Iran, Iraq & US
Meeting with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad on March 2nd 2008, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared a “new chapter” in relations between the once-hostile neighbors.
The purpose of Ahmadinejad’s visit - the first by a Middle Eastern head of state since the U.S. led invasion in 2003 - was to consolidate ties between the two nations and illustrate Iran’s rising influence in Iraq. The not-so-subtle subtext, of course, was the relative decline of U.S. power and influence in the region.
Despite Ahmadinejad’s sweeping remark that, “Iraqi people do not like America,” the mixed reaction that his visit received among Iraqis reflects the deep societal divisions that have bedeviled reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
Played out most visibly in Iraq, the ongoing power struggle between the U.S. and Iran is both a product and a reflection of complicated Mid-East dynamics and the tangled web of history linking the U.S., Iran, and Iraq.
Iran & Iraq
Deepening official ties between Iran and Iraq both reflect the complicated history between the recent rivals, and indicate a significant realignment of political power in the volatile region.
Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian leader to visit Iraq since 1979, when Iran’s Islamic Revolution brought the only conservative Shiite government to power in the Sunni-dominated region – and triggered a brutal war with Iraq.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein took advantage of the chaos caused by the Revolution and invaded Iran in 1980. The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, longer than any other conventional war in the twentieth century, and was disastrous for both countries, costing an estimated one million casualties and $350 billion.
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, however, relations between the two Shiite-majority neighbors have warmed steadily. On the most basic level, the U.S. led invasion created the conditions for rapprochement between natural allies - an irony that Ahmadinejad was careful to point out.
The administration’s decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam did politically empower Iran – but a one-dimensional analysis ignores fundamental realities about borders and identity in the Middle East.
Even without the new economic agreements they are expected to sign, there is more than a billion dollars in annual trading between the two countries. And economic connections are tied to religious ones. In 2006, over one million Iranians travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, generating the major source of revenue for some Iraqi cities.
Still, the prospect of increasing Iranian involvement has met with bitter protest, particularly - but not exclusively- among Iraq’s Sunni minority.
Iran & the US
U.S. involvement in Iraq has brought tension with Iran to a head, but rocky US-Iran relations are hardly a recent phenomenon. For more than fifty years, the US has had a complicated relationship with Iran – or more accurately, with various groups vying for power both within Iran and throughout the Middle East.
Beginning in1954, the Shah of Iran agreed to let a Western multinational consortium to run Iranian oil facilities for 25 years in return for fifty percent of profits and help crushing political dissent within Iran.
The Shah returned the oil industry to national control in 1973, but instead of joining an Arab oil embargo against the West and Israel, Iran took advantage of the situation by raising oil prices – and using the proceeds to pay for modernization, and significantly, increased defense spending.
The failure of these reforms to improve the lives of the majority of Iranians was a major cause of the Islamic Revolution. The strikes and protests that led up to the Revolution culminated in Iranian students seizing the US embassy in Tehran and taking more than fifty American hostages.
Recognizing the economic and military advantages that Iran’s vast supply of oil and the revenue it generated could provide, President Carter ordered a complete embargo of oil from Iran. Since Iranian oil production had already declined as a result of the Revolution, the combined shortage of oil caused panic in the global market and a surge in prices. As the price of oil rose, so did its ability to affect politics around the globe.
Although the U.S. supported Iraq and Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government in the long and painful war that followed the Revolution, including conducting strikes on Persian Gulf oil platforms, it also provided weapons to Iran.
Iran & U.S.: Tensions Coming to a Head
Long-standing tensions between Iran and the U.S. have largely played out symbolically or economically, rather than on the battlefield. Ahmadinejad’s very public show of strength in Iraq and increasingly open criticism of U.S. involvement in the region, however, indicate the fragile nature of the status-quo.
By deposing Hussein’s Sunni government, U.S. invasion of Iraq removed a thorn in the Iranian government’s side, and shook up the delicate balance of power in the region. Mounting ill-will between Iran and the U.S., however, is just as much a product of the ways in which our shared history has combined with the increasingly tight-knit web of global politics and economics to bring long-standing tensions to a head.
Nukes & "Terrorism"
In his 2002 State of the Union address - before the US invaded Iraq - President Bush accused Iran of being a member of the so-called ‘axis-of-evil,’ both for pursuing nuclear weapons and “exporting terror.” He later made a series of speeches in which he refused to rule out using force with Iran.
In response, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi explained, "I think Bush should know that our options are more numerous than the U.S. options… if the United States makes such a big mistake, then Iran will definitely have more choices to defend itself."
Although Asefi did not clarify what he meant by "options," the remark demonstrates that Iranian officials may be prepared to move beyond a rhetorical battle to an actual one.
The proposition of an armed conflict is particularly chilling because Iran possesses both missile power and an active nuclear program – run in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions, and intense U.S. pressure.
On October 17th, 2007 President Bush issued a stark warning that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” and urged the world to continue applying pressure, including economic sanctions aimed at persuading the Iranian people to find new leadership.
Iranian leaders have called sanctions both “illegal” and "futile,” insisting that the program is intended only for peaceful, civilian purposes. Ahmadinejad reiterated these points from Baghdad, dismissing the issue –and U.S. warnings to Iran- as “a political pretext, not a legal and technical issue.”
Running parallel to the debate over nuclear power is the ongoing issue of terrorism. the US has repeatedly blamed Iran for sponsoring acts of terrorism committed by the Shiite group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon (charges which Tehran has consistently denied) and the State Department designates Iran as a state-sponsor of terrorism. Accusations were often made many years after-the-fact, however, and none of the terrorist acts had been committed on U.S. soil.
Following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United State’s official attitude towards nations that ‘sponsor terrorism’ crystallized into a black-and-white definition: “You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”
This philosophy was then applied as a foreign policy mandate to root out terrorism at its source, forming the basis of the administration’s public rational for invading Iraq.
Throughout the war, the U.S. has blamed Iran for undermining reconstruction efforts and fueling violence inside Iraq by providing aid to terrorist groups. On September 26, 2007, the Senate passed a controversial resolution, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, accusing Iran of fighting a “proxy war” against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq, and designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
The complex and ever-changing web of relationships in the region, however, make it difficult to define ‘terrorism,’ let alone establish direct blame. Ahmadinejad has taken advantage of the absence of a universally accepted definition of terrorism to condemn U.S. policy in Iraq and promote an increasingly powerful Iran as a better alternative.
Speaking from Baghdad, and using the words and actions of U.S. policy makers as ammunition, he brought the debate over terrorism issue full circle. Denying U.S.-charges of providing extremist groups in Iraq with training and weapons, Ahmadinejad shifted the blame for terrorism to the U.S, asserting that that “six years ago there were no terrorists in our region, As soon as the others landed in this country and the region we witnessed their arrival and presence.”
Group Dynamics
As official US policy toward terrorism has grown more black-and-white, the effects of that policy and the US invasion of Iraq have made the relationships between competing groups in the Middle East ever more fluid and volatile.
The conciliatory tone of talks between the Iranian president and his Iraqi hosts – and the bitter protests Iranian involvement has been met with from some Iraqis -underscores the complicated relationship between national boundaries and the religious or cultural identities that transcend them throughout the Middle East.
Particularly susceptible to unpredictable conflicts are ‘nations’ like the modern Iraq, pieced together from pieces of the Ottoman Empire following WWI and comprised of various sects sharing neither a culture nor any sense of national identity. When it comes to Iran and Iraq, geography and history have collided in potentially explosive ways: the connections between the two countries and the divisions within each of them exist simultaneously and reinforce each other.
Options
As the deteriorating situation in Iraq has illustrated, a narrow view of US policy objectives in the Middle East that fails to take history and regional dynamics into account is bound to fail. The official welcome Ahmadinejad received in Iraq is just the most visible and recent sign that the US does not have the power to unilaterally impose whichever laws and definitions we prefer.
Still, despite the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric, the fact that tensions between the U.S. and Iran have not escalated into an outright war suggests that preventing a catastrophic conflict is still possible.
For the next U.S. President, a working understanding of the history and subtle-dynamics of the Middle East will be critical. Achieving lasting stability on the region will depend more on adopting a more realistic definition of ‘nation’ in the Mid-East context than on securing influence over any particular government.
Just as important will be a farsighted view of US foreign policy, looking back as well as forward, an understanding of the opportunities and limitations created by the global economy– and ultimately, a realistic reevaluation of what U.S. foreign policy can, and should, achieve.
Globalization has made it much more difficult for the U.S. to enforce meaningful sanctions, let alone to do so unilaterally. Particularly because China's booming economy is increasingly dependent on imported oil – and shows no sign of slowing down. Despite escalating tensions between Iran and the U.S. since 2003, China signed a 25-year oil and gas deal with Iran in 2004.
At the same time, creating economic interdependence has become a more powerful tool for keeping the peace and cementing alliances – even among such bitter former enemies as Iraq and Iran.
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