Full Disclosure

Just in case somebody drags this up, I am a (very) remote acquaintance of Jalal Talabani's son Qubad and I believe that WoC has donated money to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the past. As a result, if you want to argue that I have a vested interest in arguing that Jalal Talabani is not an Iranian stooge, go right ahead. All the same, I like to think that my arguments stand or fall on their own merits here.

Hazim Shaalan Vindicated?

A lot of people, myself included, thought that Iraqi Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan was more than a little hysterical in his fierce denunciation of the UIA as being little more than a front for Iran with a plan to turn Iraq into a Khomeinist state run by Shi'ite clerics - "Saddam with a turban," I believe he called it. However, judging from the headline ("Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are The Opposite of U.S. Vision") one can't help but wonder if the usual suspects aren't going to start regarding Shaalan as a kind of Cassandra figure whose warnings they should have heeded when they had a chance.

When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.

The Iraqi government is still secular, when last I checked. While I expect that Iraqi definitions of "secular" aren't exactly going to square with the more Western standards that individuals such as myself might have preferred and anything resembling the laicized French system, any attempt by the UIA to impose their religion on the rest of Iraq is going to result in civil war, thereby negating any power the UIA gained in the Iraqi elections. As it now stands, the fact that the UIA is going to have a majority in the Iraqi parliament without the puppeteers oversight of a Council of Guardians, a Supreme Leader, and all the other clerical trappings of the Islamic Republic still make it an anathema to the mullahs - that's why they run a theocracy and Iraq is now democracy. One government gets its authority from Allah via Khamenei and Co, the other gets it from the Iraq people.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.

Is that a not-so-subtle gloating "I told you so!" that I read between the lines there? In any case, it seems that all Wright did was take a poll of the punditocracy, which in this case consists of Juan Cole, Rami Khouri, Larry Diamond, and somebody from the State Department. That's a pretty good panel, but I would tend to disagree with some of their claims, as does Abdel Abdul Mahdi, who is the only actual Iraqi politician quoted in this story.

Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."

The quote looks like he's crediting the Iraqis, not the US, but then I didn't see the whole statement. Regardless of how the election turned out, I still think that it's quite reasonable to credit the Iraqi people for having the collective bravery to go out and vote given the very real threat of violence against them.

Seeing through the spin on SCIRI...

Yet the top two winning parties -- which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president -- are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.

Not exactly, and this is why I mentioned the word "coalition" at the beginning of the post. The UIA is a coalition group of over 100 different political parties from across the ideological spectrum, 2 of which (Dawaa and SCIRI) were supported by the Iranians against Saddam Hussein to counter Saddam's own support for the MEK. The Kurdish coalition is combined power of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patrioc Union of Kurdistan (PUK), both of which are majority Sunni with strong Sufi influences here and there. But we'll talk more on the Kurds in a minute ...

Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.

SCIRI as a whole was reckoned at between 10-12,000 members living in Iran before the war, with its Badr Brigades (which ran on a separate slate from the group's political wing) reckoned at about 4-8,000 of those. As I said, Iran supported them against Saddam Hussein and Saddam backed the Iranian MEK; in another era Iraq and Iran might have supported pretenders to one another's thrones. During Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), members of the Badr Brigades entered Iraq to start hunting down MEK members at Tehran's behest and began establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with in the Shi'ite south.

One of the more interesting outcomes of the Iraqi elections is that there has been a 180 degree shift in the liberal and conservative punditocracy as far as what exactly SCIRI is. During the spring and summer of 2003, when SCIRI was clamoring for US withdrawl, the general tone among conservatives (myself included) was that SCIRI was Iran's arm in Iraq, while liberals dismissed such claims as scapegoating Iran for the administration's problems in stabilizing post-war Iraq. It seems the situation has now changed, with liberals pointing to SCIRI as Iran's arm in Iraq and conservatives arguing that they represent the legitimate voice of the Iraqi people rather than the hidden hand of a foreign power.

As I think I've tried to explain in the past, SCIRI was backed by a different faction of the Iranian government than was Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army. The more accommodationist forces in Tehran favored using SCIRI as a means with which to gradually gain influence and power inside Iraq, while the hardliners favored a more direct confrontation with the United States and hence decided to back Sadr.

The August 2003 assassination of SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim in An Najaf is somehow connected to all of this, though I'm still a little vague on the details. What I do know is that the suicide bomber that killed al-Hakim (and nearly 100 other people) was Zarqawi's father-in-law Yassin Jarad and that Zarqawi was allowed in and out of Iran after the bombing with the assistance of General Qasem Suleimani, the current commander of Qods Force, the elite of the IRGC. At the time of the bombing, I suspected that former Baathists rather than Al Qaeda had perpetrated the attack due to the fact that the Al Qaeda leadership could not afford to antagonize its Iranian hosts by bombing An Najaf.

In retrospect and knowing what I know now, that assessment was probably overly simplistic. All the same, what I do know is that the only time that the Iranians have sought to rein in Zarqawi's activities was in early 2004 when his letter to the Al Qaeda leadership explaining his plan to instigate a sectarian civil war inside Iraq was published by the US government. Saif al-Adel vetoed that plan, presumably at the behest of his Iranian backers, and got into some hot water with them when Zarqawi orchestrated the Ashura Massacre in direct defiance of that order. Ever since the Ashura Massacre, Zarqawi refrained from carrying out attacks on major Shi'ite holy sites inside Iraq until December 2004 and only then as part of his "vote and die" blitz that seems to have lasted until the very week of the elections before easing down.

Whatever the reasons for Zarqawi going after SCIRI (at the behest of the hardliners?), the end-result seems to have been to place the group into conflict with the more extreme elements in the IRGC like General Suleimani who see Zarqawi's activities of Iraq as serving the interests of Iran, a view that it's a lot easier to take when you're not one of the people he's trying to bomb. This friction between SCIRI and the IRGC may be at least part of the reason as to why only a handful of Badr Brigades members joined Sadr and even fought against the Mahdi Army in Karbala - the primary movers behind Sadr inside the Iranian government were General Suleimani, Khamenei advisor Ali Agha Mohammedi, assistant IRGC chief Bagher Zolqadr, IRGC intelligence chief Murtada Rada'i, and former assistant IRGC chief Hassan Kazemi Qomi - all senior IRGC commanders. While whatever machinations ended up separating SCIRI from the IRGC is certainly good news, the group still has ties to VEVAK that are not to be ignored or under-estimated.

The nastier side of SCIRI being taken into account, most of the Iraqis who voted the UIA were not voting for Khomeinism or whatever other manipulations that VEVAK has cooked up with respect to Iraq. If SCIRI ends up becoming the caricature that Shaalan painted it as in his fiery denunciation of the UIA, they are going to lose votes and influence in the parliamentary elections later in the year. The SCIRI politburo is clearly aware of this, which is why they have chosen to project an extremely moderate image to the Iraqi electorate over the last several months. I should add that if US intelligence is half as smart as it likes to paint itself as, we should definitely be trying to use every resource out our disposal to "flip" al-Hakim and Mahdi from the mullahs to our side, especially given the considerable evidence the US has assembled that the mullahs were complicit in the death of the former's elder brother.

And onto the Kurds ...

"I'd rather be kicked by Turk than smiled at by an Iranian."

- PUK official to me in conversation, July 2004

This is statement is so riddled with misperceptions that it isn't even funny:

And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.

To tie Talabani to Iran purely on account of geography is a pretty weak argument, given that by that logic the folks in Azad Kashmir should love their counterparts on the Indian side of the border. The region of Iran that Talabani lives near is Kordestan province which, as the name might suggest, is far from homogeneous with the rest of Iran in terms of ethnicity or culture. Moreover, while it is quite true that Talabani and the PUK have sought aid from Iran to fight against Saddam Hussein over the last 20 years, much the same is true of just about every Iraqi opposition group under the sun. Iran was the avowed enemy of Iraq, they would have been extremely foolish not to seek support from them. While it's all well and good for us here in the West to take issue with the Kurds for being willing to accept assistance from the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism, those kinds of arguments come up rather short if your people are being ethnically cleansed from northern Iraq and your cities subject to chemical attacks in Halabja.

And look who the Post brings out to comment on the Iraqi elections? None other than our favorite University of Michigan professor, who seems to have finally found something good in the Iraqi elections now that he can claim that they went badly for the Bush administration.

"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."

He further expounds on this opinion on his blog:

Ironically, Talabani is extremely close to Tehran and has been a client of the Iranians for many years. His alliance with the UIA will ensure warm relations between the new Iraq and Iran. The US, in pushing for Talabani for Iraqi domestic reasons, is creating a Baghdad-Tehran axis in regional politics.

With all due deference to Professor Cole's status as Master and Commander of Arabic™, I would regard his opinion on the sinister nature of Talabani's ties to Iran as being a lot more credible if he hadn't also accepted Seymour Hersh's accounts of the Israelis training PUK peshmerga and even charged that the Israelis used the PUK as a funnel to pass false intelligence on Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. If Talabani is in fact bringing in Israelis to train his fighters as Hersh (and US News and World Report, which I regard as being a lot more credible) has alleged, it would stand to reason that he isn't exactly the mullahs' man in Baghdad just yet and is quite capable of pursuing Iraqi and Kurdish interests independent of whatever Khamenei and Rafsanjani want. The alternative is to believe that an Iranian pawn is allowing Israel to establish a presence in northern Iraq, something that I assure you that Tehran is not going to regard as being in its best interests. The Kurdish ties to Israel are also another reason that I strongly doubt the new Iraqi government is likely to support Hezbollah as Cole asserts a little further up.

There is also the matter that Talabani, like most Kurds, is Sunni and isn't likely to stand for the UIA or SCIRI imposing Khomeinism or a Shi'ite theocracy on Iraq. Indeed, if Talabani were an Al Qaeda leader, I strongly suspect that Cole would cite his Sunni beliefs as a rationale as far as why he wouldn't collaborate with the mullahs!

Ultimately, the best way to view Talabani and his KDP counterpart Massoud Barzani are as two very capable leaders who are willing to do whatever it takes to protect and defend the Kurdish people. When that meant getting help from Iran during the Iraq-Iran War, that was what they did. When that meant allying themselves with the US (and Turkey in the case of the PUK, a point that many people tend to forget) after the Gulf War and the creation of the no-fly zones, that was what they did. Both men's actions, however, are shaped by what they see as the best options for their people, which puts them quite a bit ahead of the other despots in the Middle East.

Moving right along ...

We next get this gem from Rami Khouri:

Added Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of Beirut's Daily Star: "The idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions about what would happen have proven false."

Yeah, we noticed that. Per Stephen Schwartz, Sistani supports boycotting Israeli goods, but most people consider that more than a step ahead of supporting suicide bombers the way Saddam Hussein did. The whole "neocons polyannish assumptions about Iraq was bunk" meme has also received well over its 15 minutes of fame (though that a lot of the predictions that the anti-war folks made that haven't materialized either doesn't seem to concern people), but it really doesn't have anything to do with respect to Iranian influence on the new Iraqi government.

The results have long-term implications. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations played Baghdad and Tehran off each other to ensure neither became a regional giant threatening or dominant over U.S. allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms.

Not exactly. During most of the Cold War, the US more or less supported Iran because the various Iraqi tyrants were in cahoots with the Soviet Bloc and hence were seen (correctly) as being in league with the bad guys. That all changed with the rise of Khomeini, his desire to export his Islamic utopia to the rest of the Middle East, and Saddam's subsequent invasion of Iraq. Up until Khomeini however, the primary US goal was to keep Iran strong so it could counter any Iraqi predations in the Gulf, much like we supported the Saudis and their spread of Wahhabism because it was anti-communist. In other words, we were viewing things through the context of the Cold War and the Iraqi despots had the bad fortune to be on the other side for the majority of it.

But now, Cole said, Iraq and Iran are likely to take similar positions on many issues, from oil prices to U.S. policy on Iran. "If the United States had decided three years ago to bomb Iran, it would have produced joy in Baghdad," he added. "Now it might produce strong protests from Baghdad."

Ignoring the historical animosity between Iraq and Iran, (there's a reason the Iraqi Shi'ites didn't defect en masse to join Khomeini in his Islamic paradise during the Iraq-Iran War) any Iraqi reaction to the US bombing Iran is likely to be three-fold depending on where in Iraq you go - Kurdish north, Sunni center, or Shi'ite south. Leaving aside the obvious quip that the US bombing Iran is likely to produce strong protests in Washington DC as well as Baghdad, any Iraqi reaction to the US bombing Iran is likely to depend on why we are doing so and how the Iraqi people see it. If we're bombing Iran because the mullahs are in cahoots with the insurgents and a majority Iraqi people buy the proof, we might well see a different reaction in Baghdad. That being said, let me add the caveat that I do not believe that the US needs to invade Iran in order to end the regime's support for international terrorism.

Oh, and as long as I'm discussing Cole's remarks, let me take issue with this statement:

(Remember Condoleeza Rice talking about people voting in Fallujah? That was propaganda pure and simple.)

Actually Juan, it was Reuters:

In Falluja, the devastated Sunni city west of Baghdad that was an insurgent stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a thin stream of people turned out to vote, defying expectations.

"We want to be like other Iraqis, we don't want to always be in opposition," said Ahmed Jassim, smiling after voting.

Who knew that Reuters was US propaganda? They've sure fooled me over the last couple of years ...

Moving right along ...

Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed most strongly by the Bush administration lost big. During his State of the Union address last year, Bush invited Adnan Pachachi, a longtime Sunni politician and then-president of the Iraqi Governing Council, to sit with first lady Laura Bush. Pachachi's party fared so poorly in the election that it won no seats in the national assembly.

Pachachi was the State Department's exile of choice among the Iraqi diaspora, with Allawi being the CIA's and Chalabi being the DoD's. You'll notice that only Chalabi gets blamed for providing bad intel on Iraq (and, quite unfairly, everything else that went wrong with pre-war planning as well as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand) in all the anonymous leaks to the press. One of the more interesting dynamics that has come out of the Iraqi elections is that all the Western journalists who badmouthed Chalabi, rightly or otherwise, are now going to have to start deferring to him again as a senior Iraqi official.

And current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, backed by the CIA during his years in exile and handpicked by U.S. and U.N. officials to lead the interim government, came in third. He addressed a joint session of Congress in September, a rare honor reserved for heads of state of the closest U.S. allies. But now, U.S. hopes that Allawi will tally enough votes to vie as a compromise candidate and continue his leadership are unrealistic, analysts say.

That's actually probably a good thing for a number of reasons. When was the last time the Middle East witnessed a peaceful transfer of power? Allawi implemented a number of security measures, including martial law, in an effort to stem the tide of the insurgency. Him implementing those measures and then stepping down as Prime Minister is likely to send a powerful message throughout the region as well as to all those Western commentators who figured that Allawi was just the latest in the long line of Arab despots supported by the US.

"The big losers in this election are the liberals," said Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation government. "The fact that three-quarters of the national assembly seats have gone to just two [out of 111] slates is a worrisome trend. Unless the ruling coalition reaches out to broaden itself to include all groups, the insurgency will continue -- and may gain ground."

True, though the Sunnis are already backtracking their more extreme demands and while I tend to share many of Diamond's concerns (though a number of the parties represented in the UIA are pretty secular Shi'ites), it is worth noting that the more progressive Iraqi groups who lost the election are also the people who least likely to embrace an insurgency that is headed up by people like Zarqawi.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, who is a leading contender to be prime minister, reiterated yesterday that the new government does not want to emulate Iran. "We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." "Now we are working for a democratic government. This is our choice."

Given the headline of this article and the fact that Mahdi is the only actual Iraqi, politician or otherwise, who is actually quoted in the article, I find his statements somewhat humorous. While I remain well aware of Mahdi's ties to VEVAK, let me just say that if he wants to create the Islamic Republic of Iraq in imitation of Khomeini he's sure going about it in a stealthy manner. I would suggest that this is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the really demagogues like Khomeini or bin Laden don't make much effort to conceal their intentions.

And a senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 percent vote won by the Shiite slate deprives it of an outright majority. "If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation," he said on the condition of anonymity because of department rules.

Given that the UIA is now at 51%, I suspect he's eating crow right about now.

U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate. Iraq's Arabs and Iran's Persians have a long and rocky history. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Shiite troops did not defect to Iran.

I mentioned that earlier. Maybe Khomeini's charming practice of sending children out into the battlefield as minesweepers made them realize that he was just as crazy as Saddam?

"There's the assumption that the new government will be close to Iran or influenced by Iran. That's a strong and reasonable assumption," Khouri said. "But I don't think anyone knows -- including Grand Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani -- where the fault line is between Shiite religious identity and Iraqi national identity."

Guess we'll get to find out then, huh? I suspect that much of the regional assumptions about the new Iraqi government being an Iranian pawn have to do with fears, even fears held by reasonable people like King Abdullah of Jordan, that the Iraqi Shi'ites will try and support their co-religionists in other parts of the Arab world, destabilizing the existing post-colonial order and plunging a number of neighboring states into chaos. I don't think that this fear is all that plausible because it conceives of Shi'ites as a monolithic force throughout the region based in large part on what happened to them in Lebanon and led to the formation of Hezbollah during the 1980s.

Iranian-born Sistani is now Iraq's top cleric -- and the leader who pressed for elections when Washington favored a caucus system to pick a government. His aides have also rejected Iran's theocracy as a model, although the Shiite slate is expected to press for Islamic law to be incorporated in the new constitution.

Sistani, like the rest of the An Najaf ayatollahs, explicitly reject Khomeini's doctrine that the clergy should rule the state. As for the role of Islam in the new Iraqi society, any elements that are incorporated are going to have to be fairly ecumenical to get through parliament because of the country's multi-ethnic, multi-religious make-up. In any event, that's for the Iraqis to decide.

For now, the United States appears prepared to accept the results -- in large part because it has no choice.

What would the Post have us do, approve all Iraqi candidates on the strict basis of ideology and prevent those who don't pass the test from running? Oh wait, there's another country in the region that already does that ...

But the results were announced at a time when the United States faces mounting tensions with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, support for extremism and human rights violations. On her first trip abroad this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran's behavior was "something to be loathed" and charged that the "unelected mullahs" are not good for Iran or the region.

She also said that Iran is stirring up trouble in Iraq together with Syria, which leads back to the whole point that the mad mullahs' mischief is bad for the region, not just for the US. Why, the Iraqis might even consider Iran enabling attacks on their country as being worthy of their concern ...

One of the biggest questions, analysts say, is whether Iraq's democratic election will make it easier -- or harder -- to pressure Iran.

Given all the bombastic rhetoric out of Tehran since the elections, including the low-rent Nuremburg rally for their perfectly peaceful nuclear program last week, I'd say that the mad mullahs are feeling the heat pretty nicely these days. The question now is whether or not we can get things to the point where the people of Iran can rise up and all Khamenei's Revolutionary Guards, and all of Khamenei's Hizb-e-Ansar, and all of Khamenei's Baseej won't be able to put the Islamic Republic back together again.

Oh, and faster please.