US, Iran and the Iraqi election game

[bemildred]

Nice piece. All the outside meddlers vs the people of Iraq.

Iran and the United States are involved in an intense competition to make Iraq an integral part of their respective, clashing, and invariably contradictory spheres of influence. Their chief difference in modus operandi is that the US has wrapped its designs in the multicolored covering of democracy and liberty to make it palatable to the Iraqis. Iran, on the contrary, is very quiet about using its Shi'ite ties to make Iraq a vassal. In the election campaign ahead of January elections, these two actors will intensify their endeavors to ensure that either a pro-US or a pro-Iran government emerges in Iraq. Strangely enough, the chief wild card in this competition is the Iraqi populace, whose preferences are being blatantly ignored by both Washington and Tehran, each determined to have its particular way.

In the power game that is being played in the Middle East, the most powerful ones don't necessarily emerge as the winners. The limitation of military power becomes obvious when one examines the fact that the United States is so utterly bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire after quickly dismantling the Saddam Hussein regime. Now it can bomb the cities into rubble, but the defiance of the insurgents and their sympathizers appears well nigh invincible. The Iraqi insurgents know that as long as they can absorb human losses the US behemoth will remain on shaky ground, for its capacity to absorb human losses is indeed quite finite. That is what is driving the insurgents and terrorists in their battles with the United States in Samarra and Fallujah.

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Apparently, the preceding US plan is put together by the DOS. However, it is as much divorced from regional realities as any other plan that the DOD has promoted thus far. No one is paying any heed to the following very basic questions. Why should Iran help the US in making Iraq in its (US) image, when such an objective so profoundly contradicts Iran's own goal of seeing the emergence of an Islamic Iraq? Why is it that Washington's objectives toward Iraq become so superior that all the neighboring states are to undermine their own national interests and behave "responsibly"? Why should, by helping Iraq become a secular democratic country, Iran improve the prospects of the establishment of a permanent US hegemony, right next door to itself? No one who is knowledgeable about the profound historic religious and cultural ties between Iraq and Iran would pursue such an objective and expect the latter to cooperate.

Let us also candidly admit that Iran, too, wishes to see a vassal Iraq in the future. But Iraq is much too significant a state - both from the vantage points of Islam and pan-Arab history - to become a vassal. Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphate from the 9th to the 13th century. During this era, it became the center of Islamic learning and international trade. In the contemporary era, Iraq became the seat of the Ba'ath Party, which was the chief proponent of pan-Arabism. Only later on was that party reduced to a mouth organ of Saddam Hussein's megalomaniac rule. Even while it was under United Nations sanctions and under constant US military surveillance, the significance of Iraq as an Arab state was never reduced.

Asia Times