Iran's Meddling in Iraq: Dan Analyzes the ICG Report, Part 1

As past readers are no doubt aware, I've been a fairly vocal advocate of the view that powerful elements of the Iranian government (i.e. the ones that matter) are up to no good in Iraq. So it is with a great deal of interest that I read the ICG report on Iranian involvement in Iraq. I disagree with the particulars and some of the general pieces of the ICG report, as I did with their report on al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia). With that said. I have a lot of respect for the excellent and professional analysis the International Crisis Group (ICG) has done re: Algeria and Jemaah Islamiyyah (just to give 2 examples).

I decided to summarize report just as I did for the Norwegian Intelligence analysis on al-Qaeda in Europe. Then I'll discuss where our analysis diverges.

Please note that the fact that I disagree with this doesn't mean I think it's garbage, which is one of the reasons I'm going to the all trouble of summarizing the information contained therein.

• ICG: Iraqi Perceptions of the Iranian Threat
• Perceptions: Dan Darling Responds
• ICG: The Legacy of the Iraq-Iran War
• Legacy of the War: Dan Darling Responds
• ICG: Iran Interests and Presence in Iraq
• Iran's Presence: Dan Darling Responds
• ICG: Iraqi Political Parties
• Political Parties: Dan Darling Responds

ICG: Iraqi Perceptions of the Iranian Threat

• Made its most vocal public debut in July 2004 with statements by interim Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan that Iran was Iraq's #1 enemy and was actively seeking to derail the government there. President Ghazi al-Yawwar and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi have expressed similar, less bellicose concerns about Iranian involvement in Iraq, claiming that Iran was setting up an intelligence presence in the southeastern parts of Iraq and sending money to pro-Iranian political parties.

• King Abdullah II made similar statements with his warnings of a "crescent" of Shi'ite power stretching from Lebanon to the Gulf and said that Iran was sending 1,000,000 Iranians across the border to vote in the January 30 elections. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said that these concerns were shared by Hosni Mubarak and one of Allawi's aides accused Ibrahim Jafaari of holding dual loyalties to Iran.

• Sunni Arabs across Iraq seem to hold similar sentiments, believing that Iran wants to create a satellite state inside Iraq through intelligence, financial support, and propaganda campaigns. The prominent Sunni Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami (Muslim Scholars Association) has claimed that Iran wants to forment a civil war inside Iraq for 3 reasons: the capital of Sassanid Persia had been inside Iraq, Iran believes that Iraq's Shi'ite population should be incorporated into Iran, and Iran wants to keep the US tied down inside Iraq to prevent it from ever attacking Iran.

• Fears of a Shi'ite power bloc across the Middle East and a belief in an Iranian menace are not one and the same, but they are often intermixed. For example, King Abdullah attempted to clarify his remarks on a Shi'ite crescent by stating that he was referring to a specific Iranian-backed Shi'ite political community, not to the rise of Shi'ites as a religious group. Also, many secular Shi'ites abhor Iran's theocratic government, argue that they fought against Iran during the Iraq-Iran War, and regard Dawaa and SCIRI as Iranian proxies.

• Iraqi perceptions towards Iranians as a whole are broadly negative, with 50.9% of Iraqis believing that Iran wants to see Iraq collapse into civil war.

• ICG interviewed a number of Sunni political leaders, some of them claiming ties to the insurgency, all of whom agreed that Iran was involved to some extent or another in the Iraqi insurgency but none of whom could back up their claims with any evidence.

• One of the most prominent Iraqis to accuse Iran of being up to no good inside Iraq is Mohammed al-Shahwani, a former Iraqi army officer who fled Iraq in 1990 and is now the head of Iraqi intelligence. In October 2004, al-Shahwani accused the Iranian embassy of killing 18 of his agents in September and cited as evidence the results of raids on 3 Iranian safe houses in Baghdad and the arrest of 4 Iranian businessmen seeking to recruit Iraqis and disburse money and weapons to the insurgency.

• Most Iraqis who refer to "Iran" generally believe that the regime is monolithic and ruled by an oligarchy that uses Iraqis who are either supportive of or have had past ties to Iran in order to achieve its objectives. As a result, the term "Iranian" is generally used to refer to anyone suspected of doing Iran's bidding, or even generally to any one of the following groups:

1. Iraqi Shi'ites who registered themselves as Persians (Faresi) during the Ottoman era in order to avoid military service and inherited this designation of their "national origin" into the modern era. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Baathists deemed them untermenschen and confiscated their property, removed their identification, and forced them to flee across the border where they were treated as refugees. After the fall of Saddam, many of these have started to return to Iraq.

2. Fayli Kurds who are the Kurdish variants of the Arab Faresi who were treated pretty much the same way under the Baathists. The post-regime violence out in al-Kut was attributed to "Iranians" by the locals, but in fact it was Fayli Kurds who were the actual perpetrators, many of whom are regarded as either Iranian citizens or else agents of the regime.

3. Persian-speaking Iraqis or Iraqis with a Persian surname, such as the secular Shi'ite nuclear scientist Hussain al-Shahristani who helped to form the UIA and has been called an "Iranian agent" by Defense Minister Shaalan.

4. Shi'ite clerics and their political parties (Dawaa and SCIRI) and in some cases supporters of Ayatollah Sistani. Some of the more conservative practices in Iraq (separate entrances for men and women, dress codes including head scarves for women and beards but no ties for men, etc.) are attributed to the Iranian influence on these parties.

5. Iraqis who fought alongside Iran during the Iraq-Iran War, particularly members of SCIRI's Badr Corps.

• This rather broad definition of Iranians may help to explain claims by various Iraqi leaders that 1,000,000 Iranians have entered Iraq since OIF, though in fact only 108,000 of the 200,000 Iraqi refugees living in Iran had returned to date according to UNHCR estimates.

• Regardless of the false premises of some accusations, Iran does appear to be taking advantage of the power vacuum inside Iraq to extend its influence there.

Perceptions: Dan Darling Responds

Actually, I agree with a majority of this and found the ICG explanation of just how "Iranian" is defined inside Iraq as being particularly helpful. I definitely think that a lot of Iraqi accusations of Iranian involvement inside Iraq contain more than a faint air of anti-Shi'ism to them - Shi'ites in general and religious Shi'ites in particular across the Middle East and South Asia have been scapegoated as puppets of Iran ever since the Iranian Revolution, most unfairly in my view, and I think that comments like those by Shaalan and others should be viewed within that context. There is also a domestic political angle here that ICG seems to miss - namely that the Shi'ite UIA was Allawi's main competition in the Iraqi elections and that it was in the political interest of Allawi and his associates (who were often accused of being US proxies) to accuse the UIA and its leadership of being puppets for the mullahs.

As for the Iraqi Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami, they're basically the politburo of the domestic (as opposed to international, i.e. Zarqawi) Iraqi Islamist movement and their claims should be viewed within that context. I also think that while the ICG is quite correct that Iran is far from monolithic (I've written about this before), I think that they're forgetting their own warnings if they think that the various Iranian sources that they quote in an effort to dispell thoughts of Iranian meddling in Iraq are all that credible. They may well be entirely sincere in as far as what they say, but these aren't the people running the show anymore. If you want to know what Iranian policy is with respect to Iraq, I'd be a lot more interested in finding out what people like Ahmadi Nejad, Ezatollah Zarghami, Ali Akbar Nateghnouri, and others in the Abadgaran movement and Rafsanjani's ruling clique think, since they're the ones running the show now.

ICG: The Legacy of the Iraq-Iran War

• While there are many differences in terms of language and culture between the Persian Iran and the Arabic Iraq, both nations are tied together by the fact that a majority of their populations consist of Shi'ite Muslims. Southern Iraq has historically been the Shi'ite heartland and most of Iran's current ruling elite studied at the great Shi'ite seminaries in An Najaf and Karbala.

• At a national, both nations have had tense relations for decades over the border demarcation of the Shatt al-Arab/Arvand Rud and clashed periodically during the 1970s, with Iraq always being deterred by the US-backed Iran. In 1975, the two agreed to share the river and use its mid-point as the border.

• After the Shah's overthrow in 1979, Saddam Hussein decided to seize advantage of the chaos and invaded Iran in September 1980, conquering parts of Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province, but territory alone was not the catalyst for the Iraqi invasion. The secular Baathists felt threatened by Iran's Islamic fervor, having already been alarmed by the growth of Shi'ite political movements during the 1970s due to Iraq's demographics. In response, the Baathists persecuted Shi'ite religious figures and expelled all Shi'ites it claimed were of "Iranian" origin. Because a lot of the Gulf states were scared to death of the Iranian Revolution, Saddam was able to convince them to bankroll his war with the mullahs under the banner of a Pan-Arab Sunni defense against the evil Persian Shi'ites.

• Despite Saddam's appeals to the Khuzestani Arabs and Iran's appeals to Iraq's Shi'ites, nationalism trumped religion or ethnicity and most of Khuzestan's Arab population fled at the sight of Saddam's legions, nearly 80% of whom would be made up of Shi'ites throughout the war.

• When the Iraq-Iran War ended in August 1998, Iran was furious that it took the UN Security Council until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to declare that it had the right to claim reparations from Iraq for the destruction Saddam's forces caused during the Iraq-Iran War. A cold peace followed the war, with Iran remaining neutral during the Gulf War and turning its back on the Iraqi Shi'ites whose freedom from Saddam it purported desired during the 1991 uprising. Relations between the two started to thaw during the mid-1990s and a peace treaty was signed, though the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab was never really solved. Iranian leaders continued to be deeply suspicious of Iraq with its purported WMD arsenal and past territorial designs and as a result Tehran was rather ambivalent towards the onset of OIF.

• While some in the Iran leadership saw the potential for gain in the US invasion, Iran officially opposed it as a war launched to obtain oil and for the benefit of Israel. That the neocons saw the creation of a democratic Iraq as a means to put pressure on Iran, with many Iranian leaders fearing that the US might turn its sights eastwards if the opportunity arose. Iran's reluctance to cooperate with the US was due to the Iranian belief that little good (for Iran) came out of its cooperation with the US in Afghanistan against the Taliban. As a result, while Iranians allowed the Iran-based Iraqi opposition to coordinate with the US, the Iranian regime had no desire to cooperate with the US in bringing about the downfall of their western neighbor.

Legacy of the War: Dan Darling Responds

Here again, this is a pretty good summary of the historical antagonism between Iran and Iraq. My main complaint is with the ICG claims (and ICG is by no means the only outfit to make statements of this nature) concerning Iranian assistance to the US in Afghanistan. In sourcing these claims, ICG quotes a Washington Post story from October 22, 2004. I critiqued the Iran aspect to the story 3 days after it came out and here again I think that ICG needs to recall its own earlier statement that the Iranian leadership is not a monolithic entity.

This is part of the problem with all these ICG interviews are being conducted with the people either in or associated with the Iranian Foreign Ministry and a lot of what they are saying, to be quite frank, does not compute. There are two ways that you can look at this, the first being that these people, many of whom are the same ones who were responsible for setting up the collaboration between Iran and the US, may have been entirely sincere in their desire to bring about an end to the Taliban but nevertheless are unable to rein in the nastier elements of the regime. Lest we forget, the Foreign Ministry has in Khatami's corner since 1997 and he's the regime's designated "moderate" and all that. That's the charitable view of what these people are saying, with the not-so-charitable view being that they're blowing smoke out of their ass to what they see as gullible Westerners. Either way, the Foreign Ministry is clearly not the people to talk to about the actions (or alleged actions, if you prefer) of groups known to associate with the hardliners such as the IRGC and VEVAK.

ICG: Iran's Interests and Presence in Iraq

• Iran, like other Iraqi neighbors, does not want to see Iraq balkanize as the result of war, insurgency, or (Kurdish) secession. While Iran is not a post-Ottoman state and has a national history stretching back over 2,000 years, it maintains a sizeable (and oppressed) Kurdish population on its western border with cross-border ethnic and tribal ties to its Iraqi counterparts. As a result, Iran fears that an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq could embolden Iran's own Kurds to join their Iraqi bretheren or at least seek a far better arrangement with themselves than currently exists with the Iranian government.

• These fears are not without warrant, as Iran has been dealing with a Kurdish insurgency since the end of the 1946 Mahabad Republic, though it has been nowhere on the scale of the violence involving Iraq or Turkey's Kurdish populations. In an effort to broaden the Iraqi Kurds influence at home in an effort to dissuade them from trying to expand it abroad, Iran has supported the Iraqi Kurds in their bid for appropriate representation in Baghdad.

• The next major Iranian goal is that the new, preferably Shi'ite, Iraqi government be strong enough to keep the country together but too weak to be anything resembling a military threat. In pursuing this goal, the Iranian leadership has officially supported Iraqi Shi'ites in their bid to hold free elections even while desiring that nothing of the sort occur inside Iran. Iranian officials reject the idea that they want a Khomeinist-style theocracy inside Iraq, citing Iraq's diverse nature as the primary rationale why such a system wouldn't work.

• The third Iranian goal is to prevent the regime from being encircled by the US, as the prevailing view among the Iranian leadership is that America is intent on overthrowing the Islamic Republic or at least use the threat of its overthrow to force it into ending its nuclear program and support for terrorism. Because they regard the US invasion of Iraq as a part of this plan, the regime is desperate to prevent the US from succeeding in Iraq and attempting to replicate its results eastwards. As a result, Iran has sought to keep Iraq in a state of "managed chaos" prior to the January 30 elections in an effort to ensure the departure of US forces sooner rather than later. Political dominance over the Iraqi Shi'ites is also regarded as the key means through which to deter any future US invasion and to ensure that America's fortunes in Iraq are dependent on cooperation with the Iraqi Shi'ites, thus minimizing the US ability to put pressure on Iran without facing a Shi'ite backlash.

• A key question for Iran is what kind of Iraq would best serve Iran's interests, as there are fears that a stable, economically prosperous, democratic Iraq could have its pro-democratic ideology spill over across the border to reach Iran's disaffected masses. Similarly, any Iraqi system that rejected the ideology of velayet-e-faqih and expouse more genuine forms of popular representation could serve as a devastating counter-revolutionary model by giving the Iranian masses a more appealing form through which religion and politics could interact. This is extremely relevant given the historic rivalry that has existed between An Najaf and Qom, given that the latter's status has risen since the Iranian Revolution and the former's declined due to Saddam's oppression.

• The rough consensus of the Iranian leadership is that their best option for handling Iraq is to support the formation of an independent, unified, and mostly stable Shi'ite-led government that can be used to reduce US influence. In addition, Iran wants to have sufficient infrastructure inside Iraq to stir up trouble if necessary. To accomplish these objectives, Iran has pursued a broad and often unpredictable strategy due to the evolving nature of the Iraqi situation.

• The presence of large numbers of Iranians inside Iraq is not a new or particularly abnormal development, as many Iranians have long sought to visit the Shi'ite holy shrines in Iraq or study in its seminaries. Not surprisingly, the flow of Iranian pilgrims has increased since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, as have trade, foreign investment, and cross-border smuggling. Thus, the mere presence of large numbers of Iran inside Iraq cannot be construed as evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraqi affairs.

• What is Iranian involvement, however, is that Iran's widespread intelligence network has infiltrated the ranks of the pilgrims with VEVAK operatives and employed returning refugees as informants, particularly in the Shi'ite slum quarters of Baghdad. King Abdullah has claimed that Iran has been paying the salaries of unemployed Iraqis in order to help drum up pro-Iranian sentiments.

• A southern Iraqi tribal leader have claimed that Shi'ite youths are being sent across the Iranian border at Basra, brainwashed, and sent back to Iraq to fight the US, while a senior US Army analyst claimed that Iranian intelligence will not target the US with anything that can be traced back to Iran, but will instead give weapons, safe houses, or money to those that do. A Sunni Arab tribal leader claims to have been approached by VEVAK and told to carry out attacks against US forces, but so far the ICG has not found any concrete evidence to support these claims.

• ICG couldn't verify claims that Iran sends fighters or weapons into Iraq, pointing out that the border is difficult to secure and that there are no signs of a large number of fighters or weapons coming in from Iran, a position supported with respect to the southern border by a UK diplomat, who claimed that most foreign jihadis were coming in from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan rather than Iran. The claim that Iraqi insurgents get weapons from Iran makes little sense to ICG given that Iraq is currently awash with weapons, some of which have caused trouble by spreading across the border into Khuzestan.

• That said, Iran may be backing insurgent groups to get back at the US for sheltering the MEK, some of them based in the Diyala and al-Anbar provinces. It is even more difficult determining whether or not Iranian support for the insurgency is coordinated by the Iranian leadership, as one of the major frustrations among Western policymakers is the existence of multiple centers of authority in Iran carrying out independent and even competing foreign policies, with the Supreme National Security Council rather than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs overseeing all Iranian policy with respect to Iraq in concert with the elite IRGC branches Qods and Ramezan as well as VEVAK.

This quote by a senior Dawaa leader is worth repeating for all those still complaining that the US "torpedoed" the Iranian attempt to trade the MEK leadership for the al-Qaeda leaders based in Iran:

"Iran does not have a single line. There are different centres of power: the Pasdaran, the supreme leader, the president. And you can't really know who is who, who is making the decisions. Sometimes you can be dealing with a senior official who agrees to something, but then he turns out not to have the power to implement it, and the agreement falls apart."

The attempts were conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while the al-Qaeda leaders in question are currently being harbored by Qods Force. You do the math.

• The IRGC is playing an increasingly important role in Iranian domestic politics and is seen as the regime's most formidable arm in Iraq as it is intimately familiar with the Iraqi political landscape and have provided material and financial support to Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. A high-ranking Iranian diplomat claimed that this was only the work of "freelancers" and not the official policy of the Iranian government.

Iran's Presence: Dan Darling Responds

As the ICG report notes in the footnotes, US officials are convinced that Iran was backing Sadr. His main backers were IRGC intelligence chief Murtadha Radhai and Qods Force Brigadier General Qassam Suleimani, the latter being the same guy who's in charge of protecting the Iran-based al-Qaeda leadership. So if the DIA and the head of US Special Forces (bad analogies, I know) start launching independent military operations into Iran that results in the deaths of hundreds of Iranian citizens, what do you figure the chances are that we can just shrug have State write it off as the work of "freelancers" to the Euros? I know, being a bunch of despots mean that you never have to say that you're sorry ...

As far as Iran's objectives inside Iraq, ICG's analysis is probably pretty accurate in as far as what the consensus view of the Iranian leadership wants: an intact, weak, and pro-Iranian Iraq. I think that they over-estimate Iran's commitment to their ability to manipulate a democratic Iraq and the Iranian claims that they'd never try for a Khomeinist theocracy there because of Iraq's multi-ethnic, multi-religious make-up don't hold water for me - on that basis, Saddam's Baathist Party would never have been able to hold sway to begin with. Similarly, I think that there needs to be a lot more analysis on the mullahs' fears with respect to Sistani and the ideological challenges that he and his colleagues represent to the very foundations of the Iranian state by virtue of their continued existence.

As to the claims that Iran is supplying weapons to the insurgents, the credible reports I've seen apply to the Ansar al-Islam and Ansar al-Sunnah fighters based in northwestern Iran. While it is true that Iraq is currently awash with weaponry, it's a hell of a lot more efficient to bring it in-country with you than it is to enter northern Iraq (where the locals are not nearly as receptive to prospective mujahideen as they are down in al-Anbar) and have to purchase, find, or steal some.

The claims that Iran was recruiting, indoctrinating, and training Iraqis to go back and fight the US is accurate, at least as far as I am given to understand. I don't want to get into the numbers game, but they were trained at IRGC camps set up at Qasr Shirin, Ilam, and Hamid under the supervision of Imad Mughniyeh. The IRGC also funded Sadr's uprising to the tune of over $80,000,000 because Radhai and Suleimani were among the dissenting view in the Iranian consensus and thought that the US was weak enough to be evicted from Iraq by force. In light of the fact that Sadr's backers were able to keep supporting him from his initial uprising in April until to his defeat last fall, either this Iranian "consensus" on how to handle Iraq was a pretty weak concept to begin with ... or they didn't feel all that inclined to restrain their more zealous colleagues. The way I see it, if Sadr failed they could always write it off as a rogue operation (as is now being done) to Western governments and if they succeeded Iran would have a compliant puppet in control of southern Iraq.

I also reject the notion that any Iranian support for the insurgency has to be construed in light of the US refusing to send the MEK back to Iran - the respective bad actors among the mullah seem quite capable of carrying out all manner of nasty things quite independent of anything we did. From their perspective, our being in Iraq to begin with was more than sufficient cause for them to go after us to begin with.

Oh and while I'm at it, I may think the ICG can find a lot better and less biased sources as to realities on the ground in Iraq than Juan Cole, especially when it comes to the foreign fighters, given his views on the subject:

The author does not mention one important latent function of the falsehoods about foreign fighters. These are intended to lay the groundwork for US wars against, and occupations of, Syria and Iran. Note that if there are foreign fighters in Iraq at all, many of them have come in from Jordan. And yet, Jordan is never threatened with being invaded, because it is already seen as cooperative in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Like I said, they can do better.

ICG: Iraqi Political Parties

• Iran has spread its influence into southern Iraq by funding infrastructure projects such as schools and clinics to win support the same way that it was able to do in Lebanon during the late 1980s and 1990s. The main vectors of Iranian influence in southern Iraq are SCIRI and Dawaa. Both parties fled to Iran during the Iraq-Iran War and SCIRI's Badr Corps fought alongside the Iranian army with the IRGC in a betrayal that many Iraqis still regard as treasonous.

• After the fall of Saddam, both SCIRI and Dawaa began shedding their Iranian influence, asserting their independence from Iran and claiming that they did not seek a Shi'ite theocracy inside Iraq. Both the US and SCIRI leaderships have had an off-and-on again relationship during the 1990s, with the US viewing SCIRI as an Iranian puppet and SCIRI viewing the US as the enemy of its backers. The US is still concerned about the Badr Corp's infiltration into Iraq immediately following OIF and establishing themselves in towns along the Iranian border in contravention of their prior agreements with Washington.

• As a result of SCIRI's ties to Iran, it is distrusted by many Sunni Arabs, secular Shi'ites, southern Shi'ites, and mixed tribesmen, all of whom feel threatened by the group's well-organized structure and ability to provide patronage in what had previously been an impoverished region. The former Badr Corps members now serving as the Misan regional police chief, as well as the governors of Basra and Muthanna have all been accused of being Iranian agents. Western diplomats reject idea that all of these figures are Iranian agents and point out that there have been no armed confrontations between the Badr Corps and British forces in the south.

• Other Shi'ite parties, such as Dawaa, appear further removed from Iranian control. Dawaa splintered under Iranian pressure that it join SCIRI during the Iraq-Iran War with competing offices being set up in Damascus and London in addition those in Tehran, with Ibrahim Jafaari heading up the London office. Jafaari's deputy Adnan al-Kadhemi, has shown sympathy for Iran and a Dawaa splinter and UIA coalition member Hizb al-Dawaa/Tanzim al-Iraq has organized protests against military occupation, but the ICG sees no proof that either do Iran's bidding.

• With respect to Sadr, he has consistently appeared as an Iraqi nationalist despite his acceptance of velayet-e-faqih, he has criticized Dawaa and SCIRI for staying in Iran during Saddam Hussein's rule and attacked Ayatollah Sistani for his non-Iraqi background. Sadr was tied to the Qom-based Ayatollah Haeri, but over time their relationship seem to have soured. Iran officially denies supporting Sadr, but Rafsanjani has praised him and EU diplomats claimed that Sadr was at one point receiving support from Brigadier General Suleimani and other Iranian hardliners, but that the support was eventually withdrawn.

• Grand Ayatollah Sistani's rejection of theocracy puts him at odds with the Iranian leadership, but thus far the Iranians seem to view him as necessary evil, though they still fear what will happen if dissident Iranian clerics start leaving Qom for An Najaf, an event likely to occur once the Iranian security situation subsides.

Political Parties: Dan Darling Responds

I'm a lot less sanguine on SCIRI and the Badr Corps than the ICG is. One of the most flawed premises that this report seems to be operating at least in part on is that if anybody (usually the Iranian Foreign Ministry) denies charges that they work for Iran then they must be telling the truth. What the hell do you expect them to say if they are meddling? The lack of activity on the part of SCIRI and the Badr Corps, for example, could just as easily have be explained by the fact that the Iranian consensus view has their handlers telling them to stay quiet, at least for now.

Similarly with Sadr, I think that the ICG (or maybe just the people they're interviewing) are going to great pains to divorce the issue of Iranian support for Sadr with all the people that he killed during his little rampage that he would never have been able to if not for people like Brigadier General Suleimani. To be quite frank, if a US general ever did anything like that to Iran there would be anti-war protests from Stockholm to Cape Town demanding his head on a pike.

And for those who suggest that we not allow the actions of a few bad apples like Brigadier General Suleimani spoil our opportunity for a Grand Bargain™ with the mullahs, let me just explain what his actions demonstrate. If we accept the ICG premise that Iran wants a weak, Shi'ite-run, but intact Iraq then we also have to accept that Suleimani was able to apparently able to pursue a contrary foreign policy that could easily have ended up getting Iran into a full-scale war with the US ... yet he has suffered no apparent consequences to his rank or status. That means that either the regime sanctioned or at least turned a blind eye to his actions (thus calling into question the ICG premise) or they were too afraid to stop him. Either way, I would say that this latest bit of evidence of Iranian complicity with respect to Sadr calls into the question the validity of any final diplomatic deal we do strike with the mullahs assuming we ever break the Groundhog Day-esque stand-off between them and the EU - what's to stop the IRGC and VEVAK from simply turning around and violating it? If the mullahs wouldn't rein in one of the elite commanders from supporting the Iraqi insurgency, just what would they rein him in for?

Morpheus calls, so I'll try to finish up the rest tomorrow, in Part 2.

Oh, and faster please.