iran.

Katzman explained:

The Reagan and Bush administrations viewed the threat from Iran and Iranian-inspired Shi'a extremism as so acute that the administrations were willing to put aside their distaste for Saddam Hussein's regime and back him in the Iran-Iraq War. The hope was that Saddam would win the war and force a retrenchment of Tehran and Shi'a Islamic fundamentalism.

Militarily speaking, Saddam did win, and Tehran was humbled militarily, although the post-Iran-Iraq War political structure of the Gulf had tilted too far in Saddam's favor and he apparently perceived the U.S. would tolerate Iraqi hegemony. Even after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, Sunni Islamic radical groups such as the Islamic group al-Jihad, which were responsible for Sadat's assassination, barely registered on the U.S. policy radar screen at all. In fact, so inattentive was the U.S. to the potential threat from radical Sunni Islamic groups that the U.S. gave material support to the Afghan Mujahideen, the most active of which was Sunni radical Islamist parties, including one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who remains at large somewhere today. I wish I knew where he was but I don't.
(my emphasis)

But even before the war was over, there were counter-currents among some conservative foreign-policy activists and officials that favored cultivating Iran.  The Iran-Contra scandal resulted from the activities of that group. Bob Dreyfuss writes in Devil's Game (2005):

The context for the secret [William] Casey-[Oliver] North approach to Iran [that resulted in the Iran-Contra scandal] was the National Security Council's 1984 reevaluation of U.S. policy toward Iran. That reevaluation was pushed by a small clique of U.S. officials opposed to the American tilt in favor of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Robert McFarlane, the national security adviser, ordered the NSC review, and several officials - including Howard Teicher and Donald Fortier at the NSC, Graham Fuller at the CIA, and others - began a two-year-long campaign to shift U.S. policy in favor of Iran. Their effort dovetailed nicely with parallel Israeli efforts to isolate Iraq and connect with Iran. At the time, Israel was supplying arms to Iran, backing the rise of the Islamic right in the occupied territories, fueling the Muslim Brotherhood's civil war in Syria, and fiercely supporting the Islamists in Afghanistan.

Now, in 2005, the US finds itself backing pro-Iranian Shi'a parties in Iraq in their efforts to suppress a Sunni rebellion, in what some are already describing as a low-level civil war.  Katzman said:

The difficulty of centering U.S. policy in Iraq on the Shi'a community, particularly Shi'a Islamist parties, has already been proven. With their Kurdish allies, the Shi'a Islamist parties engineered a winner-take-all draft constitution that has embittered the Sunnis ever further, whether or not it is adopted. The Shi'a Islamist militia parties have virtually displaced the national police force in areas where they are strong, particularly Basra. U.S. policymakers apparently felt that if Saddam were overthrown there would be this flowering of intellectually driven liberal pro-Western parties that would create vibrant democracy. These hopes were dashed almost immediately, and all the troubles in Iraq, in my view, have flowed from that faulty expectation. What has resulted instead is the creeping takeover of Iraq by pro-Iranian Shi'a Islamist parties for now and with the possible exception of Sadr - Muqtada al-Sadr, who we heard about, these parties are cooperating with the U.S. because doing so is in their interest. However, their patience with U.S. mentoring is running thin, and the Shi'a Islamist parties are likely to try to structure post-Saddam Iraq to their ideology, not to the specifications of U.S. policymakers.

There is not more instructive example of how near-total U.S. reliance on the Shi'a Islamist parties can backfire in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. One day he supports the legitimate political process; the next day his Mahdi army attacks and kills British soldiers in Basra. He agrees to a truce one day then reaches out to Sunni insurgents the next day. This said, in my view he is a clever politician and not to be underestimated. He has kept virtually every conceivable option open for himself: inclusion in the political process, violent rebellion against the political process, or even peaceful rebellion against the political process.

However, he is a vivid reminder of how U.S. relations with the Shi'a Islamists groups can turn on a dime. He has launched two major rebellions against U.S. forces and I believe he would not hesitate to rebel again if he thought that doing so were in his interest. His next rebellion, if there is one, might draw in more disillusioned Shi'as, possibly joined by Sunnis, and it might become harder and harder for the U.S. or other Shi'a politicians such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani to contain him.

Takeyh looks at what a Shi'a-dominated Iraq may do in foreign policy in the coming years:

So what does the Gulf security look like from here on? In the 1970s, there was a discussion of twin pillars where the United States would rely on its allies, the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the 1980s, there was a discussion where the United States would favor Iraq against Iran, and in 1990s, policy of dual containment with strong American presence in the region would contained both Iran and Iraq. I would suggest that we're beginning to see emergence of a dual pillar policy again, but it's the Shi'ite pillar, where you begin to see Iran and Iraq in a greater degree of cooperation as their strategic interests prove to coincide with one another. (my emphasis)

Cole talks about the problem created by the fact that democratic elections (or something like them) in Iraq resulted in a Shi'a-Islamist-dominated government:

Personally, I think there is a contradiction at the heart of U.S. - of Bush administration policy with regard to Iraq, which is that it wanted to recreate Iraq as a pro-American government with private enterprise and democracy and a glowing view of Washington, but it also I think genuinely did want to unleash democratic forces in the society as a means to that goal. And the problem for the Bush administration is that the political forces on the ground in Iraq - not necessarily terribly democratic, and to the extent that they are, they are not necessarily in line with Washington goals. (my emphasis)

He also mentions the lingering and intense resentment that some Iraqi Shi'a still feel toward the US stemming from the 1991 uprising against Saddam's regime:

Well, there is a great deal of resentment still, as you know, among the Shi'ites of Iraq that the United States stood by and allowed Saddam to put down the 1991 uprising when 16 of 18 provinces went out of the hands of the Ba'ath and the U.S. could have interdicted the helicopter gun-ships that Saddam used to put that rebellion down and did not. This feeling of resentment has been voiced by Grand Ayatollah Bashir Najafi, who's in line to succeed Sistani. He clearly still smarts and has anti-American feelings about that episode. He has given sermons about it in Najaf. 

And he talked about the way the Islamic parties developed during the 1990s as leading opposition political forces, to an extent that even expert outside observers missed to a large extent:

Could I say something about the sort of secular middleclass in Iraq and this image of Iraq as a country in which sectarian divisions weren't so important. That's both true and not true. Actually if you go back in 20th century Iraqi history, there haven't been big Sunni-Shi'a riots or a lot of bloodshed on a sectarian basis in the past. It's not - I mean it happened from time to time in the medieval period, but as a 20th century phenomenon it hasn't been a keynote for modern Iraq. So there was a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism and even to some extent an appeal of general Arab nationalism. And there was a rhetoric of Iraqi unity across these lines, and there was a good deal of intermarriage, of in migration. There were a million Sunnis in the Shi'ite south. There are Kurds - a million Kurds in the Baghdad area and so forth. But I would argue that the late Saddam period was a period in which that salience of that political unity broke down. And the people in Fallujah came under the influence of Jordanian Salafism, and Saddam allowed that in a way that he hadn't before because he was so weak and he felt he needed their support. And the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Da'awa party, the Sudras captured the political loyalty of most of the southern Shi'ites. And I think all of this was going on in the '90s under the radar so that I think it's over with. (my emphasis)

Cole and Freeman also made some important comments about the US position in the Iraq War.  Cole said:

I think there's a very severe danger that oil pipeline sabotage has emerged as a major tool in the Iraq war would then spread to Iran and Saudi Arabia. And you could see 20 percent of world petroleum production knocked offline. I think that would certainly produce a world depression. So I think a very great deal is at stake here, and I think the idea of certain quarters in Washington that it's good to destabilize places like Syria is very, very dangerous to us all.

This El Mundo article of 12/30/05 says that sabotage already threatens to paralyze oil exports from Iraq: Los sabotajes de oleoductos y las amenazas de muerte paralizan las exportaciones de crudo en Irak.

In response to a question, Freeeman talked about the absurdly changing rationales for the Iraq War that the White House has been using:

Well, if I wanted to explain the president, I would work in the White House. I'm not sure I understand very much of what he says under any circumstances - (laughter) - but I note this is the seventh different rationale for the Iraq War that he has come out with. We had weapons of mass destruction; that didn't work out quite the way he had expected. We then had regime change. Well, we did regime removal, but we didn't replace the regime so there was no regime change. Then we had democratization, which turned out to be desecularization under the force of occupation. Then we had terrorism, and it turns out that what we've built is a terrorist-generating incubator rather than the fly paper to catch terrorists that was envisaged. And then we had some business about - well, I'm losing track here - (scattered laughter) - but anyway, I think there was something about creating a model for the region, and then - (pause) - well, now we have preventing a new caliphate, You know, I talk to a lot of Muslims around the world, and I don't find many of them quaking in their slippers over the prospect that there will be a new caliphate any time soon. (my emphasis)

The menace of the new caliphate is sure to be remembered as one of the goofier explanations the administration came up with.  But we'll hear some additional creative justifications, I'm confident.

Freeman also said:

if you listen carefully to what our generals - what our military are saying, they are saying this cannot be won militarily. They are saying it is a political issue requiring political solutions. They don't have the political solutions, so I'm not sure - again, I'm not sure what staying the course means in that context.

War the Republican Party war.  Nothing quite like it.

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