Iranian Role in Iraq 2

Arabs say Petraeus report offers no Iraq solution

Tue Sep 11, 2007 8:26am EDT

By Lin Noueihed

DUBAI (Reuters) – A long-waited report by the top U.S. general in Iraq offers no new ideas on ending bloodshed and suggests Washington has lost the war whether its troops stay in Iraq or go, according to analysts in the Arab world.

General David Petraeus, facing Democratic lawmakers and many voters demanding a quick end to the U.S. engagement in Iraq, recommended cutting American troops by 30,000 in the next year but not fundamentally changing strategy in the unpopular war.

The reduction would return U.S. troop strength to roughly the same level it was before an increase ordered by U.S. President George W. Bush from February to June.

Analysts from across the Arab world were disappointed by the reports from Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, which they said seemed calculated only to shore up Bush’s policy and preclude any substantial shift in approach on Iraq.

“Washington wants to bring the situation in Iraq back to square one, to the pre-surge period, which means there is no improvement. Things are not really moving forward,” said Khaled al-Dakhil, a political sociology professor in Saudi Arabia.

“The situation in Iraq looks increasingly beyond rescue”.

The report to Congress was seen as a crucial moment in the U.S. debate over the war.

Both Petraeus and Crocker believe the troop surge in a war that is now in its fifth year and has killed over 3,700 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis is working. Critics, however, say any military success is not being matched by reconciliation between Iraqi sects and ethnic groups.

Petraeus said the number of violent incidents had dropped and the war could eventually be won, particularly as tribal leaders in the Sunni Muslim Anbar province, once one of the most volatile in Iraq, had turned against al Qaeda.

Gulf Research Centre’s Sulayman Awad Ibrahim said it was worrying that Washington was relying on tribal leaders to push out al Qaeda.

“How can a few tribes, and these are really militias, in Anbar do what 160,000 U.S. soldiers could not do. There must be something wrong. The United States is after all the world’s only superpower,” he told Reuters.

“When a government loses credibility, not just with the occupied people but with their own people, it is very difficult to regain the confidence that they can fulfill their mission.”

NO-WIN SITUATION

Petraeus said many of the bombers and the technologies they have been using to attack U.S. forces and Iraqis, came from neighbors Iran and Syria, both on bad terms with Washington.

Syria has long said it was doing its best to control its border with Iraq.

The state-run Thawra newspaper said the United States was unable to recognize or correct mistakes it had made since the 2003 invasion.

“Whoever listened to David Petraeus … was sure that the Americans have not learnt anything during the last period and are still in a state of arrogance and stubbornness which will only take the Bush administration to dead ends,” it read.

“We are astonished at how … the United States cannot find the appropriate way to correct the large, abominable mistakes which it has landed itself in and, at least, not learnt from all the lessons which it has been through in the last six years.”

With sectarian violence in Iraq raging and Washington apparently unwilling or unable to change course, some analysts said they feared Iraq would crumble into three parts — a Kurdish north, a Shi’ite south run by parties and militias close to Iran and Sunni tribes controlling the centre.

“The U.S. choices in Iraq are bleak. Their Kurdish allies want a separate state and the Shi’ites are loyal to Iran,” said Mustafa El-Labbad, an Egyptian analyst and Iran expert.

“If the U.S. leaves Iraq it will fall under Iranian influence. The current situation as well is in Iran’s favor, and one of the report’s aims is to blame Iran for the U.S. troubles,” he said.

“It is like a boxing fight with the two boxers caught in a clinch. The United States is unable to win by a knockout, and it is not scoring any points either.”

(Additional reporting by Thomas Perry in Beirut, Alaa Shahine in Cairo and Souhail Karam in Riyadh)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1182717220070911?sp=true

U.S. forces arrest Iranian-linked agent in Iraq

Wed Sep 5, 2007 7:15am EDT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. soldiers detained a “highly sought individual” suspected of links to senior officers in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in a predawn raid on the holy Iraqi Shi’ite city of Kerbala on Wednesday, the U.S. military said.

U.S. commanders in Iraq have repeatedly accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force of training Shi’ite militias in Iraq and supplying them with increasingly sophisticated weaponry to kill American soldiers. Iran denies the charges.

The U.S. military said in a statement that the detained man, an Iraqi, was suspected of liaising with high-level officers in the Guards’ elite Qods Force to arrange the transportation of Iraqis to training camps in Iran.

“It is likely that the affiliate is closely linked to individuals at the highest levels of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Qods Force,” it said.

Major-General Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in central Iraq, said last month intelligence suggested there were about 50 members of the Revolutionary Guards training Shi’ite militias in how to use mortars and rockets in southern Iraq.

He acknowledged that his troops had so far failed to seize any weapon shipments coming across the Iranian border and that no Revolutionary Guards member had been captured in his area of responsibility, which includes Kerbala.

Wednesday’s arrest could therefore be significant in helping to establish a direct link between the Qods Force and militias.

The U.S. military statement said troops had confiscated computer equipment, communications devices, documents and photographs from the suspect’s home.

“As Iran continues its proxy war against the people of Iraq, Coalition forces will continue to build on recent operations to disrupt the flow of illicit, lethal materials from Iran to Iraq,” said military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver.

U.S. generals say Iran is also trying to influence debate on the war in Washington by boosting its support for militias.

U.S. forces have been holding five Iranians since January that they say were providing support to militants. The military says the five are Qods Force agents, but Iran insists they are diplomats and has demanded their release.

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSCOL52581020070905?sp=true

Iran increasing Iraq militant support: U.S. commander

Sun Aug 26, 2007 4:39pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq accused Iran on Sunday of stepping up support for anti-American Shi’ite militants in Iraq as U.S. policymakers await a crucial assessment of the violence-torn country.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said Iraqi Shi’ite groups have received more weapons, ammunition, funding and training from Iran in the past two months, while President George W. Bush’s “surge” strategy to quell violence in Baghdad has taken effect.

“It’s clear to me that over the past 30 to 60 days they have increased their support,” Odierno said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

“They do it from providing weapons, ammunition — specifically mortars and explosively formed projectiles,” he said in a video link from Iraq.

“They are providing monetary support to some groups and they are conducting training within Iran of Iraqi extremists to come back here and fight the United States,” he added.

Iran denies meddling in Iraq and says the U.S. invasion in 2003 is the cause of sectarian strife.

But U.S. military officials have long accused Iran of supplying deadly roadside bombs to anti-U.S. militants.

U.S. intelligence agencies said in a declassified report last week that Iran has been intensifying its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shi’ite militants since January.

The report predicted the support would continue over the next year because of Tehran’s concerns about a Sunni reemergence in Iraq and U.S. efforts to limit Iranian influence.

In an interview with Reuters earlier this month, Odierno said he believed Iran was using its support for Shi’ite militants to influence the debate in Washington over whether to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and top U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus are due next month to issue a report on military and political progress in Iraq that could determine the course of U.S. policy.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2641227920070826?sp=true

Iranian agents training militias in Iraq: U.S. general

Sun Aug 19, 2007 9:24am EDT

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By Ross Colvin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence reports indicate there are about 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards training Shi’ite militias in how to use mortars and rockets in southern Iraq, a U.S. general said on Sunday.

In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini dismissed the accusation as “completely baseless”.

U.S. Major-General Rick Lynch, whose forces south of Baghdad are battling a mixture of Sunni Islamist and Shi’ite militants, said many of the 25 soldiers killed in his area in the past 60 days were hit by what the U.S. military calls “indirect fire”.

“The enemy is ramping up indirect fire attacks. The enemy is more aggressive. The great concern is about the Iranian munitions he is using,” Lynch told reporters in Baghdad.

“We have some members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. They are facilitating training of Shi’ite extremists. In my battle space … we think there are about 50 members.”

U.S. officials and military commanders have stepped up their accusations against Iran in recent weeks, charging Iraq’s neighbor of playing a spoiling role to influence a September progress report on the war due to be presented next month.

Lynch said U.S. troops had so far failed to seize any weapon shipments coming across the Iranian border and that no Revolutionary Guards member had been captured in his area of responsibility.

However, he said his troops had captured 217 weapons with Iranian markings on them since April, in a period coinciding with an increase in rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. soldiers.

Intelligence suggested that explosively formed penetrators, a particularly deadly roadside bomb that has claimed the lives of scores of U.S. soldiers, were being built in Iran and then smuggled into Iraq to be assembled there.

Iran has denied such charges and blames the 2003 U.S.-led invasion for the sectarian violence between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunni Arabs that has killed tens of thousands.

GEORGIAN BRIGADE

Lynch’s deputy, Brigadier-General Ed Cardon, said a blocking force of about 2,000 Georgian soldiers was to be deployed in Wasit province southeast of Baghdad to thwart the smuggling of any weapons from Iran.

The province shares a 200-km (120-mile) stretch of porous border with Iran. It has only one official border crossing but there are a number of smuggling routes north and south of it.

Lynch, whose “battle space” includes the “Triangle of Death”, a notorious Sunni Arab militant stronghold, and rival Shi’ite militias, has launched a series of operations to block the flow of weapons and fighters into Baghdad and stop the area being used as a launchpad for attacks.

U.S. troops have begun an offensive in provinces bordering Baghdad, targeting al Qaeda and Shi’ite militias, to buy time for Iraq’s leaders to broker a workable power sharing deal between Shi’ite Muslims, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

“We believe we have the enemy on the run. We are in a pursuit phase,” Lynch said.

He said there had been a 20 percent decline in violence in his area in the past 60 days, from 20 attacks a day to 16, and a 36 percent decline in civilian casualties.

But there has been an increase in attacks on U.S. soldiers.

He thumbed through a pack of plastic-laminated cards tied together by a rubber band that he pulled from the left leg pocket of his battledress. Each bore a number and the photograph of a U.S. soldier killed since April. The last number was 71.

(Additional reporting by Tehran bureau)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1922015320070819?sp=true

Jordan, Iraq agree to boost fight against al Qaeda

Wed Aug 15, 2007 2:08pm EDT

By Suleiman al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) – Iraq and Jordan have agreed to share more intelligence to fight al Qaeda and other militant groups waging terror attacks across the region, Iraq’s national security adviser said on Wednesday.

“We agreed to develop intelligence sharing to a qualitatively new level as the enemy is one and the main goal is fighting al Qaeda and the defeat of terrorists,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie said.

He spoke after suicide bomb attacks overnight killed 200 people in northwest Iraq. The U.S. military said on Wednesday al Qaeda was the “prime suspect.”

Islamist militants are sworn enemies of both the Iraqi government and Jordan, a U.S. ally that gives crucial support to Washington’s operations in Iraq. In November 2005, triple al Qaeda suicide bombings killed 60 people at hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

“We agreed that the threats affecting Iraqi national security are the same that face Jordan. Our common enemy are al Qaeda and religious extremism that prevails in some parts of our region,” Rubaie said at the end of two-day talks in Jordan.

Western and Arab security officials say the rise in militancy is tied to growing anti-American sentiment since the invasion of Iraq.

“This is an intelligence-led war against al Qaeda… Iraq is in the forefront of this global terror…so this is not a war of Iraq versus al Qaeda. Security in Iraq is crucial for stability in the region,” Rubaie said.

Iraq also listened to Jordanian fears that Iraq’s security forces could be infiltrated by Shi’ite militias supported by Iranian intelligence, Rubaie said.

“We listened to these complaints. We are realistic and know that the Iraqi security forces have seen some penetrations and excesses,” Rubaie said.

Jordanian security sources say Shi’ite-led militias with ties to Iran prevail in the Iraqi police and many are behind sectarian death squads blamed for sectarian violence.

Jordanian officials were briefed about the purge of 13,000 interior ministry employees accused of a role in sectarian killings and the probe of 9,000 other personnel, Rubaie added.

Jordan and other Sunni Arab countries are concerned about increasing Iranian influence in Iraq, whose government is led by Shi’ite groups close to Iran. They also fear sectarian violence in Iraq could spread across their borders and engulf the region.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1528144520070815?sp=true

Saudis biggest group of al Qaeda Iraq fighters: study

Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:12pm EST

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Most al Qaeda fighters in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and Libya and many are university-aged students, said a study released on Wednesday by researchers at the U.S. Army’s West Point military academy.

The study was based on 606 personnel records collected by al Qaeda in Iraq and captured by coalition troops in October. It includes data on fighters who entered Iraq, largely through Syria, between August 2006 and August 2007.

The researchers at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center found that 41 percent of the fighters were Saudi nationals.

Libyan nationals accounted for the second largest group entering Iraq in that time period with about 19 percent of the total, followed by Syrians and Yemenis each at 8 percent, Algerians with 7 percent and Moroccans at 6 percent.

On a per capita basis, Libyans accounted for the greatest share of foreign fighters entering Iraq.

Previous studies found Libyans accounted for a far smaller percentage of foreign fighters in Iraq, the West Point researchers said. They concluded the U.S. military either underestimated the Libyan contribution of fighters or that the pattern has shifted since a Libyan Islamic militant group strengthened ties with al Qaeda.

“The apparent surge in Libyan recruits traveling to Iraq may be linked (to) the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s increasingly cooperative relationship with al-Qa’ida, which culminated in the LIFG officially joining al-Qa’ida on November 3, 2007,” wrote authors Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman.

According to the study, the average age of the 606 fighters who entered over that one-year period was 24-25. One was 15 years old.

The authors called that finding “worrisome.”

“The incitement of a new generation of jihadis to join the fight in Iraq, or plan operations elsewhere, is one of the most worrisome aspects of the ongoing fight in Iraq,” they wrote.

“The United States should not confuse gains against al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi franchises as fundamental blows against the organization outside of Iraq. So long as al-Qa’ida is able to attract hundreds of young men to join its ranks, it will remain a serious threat to global security.”

The researchers found that of the 157 fighters who listed an occupation, 43 percent said they were students.

“Universities have become a critical recruiting field for al Qaeda,” the study said.

About half of the Saudis in the personnel pool listed their work in Iraq as “suicide bomber” with the rest as “fighter.” Some 85 percent of the Libyans and 92 percent of Moroccans in the pool listed themselves as suicide bombers.

The Combating Terrorism Center is part of the West Point military academy that trains officers for the U.S. Army. The authors said the study reflected their views, not the views of the academy, Pentagon or the U.S. government.

(Reporting by Kristin Roberts, Editing by Eric Beech)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1962918820071219?sp=true

U.S. envoy says Iraq report will sound warning on Iran

Fri Aug 17, 2007 12:57pm EDT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Washington’s envoy to Iraq warned Americans on Thursday that pulling U.S. troops out of the country could open the door to a “major Iranian advance” that would threaten U.S. interests in the region.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker also accused Tehran of seeking to weaken the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government so that it could “by one means or another control it”. Iran has denied U.S. charges that it is arming and training Shi’ite militias in Iraq.

Crocker and the top U.S. general in Iraq, General David Petraeus are due to present a pivotal report to Congress in September on progress on the military and political fronts and make recommendations on the way forward.

Opinion polls suggest most Americans have turned against the four-year war and Democrats in Congress want President George W. Bush to start pulling out U.S. troops as soon as possible. Bush, however, has resisted such calls.

“If the leadership wants to go a different way, I have an obligation to talk a little bit about what the consequences of pulling in a different direction would be,” Crocker told Reuters in an interview in his office in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

“One area of clear concern is Iran. The Iranians aren’t going anywhere. I have significant concerns that a coalition withdrawal would lead to a major Iranian advance. And we need to consider what the consequences of that would be.”

The two long-time foes are locked in a stand-off over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons.

Crocker has met his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad three times to discuss U.S. concerns that Iran is fuelling violence in Iraq, despite Tehran’s public support for Iraq’s government.

“Based on what I see on the ground, I think they are seeking a state that they can, by one means or another, control, weakened to the point that Tehran can set its agenda,” he said.

Tehran was seeking “greater influence, greater pressure on the government”, said the veteran diplomat, a fluent Arabic speaker who has spent most of his career in the Middle East.

MOVIE REEL

Bush sent 30,000 extra troops to Iraq earlier this year to try to halt sectarian violence between majority Shi’ite Muslims and minority Sunni Arabs and buy time for Iraq’s divided political leaders to agree a real power-sharing deal.

While Petraeus will look at the success of the U.S. military build-up, Crocker has the arguably more difficult task of reporting on the almost negligible political progress that has been made towards reconciling Iraq’s warring groups.

With the Bush administration often accused of not giving much thought about what do in Iraq after it invaded in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, Crocker said he was anxious to spell out the consequences of pulling out U.S. troops.

“If we decide that we tried, we’re tired, we want to bring the troops home, then what? The movie does not stop the day that coalition forces leave Iraq. It keeps on running. We need to consider what reels two, three, four and five might look like.”

Crocker said he was in daily contact with Petraeus but had not yet begun to draft his report, which is due to be presented on September 15 and is seen by many as a watershed moment in the war that could trigger a change in U.S. policy.

“I have come to find here in Iraq that a month is a long span of time,” he said.

He said the U.S. military buildup, which has succeeded in reducing sectarian violence, and new alliances formed with Sunni Arab sheikhs that have pacified volatile Anbar province had brought Maliki’s government to a cross-roads.

“This is the best chance they have had since the beginning of 2006. It is an opportunity to really start turning things around in this country. But they are going to have to move in a decisive, considered and comprehensive way.”

Iraq’s leaders have been meeting this week to try to find common ground and break the political logjam that has paralyzed decision-making, lost him nearly a score of ministers, and stalled agreement on key laws that Washington sees as crucial to national reconciliation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/gc05/idUSKAR67098020070817?sp=true

U.S. forces launch new offensive in Iraq

Mon Aug 13, 2007 6:43pm EDT

By Ross Colvin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. and Iraqi forces launched an offensive against al Qaeda and “Iranian-supported” Shi’ite militants across Iraq on Monday in anticipation of an expected surge in violence.

U.S. commanders fear militants will step up attacks on U.S. soldiers or launch a “spectacular” attack on civilians to try to influence the debate over the war in Washington, where a keenly awaited progress report on the new U.S. military strategy in Iraq is due to be presented to Congress in September.

In Baghdad, leaders of Iraq’s divided Kurdish, Shi’ite and Sunni Arab communities held a series of bilateral talks ahead of an expected summit this week.

The summit is aimed at healing the deep mistrust that has paralyzed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s national unity government and plunged it into its worst crisis.

“Everything will be on the table. It is like the days when we were forming the government, except that Maliki himself is not going to be replaced,” said a Shi’ite official familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Those taking part in Monday’s preparatory bilateral talks were Maliki, Deputy President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni and member of the Accordance Front; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Deputy President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a member of the powerful Shi’ite Supreme Islamic Iraq Council; and Masoud Barzani, the leader of Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region.

The U.S. military described Operation Phantom Strike as “a powerful crackdown” jointly carried out by Iraqi troops.

“It consists of simultaneous operations throughout Iraq focused in pursuing AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq) terrorists and Iranian-supported extremist elements,” it said in a statement.

The U.S. military says Iran has stepped up its support for Shi’ite militias, giving them more weapons and training, to hasten the departure of U.S. troops. Iran denies giving any aid.

The statement gave no details of the operation or how many of the 162,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq were involved.

U.S. forces have launched a series of offensives in recent weeks, particularly in beltways around Baghdad that have become safe havens for al Qaeda car bomb networks and Shi’ite militias.

COUNTERING THREAT

Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, the day-to-day commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told Reuters in an interview at the weekend his forces were adapting their tactics to counter an expected surge in militant attacks over the next month.

The top U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker are due to present a report to Congress in September on the success of the troop buildup and Iraqi political progress towards reconciliation.

U.S. President George W. Bush has sent 30,000 extra troops to Iraq to give Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government breathing room to agree a real powersharing deal between the warring sects.

U.S. forces have claimed successes in reducing the level of sectarian violence following the capture or killing of a number of al Qaeda leaders, strikes against Shi’ite militia cells and operations to clear areas of militants and then hold them.

But a reluctance to compromise by the main political blocs means there has been little political progress. Legislation seen as crucial by Washington to reconciliation and ending sectarian bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands has stalled.

It includes laws on sharing Iraq’s oil wealth and easing restrictions on former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party serving in the civil service, reforming the constitution and setting a date for provincial elections.

Maliki’s government has also been hit by walkouts.

The main Sunni Arab bloc, the Accordance Front, has quit, following in the footsteps of ministers loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who withdrew in April in protest of Maliki’s refusal to set a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

The Accordance Front complained Maliki had marginalized them and ignored demands for the provision of improved services to majority Sunni Arab provinces, a greater say in security matters and the release of prisoners detained without charge.

Ministers loyal to former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi began a boycott of cabinet meetings last week, saying Maliki had ignored a list of demands they had submitted in February.

(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSYAT71336220070813?sp=true

Iranian influence in Iraq undimmed despite talks: U.S.

Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:24am EDT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. officials said on Wednesday that Iranian meddling in Iraq had continued despite talks between Washington and Tehran last month in Baghdad on security issues.

“There absolutely is evidence of Iranian operatives holding weapons, training fighters, providing resources, helping plan operations, resourcing secret cells that is destabilizing Iraq,” said chief military spokesman Brigadier General Kevin Bergner.

“We would like very much to see some action on their part to reduce the level of effort and to help contribute to Iraq’s security. We have not seen it yet,” he told a news conference.

Tensions between the two old adversaries are particularly high after the United States seized five Iranians earlier this year in northern Iraq which it claimed were helping the insurgents.

Iran, which says the five are bona fide diplomats, is holding three U.S.-Iranian citizens on security-related charges.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker met with his Iranian counterpart last month in Baghdad to discuss U.S. concerns.

In particular, Washington blames Iranians for supplying a type of roadside bomb called an explosively formed penetrator which cuts through armor and has killed many U.S. soldiers.

Tehran said last week it would study a request from Baghdad for a second meeting, but warned a decision may take weeks.

Daniel Speckhard, the number two U.S. diplomat in Iraq, said there had still been no word back.

“We do not yet have another meeting scheduled for that dialogue with Iraq and Iran,” he told the briefing.

He said the first meeting produced general assurances that Tehran had a common interest in seeing a stable Iraq on its border, but these words had not been matched by deeds.

“What we’ve seen during the first meeting is, from our perspective, a sense…that their actions were out of line with their stated goals and objectives,” he said.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said his country backed the Iraqi government and accused the United States of seeking to undermine Tehran’s ties with Baghdad, the Iranian student news agency ISNA reported earlier.

Relations between the two countries are also being strained by Iran’s nuclear program, which it says is for peaceful purposes but the West claims is designed to yield nuclear bombs.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBUL74971120070627?sp=true

Iranian weapons still a problem in Iraq: U.S. military

Sun Nov 18, 2007 12:22pm EST

By Missy Ryan

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iranian weapons and agents still pose a threat to U.S.-led forces in Iraq, a U.S. military spokesman said on Sunday, despite a recent softening in tone by U.S. officials towards Washington’s bitter foe.

“We’re still seeing a large number of Iranian-made weapons still exist here in Iraq,” U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told a news conference, adding that “individuals” coordinating and carrying out attacks were still in the country.

Major-General James Simmons, the U.S. general in charge of countering attacks using deadly roadside bombs, said last week that unofficial assurances from Iran that it would stop the flow of bombs into Iraq appeared to be holding.

His comments came after U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker also noted some positive recent developments in Iranian involvement in Iraq, in an apparent softening of rhetoric towards Tehran.

“The degree to which Iran has ceased completely its training, equipping, financing and resourcing has yet to be completely witnessed,” Smith said.

Washington and the U.S. military in Iraq accuse Iran of arming, training and funding Shi’ite militias in Iraq, a charge Tehran denies. Iran blames the violence in Iraq on the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Iraqi civilian and U.S. military casualties have dropped sharply in the past two months, which Smith described as encouraging.

The falls have been attributed to a “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops which became fully deployed in June, more effective Iraqi security forces and the increasing use of U.S.-backed neighborhood police units organized by tribal sheikhs.

Smith said the number of attacks had fallen by 55 percent to their lowest levels since January 2006.

U.S. embassy spokesman Phil Reeker said another round of U.S.-Iran talks on Iraqi security was expected soon but no date has been set.

Crocker has met his Iranian counterpart three times this year, ending a diplomatic freeze that lasted almost 30 years. The talks are limited to Iraq and do not touch on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“It’s important for us to continue to push the Iranians to try by various means to bring their practices in line with their stated policy,” Reeker said.

With violence levels dropping, Reeker said attention should now turn to political progress towards reconciling Iraq’s majority Shi’ite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims.

“The improvements that we’ve seen in security have set the stage for a number of things in the economic sphere and certainly in the political sphere,” he said.

(Reporting by Paul Tait and Missy Ryan; editing by Sami Aboudi)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSRYA84317020071118?sp=true

Iraqi Qaeda group calls U.S.-Iranian talks satanic

Tue May 29, 2007 7:11pm EDT

DUBAI (Reuters) – The al Qaeda-led Islamic State in Iraq group on Tuesday criticized as satanic talks between Iran and the United States in Baghdad.

The United States and Iran held their most high-profile meeting in almost 30 years on Monday. The meeting between the arch-foes at ambassador level in the Iraqi capital was called to discuss ways of ending the conflict in Iraq.

The Islamic State in Iraq, led by Sunni Arabs, said in a statement posted on the Internet that Shi’ite Muslim Iran was willing to abandon its nuclear program to win U.S. blessing to dominate Iraq, which has a Shi’ite-led government.

“The Great Satan and its allies sat together to conspire against the people of Islam (Sunnis) after the projects of the crusaders and the Shi’ites reached a dead end,” said the group.

Iranian officials and clerics often describe the United States as the “Great Satan”.

The meeting marked a shift in the U.S. policy of shunning almost all contact with Iran since severing diplomatic ties in 1980, 14 months after Iran’s Islamic Revolution and five months after Americans were seized in a hostage crisis in Tehran.

It did not touch on Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Washington accuses Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb, but Tehran says its program is only for generation of electricity.

“Each side found the other as a bridge to reach their respective goals,” said the Islamic Group in Iraq.

“The bargain would be over the nuclear file in return for official recognition of Iran’s influence in Iraq … so that the killing of Sunni people becomes legitimate.”

Iraq has been plagued by sectarian violence between the Shi’ite majority and the Sunni Arab minority, once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2916446620070529

Iran leader suggests U.S. ties possible in future

Thu Jan 3, 2008 4:29pm EST

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran’s supreme leader suggested on Thursday that ties might one day be possible with the United States, the Islamic state’s arch foe for almost three decades, although he said it would harm Iran to restore relations now.

“Not having relations with America is one of our main policies but we have never said this relationship should be cut forever,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in the central province of Yazd, state television reported.

“Certainly, the day when having relations with America is useful for the nation I will be the first one to approve this relationship.”

The United States severed ties shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They are at odds over Iran’s atomic ambitions and also disagree over who is to blame for the violence in Iraq.

Iranian leaders have often said they would not establish ties with the United States unless Washington, which is leading efforts to isolate Tehran over its nuclear work, changes its behavior towards the Islamic Republic.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last month Washington was open to better relations with Iran if it halted its nuclear work, something Tehran has repeatedly refused to do.

The West suspects Iran wants to master nuclear technology so it can build atomic bombs. Iran, the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, says its program is aimed at generating electricity to enable it to sell more oil and gas.

NO NUCLEAR SUSPENSION

Washington is pushing for a third round of U.N. sanctions against Iran over its atomic activities, even though a U.S. national intelligence estimate last month said Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Khamenei, who like other Iranian leaders often rails against the West, suggested the example of Iraq showed the United States would remain a “danger” even if the two countries had relations.

“Because of America’s conditions … establishing this relationship now would be harmful for us and naturally we shouldn’t follow it,” he said.

“Some accuse us of provoking the enmity of America but their enmity towards Iran … is towards the principles of the Iranian nation.”

Iranian and U.S. officials eased a diplomatic freeze last year by holding three rounds of talks in Baghdad since May, but those discussions were limited to Iraq.

Khamenei rejected the suggestion by Washington and Moscow that Iran should stop its own nuclear uranium enrichment after Russia began delivering fuel in December to Iran’s first atomic power plant in Bushehr.

“This is like telling a country with huge oil reserves that it should provide for its oil needs from abroad,” he said.

Enriched uranium can be used as fuel for power plants but also, if refined much further, provide material for bombs.

Iranian officials say the country needs domestic nuclear fuel production for other power plants it wants to build.

“The Americans had no choice but to accept their failure in stopping Iran’s nuclear achievements,” Khamenei said.

(Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSDAH33865120080103?sp=true

Iranian minister in Syria for talks on Iraq

Tue Apr 17, 2007 4:40pm EDT

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

DAMASCUS, April 17 (Reuters) – Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moualem on Tuesday to coordinate policy on Iraq ahead of an international meeting next month to discuss the conflict there.

“Iraq is in extraordinary circumstances and we hope that neighbouring countries continue to do their best for security and stability there,” Mottaki told reporters after a late meeting with Moualem at the Foreign Ministry.

“We have been in touch about Iraq and there is agreement to keep up dialogue between us,” said Mottaki, who arrived in the Syrian capital after holding similar discussions in Turkey.

Egypt will host a high-level meeting of a group of countries that includes Syria, Turkey and the United States in the first week of May to discuss how to stop the violence in Iraq. The conference is a follow-up to one in Baghdad in March.

Mottaki said Iran, which was present at the Baghdad conference, had not yet decided whether to attend.

“We are studying the issue and there is still plenty of time to take a decision,” he said.

An Iranian newspaper reported last week that Iran might not take part if U.S. forces do not release five Iranians they are holding in Iraq.

The United States accuses Iran and Syria of furthering instability in Iraq, but the Baker-Hamilton panel in December recommended that Washington talk with the two countries about stopping the violence.

FEARS OF IRAN

During a meeting between President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran in February, the two leaders stressed that the identity of Iraq was Arab, to allay fears in the region of expanding Iranian influence there.

Syria has been reinforcing links with Iran as the two countries come under pressure from Washington. Senior U.S. politicians who visited Damascus lately have urged Assad to distance himself from Tehran.

Western diplomats said Assad had told visiting delegations that U.S. pressure left him with little choice but to make a closer alliance with Iran, but that Syria was ready to help end the violence in Iraq.

Washington says Syria is allowing anti-U.S. fighters to cross from its border into Iraq. Syria denies helping the rebels and says a stable Iraq is in its interest.

A fiercely anti-American newspaper published in Damascus by Iraqi Member of Parliament Mishaan al-Jubouri was recently shut down and senior Iraqi officials have been visiting Damascus.

“There has been less movement and supply across the border from Syria,” one diplomat said. “This may be more due to the fact that the insurgents are becoming self-sufficient than anything Syria is doing.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSOWE767365

U.S. spy: Iran training Iraqis to use explosives

Wed Feb 28, 2007 4:09pm EST

Corrects attribution in paragraph one to “a top U.S. intelligence official” from “the top U.S. intelligence official.”

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Iran is training anti-American Iraqi Shi’ites at sites inside Iran and Lebanon in the use of armor-piercing munitions blamed for the deaths of 170 U.S. troops in Iraq, a top U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, newly installed U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell said it was “probable” that Iranian leaders including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were aware that weapons known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, had been supplied to Iraqi Shi’ites.

But he and other senior intelligence officials told a hearing on threats to the United States that al Qaeda remained the greatest threat facing the United States and had reestablished itself in Pakistan since being driven out of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

“We inflicted a major blow. They retreated to another area. And they are going through a process to reestablish and rebuild, adapting to the seams, or the weak spots,” McConnell said in his first congressional testimony as the U.S. director of national intelligence.

McConnell, a retired Navy admiral and career military intelligence officer, took over the intelligence chief’s job a week ago, replacing John Negroponte who was sworn in on Tuesday as the new deputy secretary of state.

In describing Iran’s role in Iraq, he stopped short of he stopped short of saying the Islamic Republic was directing EFP attacks on U.S. forces.

“We know there are Iranian weapons manufactured in Iran.

We know that Quds Forces (of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards) are bringing them (into Iraq),” McConnell said.

“Is there a direct link from Quds Forces delivering weapons, to the most senior leadership in Iran?” he said. “I would phrase it as ‘probable’ but, again, no direct link … I am comfortable saying it’s probable.”

HEZBOLLAH ROLE?

Under questioning by Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples tersely acknowledged that the United States has evidence showing that Iran is training Iraqi Shi’ites at sites outside Iraq to use EFPs.

“And some of that training is occurring in Iran?” asked Lieberman.

“Yes, sir,” Maples replied.

“I’ve heard reports that some may be occurring in Lebanon in Hezbollah training camps,” Lieberman said.

“We believe Hezbollah is involved in the training as well,” Maples answered.

Tehran denies any role in supplying the arms, and other U.S. officials including President George W. Bush have said the United States cannot prove complicity by Iran’s leaders.

“If Iran is training Iraqi militants in the use of Iranian weapons which are then being used to kill Americans in Iraq, I think that’s a very serious act and one that we ought to consider taking steps to stop,” Lieberman said.

McConnell’s comments were the latest in a series of assertions by U.S. military and intelligence officials that Iran is behind the appearance of EFPS in Iraq, where the weapons have been able to pierce some of the heaviest U.S. armor.

Critics of the Bush administration have cast doubt on U.S. assertions of a role by Iran in violence against U.S. forces at a time when combative U.S. rhetoric toward Tehran has raised concerns about a possible U.S. military strike on Iran.

“The intelligence community … is burdened by skepticism about the accuracy of its assessments due to poor performance and manipulation of intelligence on Iraq prior to the invasion,” noted committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat.

Officials said Iran’s influence in Iraq has grown steadily since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and predicted Iraq’s postwar government would have great difficulty overcoming sectarian violence and achieving reconciliation between Shi’ites and Sunnis.

“Iraqi political leaders have close to impossible tasks,” McConnell said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2730947820070228?sp=true

Iraq Shi’ites fear getting snared in Iran-U.S. spat

Mon Feb 12, 2007 11:23am EST

By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD, Feb 12 (Reuters) – Iraqi Shi’ites fear that growing tension between neighbouring Iran and the United States could leave them caught between defending a fellow Shi’ite nation and an ally that toppled their worst enemy — Saddam Hussein.

While Shi’ite Iraqi officials have sought to distance themselves from the war of words between Tehran and Washington, they have privately expressed concern the increased friction could force some Iraqi Shi’ites to choose sides.

Raising the stakes, senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad presented on Sunday what they called growing evidence of Iranian weapons being used to kill their soldiers and implicated the “highest levels” of Iran’s government in the training of Iraqi militants.

“We do not want to be involved. We want good relations with Iran and good relations with Washington,” a senior Iraqi Shi’ite official told Reuters.

“This is the general view among the Shi’ites but can we control everybody? Of course not.”

President George W. Bush has said he has no intention of invading Iran. But some war critics say the Bush administration’s language on Iran echoes comments made leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Washington, which has branded non-Arab Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’, has long been worried by the influence the Islamic Republic has on anti-U.S. groups in the region.

Among those is the movement of anti-American Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led his Mehdi Army militia in two uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004.

Washington calls the Mehdi Army the biggest threat to Iraq’s security and has urged Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to disarm it. Sadr is a key political ally of Maliki.

Many Iraqi Shi’ite leaders, oppressed under Saddam, took refuge in Iran during the 1980-1988 war with Saddam’s Iraq.

They came to power after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam, giving Arab Shi’ites a rare taste of power in the Sunni dominant Arab world. All Iraqi Shi’ites are Arabs while the Shi’ite of Iran are Persian.

“The Shi’ites in Iraq are on good terms with Iran but they are not willing to lose what they have achieved so far for another country, even if it is Iran,” said an official in Maliki’s governing Shi’ite Alliance coalition.

COMPETING FOR SHI’ITE POWER

The alliance, formed largely as a Shi’ite bloc to compete in 2005 elections, is composed of 18 parties but dominated by Sadr’s movement and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Both groups are rivals and have armed wings.

Sadr and Hakim also have very different views of the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Sadr fiercely opposes American soldiers and has demanded their withdrawal. Hakim, who is on good terms with the United States, says the troops are needed to help stabilise Iraq until the country’s own security forces are ready.

Sadr said a year ago during a visit to Tehran that his Mehdi Army would aid Iran if it came under attack.

Such U.S. intervention in Iran would be a disaster for Iraq, some Shi’ite officials said.

“Any attack on it would be seen as an attack on Shi’ites in general,” said another Shi’ite official, who like all those interviewed, requested anonymity.

“Some might want to get involved under the banner of defending Shi’ites. I do not want to be seen as defending the Americans, but each country has its own interests. It is not in ours to turn our country into a battlefield for others.”

Some Shi’ites officials said rogue elements in Sadr’s Mehdi Army were being funded by Iran — a charge also made by the U.S. military officials on Sunday.

Iraqi officials urged both Washington and Tehran not to turn Iraq into their battlefield.

“Both countries should settle their scores somewhere else,” said another Shi’ite Alliance official.

“Iraq is suffering enough already.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSKAR253369

ANALYSIS-Bush jabs Shi’ite radicals, Iran conciliates Arabs

Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:30am EST

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

BEIRUT, Jan 24 (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush has called Iranian-backed “Shi’ite extremists” as great a peril to his nation as al Qaeda, singling out Lebanon’s Hezbollah rather than the Shi’ite Islamist factions empowered by his war in Iraq.

There was no immediate official reaction from Tehran or from Hezbollah, but one Iranian analyst said Bush was “softening up” his critics in Congress for a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran says the programme is civilian not military.

Hermidas Barvand, a Tehran university professor, said Bush sought to “magnify the menace of Shi’ites” for two reasons: “to mobilise Sunni Arabs…and to legitimise future measures by creating a resemblance between Shi’ite extremism and al Qaeda”.

Bush’s broadside, in his annual State of the Union speech on Tuesday, was in line with his “for us or against us” division of the Middle East since the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

He has opted to isolate and confront Iran and Syria, along with the political-military Islamist groups Hezbollah and the ruling Palestinian Hamas, rather than talking to them.

Both states have tried this month to avoid isolation and show they can’t be ignored in a region of intertwined conflicts. Syria has hosted Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and brokered talks in Damascus between Hamas and its Fatah rivals.

Shi’ite Iran has reached out to Saudi Arabia, U.S. ally and bastion of Sunni Islam, in an apparent effort to keep sectarian warfare in Iraq from igniting in Lebanon and beyond.

BRUSH FIRE OR WORSE

“Some of the contacts between Saudi Arabia and Iran are very significant,” Paul Salem, director of the Middle East Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters.

He said Tehran and Riyadh feared that Sunni-Shi’ite strife could spin out of control and wanted to ensure that “the brush fire that exists in Iraq doesn’t become a forest fire that could consume Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and parts of Saudi Arabia”.

Bush’s emphasis on Shi’ite radicals seemed designed in part to please U.S.-backed Sunni rulers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, who are alarmed by rising Shi’ite power and Iranian influence in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Bush said Sunni militants such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in Iraq, and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were just one part of a “totalitarian” threat from Islamist radicals. “In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shi’ite extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East,” he told Congress.

“Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah — a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken,” Bush said. Washington says Hezbollah was behind a 1983 suicide bombing in Beirut which killed 241 U.S. military personnel.

The United States has taken sides in Lebanon’s internal crisis, vowing to back the government against Hezbollah and its Shi’ite and Christian allies, who accuse Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of taking his orders from Washington.

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said on Tuesday Siniora was up against “those who would go into the streets to overturn a democratically elected government through … mobs”.

CALMING LEBANON

For now, Iran has refrained from matching U.S. rhetorical escalation, amid signs it wants to calm the Lebanese crisis.

Iranian-Saudi diplomacy may have influenced Hezbollah’s decision to suspend a shutdown that brought chaos and bloodshed to Lebanon on Tuesday and raised fears of a return to civil war.

A Lebanese political source said the ambassador of Saudi Arabia, which supports Siniora, and his Iranian counterpart had been in touch with rival factions to try to defuse the conflict.

Senior Saudi diplomat Prince Bandar bin Sultan was now in Tehran to discuss Lebanon, the source said. Recent visits by Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani to Riyadh and other Arab capitals were to allay fears “stoked by the United States” about the emergence of Shi’ite power in Iraq, said an Iranian analyst, who asked not to be named.

Iran’s overtures may also be linked to the recent domestic political setbacks of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose fiery tirades have done much to raise U.S. and regional worries.

“Iran has made some very historic gains in the region, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine,” Salem said. “At the same time it triggered a very serious backlash and fears among a number of Arab countries over its growing might, over its nuclear programme, over possible Sunni-Shi’ite tensions.

“Iran quickly realised that… it needs to attend to its rise in the region and manage it and moderate it in a way that it doesn’t cause these backlashes,” he said. (Additional reporting by Tehran bureau)

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSB273735

Iran asks Saudi Arabia to ease tension with U.S.

Mon Jan 15, 2007 10:29am EST

By Andrew Hammond

RIYADH (Reuters) – Iran has asked Saudi Arabia to help ease tensions between the Islamic Republic and the United States in a letter delivered by Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator to the Saudi King, a Saudi official said on Monday.

The letter, from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, comes at a time of rising tension over Iran’s role in Iraq and Tehran’s nuclear program.

It also follows growing criticism in Iran of Ahmadinejad’s approach of railing against the West which more moderate politicians blame for stoking fears abroad.

Saudi newspapers carried pictures of Iranian negotiator Ali Larijani, who has often visited key U.S. ally and leading Sunni Muslim nation Saudi Arabia over the past year, in what looked like friendly conversation with King Abdullah on Sunday evening.

Moderate conservatives, like Ahmadinejad’s rival Larijani, may be gaining a bigger say in Iranian policy-making after the president’s supporters were trounced in December elections to municipal councils and a clerical body, Iranian analysts say.

A Saudi official said Iran wanted Saudi leaders to relay a goodwill message to Washington. Iran would like Saudi Arabia to “help bring opinions together” between Iran and the United States, the official said, but gave no more details.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to arrive for talks in Riyadh on Monday and Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter and a bastion of Sunni Islam, shares U.S. worries over Iran’s nuclear program and is also angry over Shi’ite Iran’s influence in Iraq where sectarian violence is threatening a civil war.

President Bush this month vowed action to stop what he said was Iran’s role in fomenting violence in Iraq.

PRAGMATIST ELITES

As tension mounts, Iran’s more pragmatic politicians from the liberal and moderate conservative camps have urged a more cautious Iranian approach and, heartened by the December polls, have criticized Ahmadinejad for provoking confrontation.

Ahmadinejad does not have the final say in the Islamic Republic, where ultimate authority lies with Khamenei, but analysts say the president has encouraged a tougher line with the West since he came to office in 2005.

“In the future, I think the hands of the pragmatist elites, little by little, may become more powerful than before the (December) elections,” said political analyst and university professor Hamidreza Jalaiepour, citing figures like Larijani, who was defeated by Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential race.

Gulf Arab countries said last month they would go ahead with their own civilian nuclear energy program, in what some observers have said was a Saudi message to Washington that a nuclear arms race will ensue if Tehran is not checked.

Iran says its nuclear energy is for peaceful purposes but the United States says it is a covert arms program.

U.S.-allied Arab countries including Saudi Arabia acquiesced in Washington’s plan to invade Iraq in 2003, offering some public words of opposition. But Gulf countries fear an Iran war could expose them to greater military and environmental risks.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said at the weekend he hopes to hear clarifications from Rice on Bush’s new strategy, which Riyadh fears will lead to U.S. troops leaving Iraq prematurely, allowing Iran to gain more influence and leaving minority Sunnis at the mercy of Shi’ite militias.

(With additional reporting by Edmund Blair in Tehran)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1523258620070115?sp=true

Rice likely to discuss Iran and Iraq with Saudis

Mon Jan 15, 2007 6:33pm EST

RIYADH (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice holds talks with Saudi leaders on Tuesday that are widely expected to cover Iraq and the standoff between the West and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.

A Saudi official said on Monday Iran had asked Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, to help ease tensions between the Islamic Republic and the United States, as Washington held out the possibility of “engagement” with Tehran if it changed tack in Iraq.

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani delivered a letter from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah ahead of Rice’s visit to Riyadh.

The official, who declined to be named, said Iran wanted Saudi leaders to relay a goodwill message to Washington. But the official gave no details.

Tensions have been rising over Iran’s role in Iraq and its nuclear program. There has also been growing criticism in Iran of Ahmadinejad’s approach of railing publicly against the West that more moderate politicians say has stoked fears abroad.

U.S. forces are holding five Iranians after raiding an Iranian government office in the Iraqi city of Arbil last week — the second such operation in Iraq in the past few weeks.

President George W. Bush has vowed to stop what he said was the role of Shi’ite Muslim Iran in fomenting violence in Iraq.

Bush is sending about 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq to help stamp out an insurgency and sectarian bloodshed between Iraq’s Shi’ite majority and its Sunni Arab minority, once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

NEW IRAQ STRATEGY

Gulf Arab countries said last month they would go ahead with their own civilian nuclear energy program, in what some observers have said was a Saudi message to Washington that a nuclear arms race would ensue if Tehran was not checked.

The United States accuses Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program. Iran says its nuclear program is solely for power generation.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the weekend he hoped to hear clarification from Rice on Bush’s new strategy on Iraq.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, fears if U.S. troops leave Iraq prematurely it would allow Iran to gain more influence and put Sunnis at the mercy of Shi’ite militias.

The kingdom wants the United States to help revive stalled Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking.

Rice, on a lengthy Middle East tour, told reporters in Egypt on Monday she would bring Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas together soon for what she called informal talks on how to set up a Palestinian state.

A senior U.S. official said the meeting would be held in three to four weeks, probably in the Middle East.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1516728920070115?sp=true

Iraq ex-minister denies graft charges, slams govt

Mon Jan 8, 2007 9:38am EST

DUBAI, Jan 8 (Reuters) – A former Iraqi minister who escaped a Baghdad jail last month said on Monday that corruption charges against him had been trumped up by a Shi’ite-led government which he said was ruling the country along sectarian lines.

Ayham al-Samarraie, electricity minister in the former transitional government of Iyad Allawi, said he was being punished for his opposition to Iranian influence, but would not be forced out of the political process.

“Because I said that we have to talk to the Baathists, we have to talk to the insurgents, we have to bring back the Iraqi army and security and police because they can fix the country … I got a lot of enemies on the Iranian side,” he told a news conference in the Gulf Arab city of Dubai.

“The Iraqi government now is a sectarian government … Some of them represent Iran more than Iraq.”

Samarraie, a secular Sunni who spent years in exile in the United States and holds dual Iraqi and U.S. citizenship, flew to Jordan after escaping from jail with the help of what he said “were a group of Iraqis and foreigners including Americans”.

He said the U.S. embassy was not involved in his breakout. The embassy has said it is working with the Iraqi government, which is investigating Samarraei’s disappearence from Iraq. Samarraie said the Iraqi Supreme Court had already ordered his release on bail but he decided to break out and flee Iraq because he feared for his life in the lawless capital.

“The Supreme Court decided on Dec. 11 to release me and on Dec. 17 they said that I had to go… Based on Iraqi procedures, they have to take me outside the Green Zone for fingerprints …

“If they took me outside the Green Zone, I would … have been kidnapped or killed immediately.”

He did not say which passport he escaped on or give details of his escape, but said he planned to return to the United States. He has been staying in Jordan, where he has residency.

Samarraie had been detained at a police station on the outskirts of the Green Zone, a heavily fortified compound that houses the Iraqi government and the U.S. and British embassies.

He was convicted in October and sentenced to two years in jail for misuse of $200,000 in public funds. The conviction was overturned on appeal but he continued to be held.

He said another 11 corruption charges against him had already been dropped for lack of evidence.

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL08830328

Iranian agents arrested in Baghdad: BBC

Fri Jan 5, 2007 7:46am EST

LONDON (Reuters) – A British official has said five Iranians arrested in Baghdad last month in a raid by U.S. forces were senior intelligence officers thought to be on a covert mission to influence the Iraqi government, the BBC reported.

Several Iranians — including two diplomats who were later released — were arrested by U.S. troops in the raid, which the BBC said occurred on December 21 in the compound of SCIRI head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shi’ite leaders.

“There were five senior officers in various Iranian intelligence organizations,” the BBC’s Newsnight television program, broadcast late on Thursday, quoted the unnamed official as telling it.

“It was a very significant meeting. These people have been collared, relatively speaking, up to no good.”

Three intelligence officers had since been set free but the U.S. military continued to hold two others, the BBC said.

Britain’s foreign ministry declined to comment on the report.

“We’ve always made clear it is vital that all Iraq’s neighbors support Iraq as it develops its own security and democracy,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.

“Anything that undermines the Iraqi government is unhelpful and any Iranian links to armed groups in Iraq are unacceptable.”

British officials were quoted as telling the BBC that the raid produced some important intelligence in spite of failing to provide a “smoking gun” linking the Iranians to supplies of arms to Shi’ite militants who attack British troops in southern Iraq.

The State Department has said “a small number” of diplomats were among those detained in raids last month against Iranians suspected of planning attacks on Iraqi security forces, but they were turned over to Iraqi authorities and released.

Iran’s foreign ministry has said the diplomats had been invited by the Iraqi government.

The BBC said the arrested men were in Iraq to hold high-level meetings with Iraqi Shi’ite factions.

“There was discussion of whether the (Prime Minister Nuri al-) Maliki government would succeed, who should be in which ministerial jobs,” one British government source told Newsnight.

“It was a very significant meeting. The fact of who some of the Iranians were is very significant.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0559746820070105?sp=true

Arab governments tell Iraq to dissolve militias

Wed Dec 6, 2006 6:57am EST

Arab governments tell Iraq to dissolve militias

Wed Dec 6, 2006 6:57am EST

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By Mohamed Abdellah

CAIRO (Reuters) – Foreign ministers of Iraq’s Arab neighbors pressed the Iraqi government on Tuesday to dissolve all militia groups and accelerate the build-up of the police and armed forces.

The ministers, meeting at Arab League headquarters in Cairo, also proposed a long-delayed Iraqi national accord conference take place within four months at the most.

In a statement after the one-day meeting, the Arab states did not promise any practical steps of their own to help end the chronic violence in Iraq, which they fear will spread chaos over Iraq’s borders into their own territory.

The Arab governments have little influence in Baghdad and the Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shi’ite Muslims close to Iran, is suspicious that some of them might be trying to restore Sunni control over the country, analysts say.

For some of the Arab governments, the main strategic danger is that Iran will emerge the winner from the conflict, depriving them of Iraq as a natural Arab ally.

The Cairo meeting of the Arab League committee on Iraq brought together Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.

“The committee supported the Iraqi government in confronting acts of violence and called on it to dissolve the militias immediately and end the illegal carrying of weapons, which helps to increase tension in Iraq,” the statement said.

“The process of building up the armed forces and security forces should be accelerated on a national and professional basis in accordance with a timetable which matches the departure of foreign forces.”

Iraq has dozens of militias, many of them based on religion or ethnicity and some of them linked to people in power. They are thought to be responsible for many of the sectarian killings which have become a feature of the violence.

IRANIAN INFLUENCE

The proposed national accord conference has been in preparation for more than 18 months and a preparatory conference took place in Cairo in November 2005.

The Iraqi government tells foreign governments that it wants the event to happen but, with Iraqi groups more divided now than they were at the preparatory meeting, diplomats say they do not think such a conference can take place soon.

The final statement contained veiled references to the fears of Arab governments that Iranian influence is growing in Iraq and that Iraq might break up or lose its Arab identity.

It said the participants rejected “interference in Iraq’s internal affairs by any party … to try to achieve aims which do not serve Iraqi national unity.”

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in a statement: “Some foreign and regional parties are trying to affect the internal situation in Iraq by extending their political influence and through cultural penetration.”

Aboul Gheit has in the past used the expression “cultural penetration” in Iraq in connection with Iran, which has longstanding cultural and social links with southern Iraq.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Andrew Hammond in Riyadh)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0565027020061206?sp=true

Hezbollah challenge tests limits of U.S. power

Fri Dec 1, 2006 12:47pm EST

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Hezbollah-led opposition’s challenge to the Beirut government is a blow to U.S. Middle East policy and shows Washington has limited options to head off Syrian and Iranian influence in Lebanon.

With mounting calls for Washington to engage with Tehran and Damascus as part of its policy to ease violence in Iraq, both states aim to strengthen their hand by dealing the United States a political blow in Lebanon, analysts say.

The United States has accused Tehran and Damascus, acting through Hezbollah, of trying to mount a coup against the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which came to office after the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year.

Washington and Paris led pressure for the pullout and have forged an alliance with the anti-Syrian majority coalition.

With the United States bogged down in Iraq, Iran and Syria are now seizing a chance to further erode Washington’s regional position through Hezbollah’s challenge to the government, the analysts say.

Hezbollah and its allies are staging street protests to press their demand for a new government after the collapse of talks on giving them a greater say in cabinet last month.

“It’s really squeezing U.S. policy into a corner,” said Oussama Safa, head of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.

“This is definitely a blow for U.S. policy in Lebanon and another way to force on the agenda a change of course in U.S. policy. If they succeed in toppling the government or in paralyzing the country, there’s nothing the U.S. or the government it backs can do,” he said.

The United States has underlined its backing for the Lebanese government since the November 21 assassination of anti-Syrian cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, pledging more military aid and other support.

But Syria and Iran may hold the most powerful cards in Lebanon through their alliance with Hezbollah — the strongest faction in the country which claimed victory over U.S. ally Israel in a war in July and August.

Hezbollah accuses some members of the anti-Syrian majority of failing to support it during the war, which was triggered by the capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12. Hezbollah says its political rivals wanted Israel to destroy their group.

Instead it emerged from the conflict with more political momentum, which Iran and Syria now aim to exploit.

“Syria and Iran are very effectively and very openly trying to assert influence in Lebanon and having a great deal of success,” said Andrew Exum, research fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“FRUSTRATION IN WASHINGTON”

“There’s a high degree of frustration in Washington because events in Lebanon are largely out of American control and expose the limit of American political power in the region.”

Prominent anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon say Hezbollah aims to pull Lebanon firmly back into a Syrian sphere of influence. Hezbollah says it wants to topple what it calls a U.S. puppet government in Lebanon so that the opposition can have a real say in how the country is run.

“Both Iran and Syria believe that the current government in Lebanon is vulnerable,” Lebanese political scientist Sami Baroudi said. “They believe that the United States is not in a position to do much to help it. So they feel that there is an opportunity to be on the offensive.”

Iran has been under Western pressure over its nuclear program while Syria is facing the prospect of an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.

Although Damascus has denied involvement in the killing last year, an international inquiry into the assassination has implicated Lebanese and Syrian security officials.

Anti-Syrian leaders say Hezbollah wants to bring down the Lebanese government to derail the tribunal and protect their allies in Damascus.

Damascus could be hoping Washington will trade Syrian cooperation in Iraq for a reassertion of its role in Lebanon.

That is what happened in 1990 when the United States acquiesced in the Syrian campaign to defeat Christian leader Michel Aoun in return for support against Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. Aoun is now allied with Hezbollah.

The outcome was Syrian dominance in Lebanon for the next 15 years, analysts say. But Washington cannot afford to give way this time, even if it has limited means to fend off the Syrian-Iranian challenge.

“For them to give up Lebanon to Syria because of Iraq would mean giving up on their only diplomatic success in the region over the last six years,” Exum said.

Hilal Khashan, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut, said: “If the Iranians win in Lebanon this would weaken the American position in Iraq. This will make the Iranians more bold in dealing with the Americans in Iraq.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL3078339320061201?sp=true

Bush aides insist Maliki cancellation not a snub

Thu Nov 30, 2006 5:23pm EST

By Caren Bohan

AMMAN (Reuters) – To make it to Jordan on Wednesday evening for crisis talks on Iraq, President George W. Bush left a NATO summit in Latvia right after lunch, tightening up an already packed schedule in the Baltics.

But as he flew to Amman for a three-way meeting at King Abdullah’s palace to include the Jordanian monarch and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Bush was informed Maliki wouldn’t be there.

Two days of meetings between Bush and Maliki were shrunk to one and Bush was to dine alone with Abdullah and then meet the Iraqi prime minister the next morning for breakfast.

An entourage of reporters traveling with Bush did not learn of the change until they arrived at Abdullah’s palace that evening and the White House found itself besieged by questions.

Was Bush offended? Did he see it as a snub? Was it a sign of tension between two leaders facing strong pressures over the escalating bloodshed in Iraq?

“Absolutely not,” insisted White House counselor Dan Bartlett who played down the Wednesday visit as merely a social call that turned out to be unnecessary.

But U.S. officials were initially at a loss to explain precisely who decided to cancel the meeting or to say when Bush found out.

U.S., Jordanian and Iraqi officials have since filled in some gaps, but much about the incident is still cloaked in mystery.

“We may never find out,” said Joost Hiltermann, an analyst at the Amman office of the International Crisis Group.

PRESSURE TO BOYCOTT MEETING

But Hiltermann was among many who suspected that, despite the denials, the decision to shelve the evening talks was indeed a snub by Maliki in reaction to the surfacing of a White House memo critical of the Iraqi prime minister.

“Of course they’re going to deny it,” Hiltermann said.

The memo to Bush from White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley, reported by The New York Times, said the Iraqi leader might have good intentions about curbing violence but was not effective.

The memo said, “the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into actions.”

Maliki had already faced intense pressure in Iraq from powerful Shi-ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who had urged him to boycott the meeting with Bush.

Offering an alternative explanation to the idea that the cancellation was due to the memo, sources in the Iraqi delegation said Maliki had wanted to keep the discussions on Iraq separate from any wider talks involving third parties — a reference to King Abdullah.

Jordanian officials said the king had been keen to lobby Bush for progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some Iraqi Shi’ite leaders do not see the king as an unbiased intermediary on Iraq. Abdullah has warned in the past of growing Iranian influence since the 2003 invasion and the emergence of a “Shi’ite crescent” stretching across the region.

If Bush viewed the schedule change as a diplomatic slight, he did not show it. At a news conference on Thursday, he praised Maliki as courageous and the “right guy” to lead Iraq.

As for Maliki, he told reporters the Wednesday meeting was never part of the schedule. “Therefore there was no problem,” he said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN3032915320061130?sp=true

Iran says will do all it can to help Iraq

Mon Nov 27, 2006 6:44pm EST

By Edmund Blair

TEHRAN (Reuters) – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday Iran would do whatever it could to help provide security to Iraq amid warnings the country was on the brink of civil war.

The White House, acknowledging violence in Iraq was in a “new phase”, said the issue of talking to Iran and Syria about Iraq was likely to be raised at a meeting this week between President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The United States is facing calls to engage Tehran to help end the bloodshed, which U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said had pushed Iraq closer to civil war.

Bush and Maliki are due to meet in Jordan on Wednesday.

“I think you’re going to find that Prime Minister Maliki is going to bring that (talking to Iran and Syria) up with the president,” U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters accompanying Bush to the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

Ahmadinejad made his pledge to help Iraq at the start of a visit to Iran by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, whose trip was delayed because of a curfew imposed after Thursday’s bombing in a Shi’ite Muslim stronghold of Baghdad which killed 202 people. The curfew was lifted on Monday.

“The Iranian nation and government will definitely stand beside their brother, Iraq, and any help the government and nation of Iran can give to strengthen security in Iraq will be given,” Ahmadinejad said, Iran’s ISNA news agency reported.

“We have no limitation for cooperation in any field,

Political analysts said Iran may try to use the talks Talabani to show off its influence to Washington and bolster its position ahead of any dialogue with its old enemy. They also said Iran’s ability to stem the bloodshed in Iraq was limited.

U.S. officials say the violence is fueled by Iran’s backing for Shi’ite groups and its weapons exports. Iran denies the charge.

IMPROVING IRAN-IRAQ TIES

Talabani said he would discuss improving ties between the neighbors, which fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

“In this trip, we will also talk about Iraq’s security file because Iraq needs the comprehensive assistance of Iran to fight terrorism and create stability,” ISNA quoted Talabani as saying.

The atmosphere in Baghdad was nervous as the curfew ended. Nerves frayed on fears of a new wave of blood-letting after Thursday’s bombing — the worst since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Annan, making a rare comment on the situation, said he believed Iraq was nearly in civil war — something Iraqi and U.S. politicians have refused to say despite mounting deaths.

“Given the developments on the ground, unless something is done drastically and urgently to arrest the deteriorating situation, we could be there. In fact we are almost there,” Annan told reporters in response to a question.

The White House continued to refuse to use the term. “The Iraqi’s don’t talk of it as civil war,” Hadley said.

But he acknowledged: “We’re clearly in a new phase characterized by this increasing sectarian violence that requires us obviously to adapt to that new phase and these two leaders need to be talking about how to do that.”

King Abdullah of Jordan, who will host the summit between Maliki and Bush, said “something dramatic” must come out of it because Iraq was “beginning to spiral out of control”.

The New York Times said a draft report to be debated by the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and which is preparing eagerly awaited proposals on a new direction in Iraq, would urge an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative to include direct talks with Iran and Syria.

The group’s recommendations will be sent to the White House, which is considering a change in strategy in Iraq to allow it to start pulling out some of its 140,000 troops.

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami, Ross Colvin in Baghdad, David Clarke in London and Lisa Jucca in Milan, Irwin Arieff in New York, Caren Bohan in Tallinn)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSCOL15308120061127?sp=true

Iranian Role in Iraq

Iraq Shi’ite leader wants U.S.-backed units curbed

Fri Dec 21, 2007 1:28pm EST

By Alaa Shahine

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A powerful Shi’ite Muslim leader in Iraq called on Friday for U.S.-backed, mainly Sunni neighborhood patrols to be brought under tight government control with a more balanced sectarian makeup.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the biggest party in the Shi’ite-led government, said the patrols known to Iraqis as “Awakening Councils” had helped reduce violence but should only play an auxiliary role.

His remarks highlight the uneasiness of Iraqi Shi’ite leaders over the prospect of organized Sunni armed groups that could turn against them when U.S. forces withdraw.

“It is necessary that these Awakenings should be an arm of the government in chasing criminals and terrorists but not a substitute for it,” he told hundreds of Shi’ites at his Baghdad compound in a speech marking the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast.

“Weapons should only be in the hands of the government,” he said. He added that the makeup of the units should be more balanced in religiously mixed regions and that they should only operate in areas where violence remained high.

A suicide car bomber killed four policemen and a civilian and wounded eight people on Friday when he blew up his car outside a police station southwest of Baghdad.

The United States puts the number of the mainly Sunni Arab patrolmen at some 71,000 and credits them as an effective force in fighting Sunni al Qaeda militants.

The U.S. military, which pays most of the men around $10 each a day, acknowledges that some of them may have had links to insurgent groups but says they undergo background checks.

Under U.S. pressure, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government has decided to put most of the neighborhood patrols on its payroll by mid-2008. It says it will integrate some patrol members into its security forces while others will be given training for civilian jobs.

RUDD VISITS

After the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sunnis and Shi’ites engaged in a vicious cycle of violence that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Even with violence at its lowest levels in nearly two years, politicians from both sects remain at odds over how to share power, stalling the passage of crucial laws in the parliament.

In his speech, Hakim said it was necessary to convince parties that have pulled out of Maliki’s government to return. The Sunni Arab Accordance Front quit the government in August over disputes with Maliki’s Shi’ite coalition.

U.S. officials worry that the slow progress towards national reconciliation could eventually erode security gains and say al Qaeda remains a formidable foe.

The lull in bloodshed does not appear to have made a difference yet for around 2 million Iraqi children who continue to face threats including poor nutrition, disease and interrupted education, the United Nations said on Friday.

In a report entitled “Little respite for Iraq’s children in 2007″, the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said hundreds of children lost their lives or were wounded by violence, while many more lost their breadwinners to killing and kidnappings.

About 1,350 children were detained by the military or police, many for alleged security violations, the report said.

In Baghdad, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd held talks with Maliki during an unannounced visit to Baghdad.

Rudd, who swept aside 11 years of conservative rule in an election on November 24, plans to withdraw the last remaining 550 Australian combat troops in mid-2008. He and Maliki said they agreed to expand agricultural cooperation and military training.

(Writing by Alaa Shahine; Editing by Charles Dick)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL21844720071221?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

Stronger Iraqi government behind drop in violence: Iran

Sun Nov 18, 2007 5:20am EST

By Hossein Jaseb

TEHRAN (Reuters) – A strengthened Iraqi government and a reduction of “foreign interferences” have helped improve security in Iraq, Iran said on Sunday in an apparent reference to the role of U.S.-led forces in its neighbor.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly blamed the violence in Iraq on the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. For its part, the United States accuses Iran of arming and training Shi’ite militias in Iraq, a charge Iranian officials deny.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a press conference that Washington had leveled “baseless accusations” at Tehran over its role in Iraq, which like Iran is predominantly Shi’ite Muslim.

“As for the betterment of the security situation it is because the role of the Iraqi government has been strengthened and Iraqi security forces are more active than before and foreign interferences also have decreased,” he said.

Hosseini, whose comments were translated by Iran’s English-language Press TV satellite station, did not specify what he meant with “foreign interferences”. The U.S. military hopes to gradually hand over security control to Iraqi forces.

U.S. officials have attributed falls in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian deaths in the past two months to a “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops and tribal Sunni Arab sheikhs organizing supporters into local police units.

They have also appeared to soften their rhetoric about Iran’s involvement in Iraq, noting a sharp drop in mortar attacks on Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone which they have blamed on Shi’ite militias using weapons supplied from Iran.

Some analysts say America and Iran, two old foes who are also at odds over Tehran’s disputed atomic ambitions, may be trying to ease tension over Iraq. Both have expressed willingness to attend further talks on Iraq’s security situation.

Hosseini did not mention the U.S. “surge” but reiterated allegations that the U.S.-presence had benefited “terrorist groups” in Iraq, referring to Kurdish guerrillas operating in its north.

Turkey has massed up to 100,000 troops near its border ahead of a possible major cross-border incursion to crush armed groups of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) hiding there.

Like Turkey, Iran also has a Kurdish minority and it faces occasional attacks by rebels belonging to a PKK offshoot. Iran has at times shelled their suspected hideouts in Iraq.

“Terrorist groups have used the opportunity of the presence of the United States … to beef up their activities,” he said.

“But right now with the cooperation of neighboring countries we see some steps forward,” Hosseini said. “And I think the problem … between Iraq and Turkey will be solved in the near future.”

(Reporting by Hossein Jaseb; Writing by Fredrik Dahl)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSDAH82773820071118?sp=true

Iran says will soon hold talks with U.S. on Iraq

Tue Nov 20, 2007 5:57pm EST

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By Zahra Hosseinian

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran has agreed to hold a new round of talks soon with the United States on how to improve security in Iraq, Iran’s foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Ambassadors of the two old enemies, deeply at odds over who is to blame for the violence in Iraq as well as over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions, have held three meetings in Baghdad since May on Iraq, but the last one was three months ago.

Washington accuses Iran of arming, funding and training Shi’ite militias in Iraq. Tehran blames the sectarian violence, which has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, on the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Iraq’s government had approached all sides and asked that the three meet again to discuss Iraqi security issues.

“We have said yes that we would agree to that,” he said.

The United States had not received a reply from Iran and that no date for talks has been set, McCormack said.

U.S. officials have appeared to soften their rhetoric about Iran’s involvement in Iraq and some analysts say Iran also may be trying to reduce tension by restraining Shi’ite militias there and restricting arms crossing the border.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Iran had received the U.S. request via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents U.S. interests in the country after Washington severed ties following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“Iran is agreeing to this request in the framework of the policy of helping the Iraqi government and nation and (supporting) stability and security in this country,” state radio quoted Mottaki as saying.

“These negotiations will be held in a near future,” he said.

“PROPER DIALOGUE”

In Baghdad, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said he hoped the next round of U.S.-Iran talks would encourage understanding between the two countries, foster security and stability in Iraq and reduce tension in the region.

This year’s Iranian-U.S. talks on Iraq’s security situation eased a diplomatic freeze that lasted almost three decades, even though Tehran and Washington are embroiled in a deepening stand-off over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“It is an open channel of communication and we have said that we would avail ourselves of it if we thought it would be particularly effective,” McCormack said.

Iraq last week said it was encouraged by signs of a thaw in ties between the two countries over Iraq but it wanted them to have a “proper dialogue” about the issue.

A fourth round would follow the U.S. military’s release this month of nine Iranian prisoners held in Iraq. The U.S. military has also said that unofficial assurances from Iran that it would stop the flow of bombs into Iraq appeared to be holding.

U.S. officials have also noted a decision in August by Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the Mehdi Army Shi’ite militia, to call a cease-fire. They say Sadr has close links with Iran.

With Shi’ite Muslims now in power in Baghdad, ties have strengthened between the two oil-producing states since 2003.

In the nuclear row, the United States accuses Tehran of seeking to build atom bombs, a charge Iran denies. Washington has refused to rule out military action, while saying it remains committed to seeking a diplomatic solution to the stand-off.

(Additional reporting by Paul Tait and Missy Ryan in Baghdad and by Washington bureau; Writing by Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Robert Hart)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSDAH82773820071120?sp=true

U.S. praises Iran curbs on Sadr militia in Iraq

Sun Dec 23, 2007 1:21pm EST

By Peter Graff

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S. ambassador to Iraq praised Iran on Sunday for helping to curb Shi’ite militia violence in Iraq on Sunday, using some of the warmest language Washington has employed toward its arch foe over Iraq.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Washington believed Iran may be behind a ceasefire announced by Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and that it had helped to ensure the ceasefire stuck in areas where it wielded influence.

But he also indicated that U.S. authorities still see Iran’s role as unpredictable and its motives opaque.

“I’m very cautious about predicting or analyzing what the Iranians are doing, because we’re not there,” Crocker told journalists in Baghdad.

“But we have seen a reduction in violent action on the part of extremist militias — not an elimination, but a reduction.

“We have seen Moqtada al-Sadr’s call for a freeze, and then his call for a renewal of that freeze. The Iranians have indicated — not to us but to others — that they have had a role in all of this. If that’s the case, then it’s good.

SPECIAL GROUPS

Asked who had provided the information that Iran was behind Sadr’s freeze, he said it had come from Iraqi authorities.

The United States has blamed Iran for providing training and weapons — especially missiles and sophisticated roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) — to Iraqi Shi’ite militia. It uses the term “special groups” to refer to militia units it says use such Iranian weapons.

Crocker said such attacks had become less frequent, although he said an EFP was used earlier this month to kill the police chief of Babil province, a mainly Shi’ite area south of Baghdad where security forces have clashed with Sadr’s militia.

“If Sadr has started the policy and the Iranians have used their influence to make it stick in areas where there are ‘special groups’ and they’ve got far more influence then he does — then that’s a positive development,” he said.

Earlier this year, the United States and Iran set up a committee to discuss security in Iraq, a development seen as a diplomatic breakthrough for two countries that have had only limited contacts for 30 years.

The committee last met in August at a time when Washington was loudly accusing Iran of fomenting violence and helping Shi’ite militia kill U.S. troops. But Sadr declared a six-month ceasefire by his Mehdi Army militia later that month, and U.S. forces say Shi’ite militia attacks quickly declined.

Sadr’s spokesman said last week that he was considering extending the ceasefire when it expired in February.

The next meeting of the Iran-U.S. security committee was due to take place on December 18 but was postponed because of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Crocker said U.S. and Iranian officials were still negotiating a new date, but he expected the meeting to take place within the next few weeks.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2344148420071223?sp=true

U.S. blames Iran-backed group for Baghdad bombing

Sat Nov 24, 2007 9:10am EST

By Paul Tait

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iranian-backed militants were behind a bombing that killed 13 Iraqis at a Baghdad pet market, the U.S. military said on Saturday, raising concerns that Shi’ite militias might be switching tactics.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith said it appeared the Shi’ite militants wanted Friday’s bombing, the deadliest attack in Baghdad in two months after a lull in violence, to look like the work of al Qaeda.

Most big bombings that cause mass casualties are blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.

Shi’ite militias, many of which the military says are backed by Iran, are more commonly accused of sectarian killings and kidnappings rather than what the U.S. military calls “spectacular”, or large-scale, bomb attacks aimed at civilians.

Smith told a news conference that overnight raids by U.S. and Iraqi forces had captured four people who U.S. forces believed were responsible for the “horrific act of indiscriminate violence” at the pet market.

The bomb, placed inside a birdcage, was packed with ball-bearings to maximize casualties.

“Based on subsequent confessions, forensics and other intelligence, the bombing was the work of an Iranian-backed ‘special groups’ cell operating here in Baghdad,” Smith said.

Washington accuses Iran of funding, training and arming Shi’ite militias in Iraq. The military has often displayed weapons, including rockets and roadside bombs, it says have been supplied by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite Qods Force.

Tehran denies the charge and blames the violence in Iraq, in which tens of thousands of people have been killed, on the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

“I’m not saying that yesterday Iran ordered the bombing of the pet market,” Smith said. “What I’m telling you is that the forces that are inside Iraq that have historically received training, funding, equipping and so forth by Iran is the group responsible for that attack.”

“TWISTED INTENT”

U.S. officials in Iraq had appeared to soften their tone towards Tehran in recent weeks, noting several positive developments in Iran’s involvement in Iraq, although the military says Iranian influence is still widespread.

Among those developments, U.S. officials have noted a ceasefire ordered in August by anti-American Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the head of the Mehdi Army militia which is accused of links to Iran.

“This bombing demonstrates that there are individuals who continue to ignore Moqtada al-Sadr’s pledge of a ceasefire,” Smith said.

In Sadr City, a sprawling Shi’ite slum and Mehdi Army stronghold in northeast Baghdad, thousands of Iraqis rallied on Saturday to pledge their support to the young cleric Sadr. Many carried banners reading “No, No America … Yes, Yes Moqtada”.

Smith said those behind the market attack intended to make it look like the work of al Qaeda in order to convince Iraqis in the area they needed the protection of Shi’ite militias.

“It was a very twisted intent … but we accept that to be the motivation,” he said.

Violence has fallen across Iraq in recent months, with attacks down by 55 percent since an extra 30,000 U.S. troops became fully deployed in mid-June, and something like normal life has been returning to Baghdad.

Baghdad officials reopened Abu Nawas street on Saturday, a famous thoroughfare along the Tigris River that was closed as residents retreated behind concrete blast walls at the height of the violence.

“We will poke terrorism in the eye,” said Lieutenant-General Abboud Qanbar, head of the Baghdad security plan.

In the northern city of Mosul, two suicide bomb attacks against an Iraqi police checkpoint on Friday killed 21 people, Smith said, including 10 civilians. Police had previously said nine people were killed.

(Editing by Dean Yates and Elizabeth Piper)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL0667667620071124?sp=true

Petition condemns Iran for “disorder” in S.Iraq

Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:42pm EST

By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – More than 300,000 Iraqis including 600 Shi’ite tribal leaders have signed a petition accusing Iran of sowing “disorder” in southern Iraq, a group of sheikhs involved in the campaign said.

The sheikhs showed Reuters two thick bundles of notes which contained original signatures. The sheikhs said more than 300,000 people had signed the pages.

Such a public and organized display of animosity toward neighboring Shi’ite Iran is rare in Iraq. Iranian influence has grown steadily, especially in the predominantly Shi’ite south, since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

“More than 300,000 people from the southern provinces condemned the interference of the Iranian regime in Iraq and especially in spreading security disorder in the provinces,” the sheikhs said in a statement.

They did not elaborate, but Washington and the U.S. military accuse Iran of arming, training and funding Shi’ite militias in Iraq. Iran denies the charge and blames the violence in Iraq on the U.S. invasion.

The sheikhs declined to be identified for fear of retribution. They said various groups had been collecting the signatures for six months across southern Iraq. It was not immediately clear what they planned to do with the petition.

With Shi’ite Muslims in power in Baghdad after the ouster of Saddam, a Sunni Arab who was an enemy of Tehran, ties have strengthened between the two oil-producing states.

But some Iraqis chafe at the influence of Iran’s more conservative brand of religion in the south.

Shi’ites comprise around 60 percent of Iraq’s population, generally put at 26-27 million before the 2003 invasion.

“The most poisonous dagger stabbed in us, the Iraqi Shi’ites, is the (Iranian) regime shamefully exploiting the Shi’ite sect to implement its evil goals,” the statement said.

“They have targeted our national interests and began planning to divide Iraq and to separate the southern provinces from Iraq.”

Iran routinely pledges its support for a stable Iraq, and political leaders from Baghdad regularly visit Tehran.

STRICT ISLAMIC RULES

The statement said that besides 600 Shi’ite tribal leaders, the petition was signed by a number of lawyers, engineers, doctors and university professors.

The group of sheikhs is the same one that told Reuters last month that Shi’ite Islamist political parties were imposing strict Islamic rules in southern Iraq and using their armed wings to create a state of fear.

Such fears are not unfounded — two provincial governors were blown up by roadside bombs in August, apparent victims of infighting between the Shi’ite parties for political dominance in the region, source of most of Iraq’s oil wealth.

Aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the reclusive religious leader of Iraq’s Shi’ites, have also been killed.

The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and the movement of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are the dominant political forces in the Shi’ite provinces. Both have links to neighbouring Iran and believe Iraq should be governed according to Islamic principles.

SIIC and the Sadrists saw their rise to power cemented by the December 2005 elections which brought the Islamist Shi’ite Alliance to power. The Sadrists have since pulled out of the Alliance and the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, leader of the smaller Islamist Dawa party.

The growing strength of the Shi’ite parties in the south has weakened some secular tribal leaders and excluded them from power structures, a source of patronage and revenues.

(Writing by Dean Yates; Editing by Dominic Evans)

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSL2156942820071121?sp=true

U.S. policy on Iraq Shi’ites could aid Iran: report

Wed Nov 14, 2007 6:19pm EST

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration’s courtship of the biggest Shi’ite party in Iraq could worsen a dangerous rift between rival Shi’ite groups and ultimately give Iran a greater political role, a think tank said on Wednesday.

The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC, a cornerstone of the political alliance behind Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has enjoyed close relations with Washington since the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, unlike the rival Shi’ite movement led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr.

But the International Crisis Group urged the United States to adopt a more evenhanded approach to the majority Shi’ite community, saying in a report that Shi’ite rivalries are likely to have more influence on Iraq’s future than the sectarian conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis.

“The U.S. has fully backed (SIIC) in this rivalry. This is a risky gambit,” the Belgium-based think tank said.

It warned that U.S. reliance on fighters from SIIC’s Badr Organization as a counterweight to Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia is “bound to backfire, polarizing the Shi’ite community and creating the foundations for endemic intra-Shi’ite strife.”

“While Washington is intent on stabilizing Iraq, for example, (SIIC) is bent on ruling it,” the report said.

It described SIIC’s rivalry with Sadr as a class struggle between a Shi’ite merchant elite represented by SIIC and the far more numerous Shi’ite urban underclass devoted to Sadr.

SIIC members are believed to make up a sizable segment of Iraq’s security forces, and the party holds about one-quarter of the parliament seats occupied by Maliki’s ruling Shi’ite Alliance.

But SIIC could not prevail alone in free elections and would face a tough challenge from the Sadr movement even if it sought power at the head of a coalition of political parties, the think tank said.

“SIIC’s empowerment through U.S. protection and support may open the door to greater Iranian involvement, especially once U.S. forces begin to withdraw,” it said.

“SIIC’s control over government security forces is far from complete and is challenged by many. As a result, it may seek even greater Iranian support in its battle for power.”

SIIC was founded in Iran in 1982 by Iraqi Shi’ite exiles who returned to Iraq after the 2003 invasion toppled Saddam.

Although the party has tried to bolster its Iraqi credentials, the International Crisis Group said SIIC has not quite managed to shake off its past as an Iran-bred group of exiles with a sectarian agenda.

It said the United States should force SIIC to undergo fundamental change, including a purge of members involved in sectarian killings, torture and divisive rhetoric.

The think tank also urged the Bush administration to help move SIIC away from demands for a Shi’ite super region spanning Iraq’s nine southern governates, an idea that has stirred widespread opposition, notably from Sadr, who portrays himself as a nationalist.

(Editing by David Alexander and David Wiessler)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1421248420071114?sp=true

Military finding more Iranian arms in Iraq

Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:04pm EST

By Paul Tait

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The quantity of Iranian bomb-making components being found in Iraq is increasing despite a fall in attacks and 20 Iranian-trained agents are still operating south of Baghdad, a top U.S. general said on Sunday.

Extensive Iranian influence in Iraq remained evident, said Major-General Rick Lynch, despite signs of a possible easing of tensions between Washington and Tehran over security in Iraq.

“Iranian influence is dominant at many levels,” said Lynch, whose area of command extends from Baghdad’s southern suburbs south through Sunni Arab insurgent strongholds to the major Shi’ite cities of Kerbala and Najaf.

Lynch said his troops were chasing 20 “targets” he identified as Iraqi Shi’ites who were agents for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s (IRGC) elite Qods Force.

“They were trained in Iran and they’re conducting operations in our battle space,” Lynch told reporters. “They’re Iraqis but they’re IRGC surrogates and they’re still out there.”

Lynch said in August that military intelligence suggested there were about 50 IRGC troops in southern Iraq training Shi’ite militias in the use of mortars and rockets.

His latest comments came despite an apparent softening of rhetoric by U.S. officials in Baghdad towards Iran.

Washington accuses Tehran of arming, training and funding Shi’ite militias in Iraq, charges Iran denies, but U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker late last month noted several positive developments in Iran’s involvement in Iraq.

These included a sharp drop in mortar attacks on Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, many blamed on Shi’ite militias using Iranian weapons, and the Mehdi Army militia ceasefire ordered in August by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

On Friday, the U.S. military released nine Iranians, including two it accused of links to the Qods Force.

Falls in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian casualties in the past two months have been attributed to a “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops, which was completed in mid-June, and tribal sheikhs organizing “concerned citizens” into local police units.

Lynch said there had been a 59 percent fall in roadside bomb attacks in his area including “explosively formed penetrators” — arming-piercing bombs known as EFPs — since July 1.

“The number of EFP attacks are on the decline but the number of EFP munitions we’re finding has indeed increased,” he said.

“We’ve come across weapons caches with large numbers of EFP components all traceable back to Iran based on tool markings.”

Lynch said he did not know whether these components were being found more often because more were coming in or whether his troops were conducting more searches.

He said he was also troubled by the number of Iranian rockets being found. In two recent cases, he said, 46 Iranian rockets were found ready and aimed at a U.S. operating base and several more were discovered near a U.S. patrol post.

(Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1124367020071111?sp=true

Iran support the Iraqi militia’s

Iraqi Insurgency GroupsThe insurgency in Iraq has grown in size and complexity over the course of 2004. Attacks numbered approximately 25 per day at the beginning of 2004, and averaged in the 60s by the end of the year. Insurgents demonstrated their ability to increase attacks around key events such as the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) transfer of power, Ramadan and the January 2005 election. Attacks on Iraq’s election day reached approximately 300, double the previous one day high of approximately 150 reached during Ramadan 2004. The pattern of attacks remains the same as in 2004. Approximately 80% of all attacks occur in Sunni-dominated central Iraq. The Kurdish north and Shia south remain relatively calm. Coalition Forces continue to be the primary targets. Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) officials are attacked to intimidate the Iraqi people and undermine control and legitimacy. Attacks against foreign nationals are intended to intimidate non-government organizations and contractors and inhibit reconstruction and economic recovery. Attacks against the country’s infrastructure, especially electricity and the oil industry, are intended to stall economic recovery, increase popular discontent and further undermine support for the IIG and Coalition. The exact elements attacking the US-led coalition’s nation-building effort remain unclear. Since the declared end to major combat operations on 1 May 2003, the continuing attacks against Coalition troops, civilian contractors, aid workers, new Iraqi security forces, as well as the infrastructure, have undermined efforts to reconstruct and stablize the country, carried the total American troop fatality level over 1,000, and led many in the U.S. and elsewhere to question whether the country can be pacified at all without a longer commitment than most consider palatable. Attention has been paid to Saddam loyalists, Iraqi nationalists, foreign Jihadists, militant Sunni and Shia Muslims, and ordinary criminals, with officials trying to assess the nature, goals, funding, and capabilities of the insurgents, the degree of cooperation or conflict between the groups, and links between the insurgency and international terrorist networks and foreign governments. On 14 November 2003 General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, estimated the number of fighters operating against US and allied forces at no more than 5,000, and said the insurgency remained a loosely organized operation. Abizaid said there “is some level of cooperation that’s taking place at very high levels, although I’m not sure I’d say there’s a national-level resistance leadership.” He also said “the most dangerous enemy to us at the present time are the former regime loyalists” operating in central Iraq. According to Abizaid, “The goal of the enemy … is not to defeat us militarily, because they don’t have the wherewithal to defeat us militarily. The goal of the enemy is to break the will of the United States of America. It’s clear, it’s simple, it’s straightforward. Break our will, make us leave before Iraq is ready to come out and be a member of the responsible community of nations.” Almost a year on, with kidnappings and beheadings by Islamic militants, large cities still not under the control of coalition forces months away from planned elections, and with security problems requiring the diversion of funds from reconstruction projects, assumptions were being reconsidered and estimates revised. The New York Times reported on 22 October 2004 that senior American officials believed that “hard-core resistance” comprised between 8,000 and 12,000 people, with the number jumping above 20,000 when “active sympathizers or covert accomplices are included.” Moreover, officials believed around 50 militant cells were drawing on “unlimited money” through underground networks supplied by people connected with the former regime, as well as wealthy Saudis and Islamic charities. Though some groups had the ability to carry out attacks in regions other than their own, and there may be some degree of cooperation between regions, it is believed that insurgent activities are organized regionally and that no national insurgent network exists. In January 2005 Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said that Iraq’s insurgency consited of at least 40,000 hardcore fighters, out of a total of more than 200,000 part-time fighters and volunteers who provide intelligence, logistics and shelter. Shahwani said the resistance enjoyed wide backing in the Sunni provinces of Baghdad, Babel, Salahuddin, Diyala, Nineveh and Tamim. Shahwani said the Baath, with a core fighting strength of more than 20,000, had split into three factions. The main one, still owing allegiance to jailed dictator Saddam Hussein, is operating out of Syria. It is led by Saddam’s half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan and former aide Mohamed Yunis al-Ahmed, who provide funding to their connections in Mosul, Samarra, Baquba, Kirkuk and Tikrit. Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri is still in Iraq. Two other factions have broken from Saddam, but have yet to mount any attacks. Islamist factions range from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate to Ansar al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam. A picture of the composition of the insurgency, though in constant flux, has come into somewhat greater focus. London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates roughly 1,000 foreign Islamic jihadists have joined the insurgency. And there is no doubt many of these have had a dramatic effect on perceptions of the insurgency through high-profile video-taped kidnappings and beheadings. However, American officials believe that the greatest obstacles to stability are the native insurgents that predominate in the Sunni triangle. Significantly, many secular Sunni leaders were being surpassed in influence by Sunni militants. This development mirrors the rise of militant Shia cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr vis-à-vis the more moderate Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani. Still, the New York Times article also references military data suggesting roughly 80 percent of violent attacks in Iraq were simply criminal in nature –e.g., ransom kidnappings and hijacking convoys- and without political motivation. This figure lends credence to those who cited the CPA’s disbanding of the Iraqi army as an error likely to create a pool of unemployed and discontented young males ripe for absorption into the insurgency. Further, this statistic highlights the importance of reconstruction, and the revitalization of an economy in Iraq that can provide traditional employment opportunities. Of the remaining 20 percent of violent attacks –those with political motivation- four-fifths are believed attributable to native insurgents as opposed to foreigners. In late July 2005, Gen. Jack Keane, a former deputy chief of staff for the Army, said that US and Iraqi forces had killed or captured over 50,000 Iraqi insurgents since the begining of 2005. The Pentagon had been previously stated that 15,000 to 16,000 Iraqis were in custody in Iraq. The difference is explained by the fact that some Iraqis who were detained in military operations were subsequently released.Former Regime Loyalists [FRL]Sunni Arabs, dominated by Ba’athist and Former Regime Elements (FRE), comprise the core of the insurgency. Ba’athist/FRE and Sunni Arab networks are likely collaborating, providing funds and guidance across family, tribal, religious and peer group lines. The Former Regime Loyalists, or FRL’s, threaten the safety of Iraqis and prolong the Coalition presence. By capturing the FRL’s, US Forces are helping Iraq move forward to a peaceful and prosperous future. Ba’athist loyalists are thought to be responsible for some of the recent attacks against U.S. forces. According to 21 July 2003 Newsweek, two months before the war began, the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, issued instructions, “to do what’s necessary after the fall of the Iraqi leadership to the American-British-Zionist Coalition forces, God forbid…” The document outlined a total of 11 steps which were to be taken if the U.S. overthrew Saddam’s regime. These included “1. Looting and burning government institutions…” In addition, it included orders to sabotaging power plants, and creating chaos by utilizing stolen weapons. The Pentagon has not officially verified this document, according to Newsweek, but has called it “plausible.” The current sabatoge and attacks seem to substantiate the possibility that Ba’athist loyalists are responsible for some of the mayhem. In addition, L. Paul Bremer may have unleashed these former soldiers against US Troops by disbanding the Iraqi military. These former Guard members are without any income, but still are armed and ready to kill, making US Troops vulnerable to attack. While the Republican Guard experienced high casualties in the US strikes on Baghdad, the Special Republican Guard was not especially involved in this part of the war, allowing them to disappear with a number of weapons and munitions. Approximately 40,000 men were members of the Republican Guard. According to the 12 August 2003 New York Times, there is an estimated 100,000 former Iraqi security service members without employment, mostly concentrated in the Sunni Triangle, the same region where many of the attacks have occurred. Islamic RevivalistMuslims have been oppressed for decades under the rule of Saddam. While extremist elements are inexperienced in planning attacks, other regional groups are sure to come to their assistance. Such groups include the Al- Faruq Brigades, a militant wing of the Islamic Movement in Iraq (Al-Harakah al-Islamiyyah fi al-arak), the Mujahideen of the Victorious Sect (Mujahideen al ta’ifa al-Mansoura), the Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq (Kata’ib al mujahideen fi al-jama’ah al-salafiyah fi al-‘arak); and the Jihad Brigades/Cell. Another insurgency group called “White Flags, Muslim Youth and Army of Mohammed” have claimed responsibility for the attacks against U.S. Forces. The White Flags have urged other Iraqis to attack Americans. In a 10 August 2003 videotape aired on the satellite network Al Arabiya, a Dubai-based station, the White Flags announced that the only way to free Iraq from American occupiers was through guerilla war. “We want to warn countries of the world for the last time not to send troops into Iraq.” Ansar al Islam, a Taliban-like, jihadist group with tie to Al Qaeda is also suspected in guerilla attacks. Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was estimated to have 850 members, but nearly 200 were killed by Kurdish and U.S. Special Forces in March. An estimated 300 to 350 fled to Iran during Iraqi freedom, after a few hundred surrendered or were captured. The 07 May 2003 bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Iraq has added to speculation that Islamic revivalists, like Ansar al Islam, may be playing a stronger role in the Iraqi insurgency than originally estimated. L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator for Iraq, has publically speculated that Ansar al Islam may have been responsible for the car bombing. The attack killed 19 people and wounded more than 60. One group of Ansar al-Islam militants captured in the Kurdish region during early August 2003 consisted of five Iraqis, a Palestinian and a Tunisian. It was reported that the men had five forged Italian passports for another group of militants. It is estimated that at least 150 members of Ansar al-Islam have entered Iraq with the help of smugglers within the last few weeks. Of the tens of thousands of unemployed former Iraqi security service members, an estimated 2,000 of them, most especially those without any source of income at all, are likely to be recruited by Islamic fundamentalist groups, like Ansar al-Islam. RecruitmentRecruiting militants has been observed to take place in three stages. First, there is some form of contact initiated, perhaps in a mosque after daily prayers. In this first conversation, a later meeting is arranged. After this meeting, some of the prospective militants are eliminated, leaving the third round of candidates that will train in the campus. Accoring to the 12 August 2003 New York Times, these recruits are instructed to move away from their families and terminate communication with all outsiders. Foreign fighters are a small component of the insurgency and comprise a very small percentage of all detainees. Syrian, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian and Iranian nationals make up the majority of foreign fighters. Fighters, arms and other supplies continue to enter Iraq from virtually all of its neighbors despite increased border security. Syrian and Iranian involvementIn December 2004 US General George Casey warned that sympathizers of the insurgency within Syria had been allowed to provide funding, weapons and information to Iraqi insurgents and continued to be a source of infiltration by foreign volunteers.The following February, Iraqi television broadcast taped confessions of alleged insurgents, who claimed to have been trained in Syria, possibly by Syrian intelligence officials. Yet while coalition forces often suspect Syria of assisting insurgents, Syrian denials are adamant and hard evidence is lacking. Also in February, after continued American pressure, Syria delivered Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, a half-brother of Saddam and a financial backer of the insurgency. US officials reported some improvement in co-operation against the insurgency from Syria, whose border forces are too few to police the porous Iraqi border effectively. While coalition-aided Iraqi border controls are strengthening, Iraq’s bordes, totalling 3,650 kilometres in length, remain difficult to control. As with Syria, the Iranian presence in Iraq is difficult to guage, although it certainly exists. Several Shi’ite political parties (including SCIRI and al-Da’wa, both members of the United Iraqi Alliance, the country’s dominant political coalition), have ties to Iran. The Interim Iraqi Government repeatedly expressed concern over Iraqi influence, Defence Minister Hazem Sha’alan claiming in mid-2004 that there was “clear interference in Iraqi issues by Iran” and that the latter supported terrorism in Iraq. The recalcitrant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is widely perceived as an Iranian proxy, while in a television interview, Muayed al-Nasseri, commander of Saddam’s “Army of Muhhammad,” said his group received weapons and cash form both Iran and Syria. Iran too has strenuously denied involvement. But Iranian actions often diverge from Tehran’s official policy: The Iranian polity is fractured, with various power bases supporting their own interests. This was clearly apparent in the aftermath of the capture by Iran in June 2004 of a British patrol boat. After a number of contradictory statements, likely reflecting disagreement between Iranian elements, the crew were released. At the same time, sources within the hard-line Iranian revolutionary made plain that restraint in Iraq was contingent on international treatment of Iran in other aspects of policy, such as Iranian nuclear ambitions. internationally isolated, Iran maintains links with dissidence groups, such as the Lebanese Hizballah, as useful levers in foreign policy negotiation. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_insurgency.htm 03 July 2007Iran Training Iraqi Insurgent Groups, General SaysQuds Force provides training, funds and armsFPRIVATE “TYPE=PICT;ALT=Kevin Bergner speaking while seated next to an image of captured senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative, Ali Musa Daqduq “ Army Brigadier General Kevin Bergner speaks during a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq, July 2. (© AP Images) Washington — An elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with ties to Hezbollah is training, funding and arming insurgents in Iraq to attack coalition and Iraqi forces and conduct other missions, says a senior U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Iraq.The Quds Force, which conducts international operations for the Iranian Guard, “played key roles in the planning and execution of bombings, kidnappings, extortion, sectarian murders, illegal arms trafficking and other attacks against the Iraqi people, the police, the Iraqi army and coalition forces,” Army Brigadier General Kevin Bergner said in a July 2 briefing.Bergner, speaking via teleconference, said that senior agents working for Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based terrorist organization, began training, equipping and forming Iraqi insurgent groups in 2004 under direction from Quds with the full knowledge of the senior leadership in Iran. Hezbollah instructors trained approximately 20 to 60 Iraqis at a time in three training centers in Iran, sending them back to Iraq to form insurgent cells, he said.“Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity,” Bergner said. “It shows how Iranian operatives are using Lebanese surrogates to create Hezbollah-like capabilities.“And it paints a picture of the level of effort in funding and arming extremist groups in Iraq.”The Iraqi insurgents, formed into special groups, were assembled over the past three years to operate largely in a cellular structure that provides maximum independence and security for operations, he said.Quds supplies the insurgents, who operate throughout Iraq, with machine guns, shoulder-fired rockets, sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices and explosively formed penetrators, Bergner said. Quds provides up to $3 million per month to fund insurgent operations.One group leader, Azhar Dulaymi, who was killed by coalition forces May 19, led the January 20 attack on the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq, that killed five U.S. soldiers, Bergner said.Dulaymi worked with Ali Musa Daqduq and Qayis Khazali, both of whom were captured by U.S. forces in 2007 in Iraq, Bergner said. Daqduq joined Hezbollah in 1983 and served in numerous leadership positions, including providing security for Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyad Hassan Nasrullah.“In 2005, [Daqduq] was directed by senior Lebanese Hezbollah leadership to go to Iran and work with the Quds Force to train Iraqi extremists,” Bergner said. Daqduq and Khazali were captured March 20 with false papers, detailed documents discussing tactics and methods for attacking coalition and Iraqi forces and convoys, and instructions on how to use small arms and machine guns.Bergner said Khazali had been in charge of the Iraqi insurgent groups throughout Iraq since June 2006. Khazali, an Iraqi, was tasked with developing the insurgent groups into a force similar to Hezbollah.State Department spokesman Sean McCormack in Washington said July 2 that these reports are another “data point in what is a troubling picture of Iranian negative involvement in Iraq.”“We have found that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has essentially subcontracted out to some elements of Hezbollah, using them as a pass-through for material, technology and other material assistance. … It is of deep concern to us,” McCormack said.McCormack said that no matter what Iran may think of the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, they are serving as a stabilizing influence in Iraq and they are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government.“We would urge the Iranian government to reconsider its current course of action,” he said.The Quds Force is part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for extraterritorial operations, including terrorist operations and training Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. It was created during the Iran-Iraq War as a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Lebanese Shiite clerics inspired by the Islamic revolutionary ideology of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Its original goal was to create an Islamic republic in Lebanon. It has been an active sponsor of anti-Western terrorism and has conducted terrorist operations throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, working for third parties.(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2007&m=July&x=20070703102256dmslahrellek0.3060114 Inside Iran’s Secret War for IraqMonday, Aug. 15, 2005 By MICHAEL WARE/BAGHDAD The U.S. Military’s new nemesis in Iraq is named Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, and he is not a Baathist or a member of al-Qaeda. He is working for Iran. According to a U.S. military-intelligence document obtained by TIME, al-Sheibani heads a network of insurgents created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with the express purpose of committing violence against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Over the past eight months, his group has introduced a new breed of roadside bomb more lethal than any seen before; based on a design from the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hizballah, the weapon employs “shaped” explosive charges that can punch through a battle tank’s armor like a fist through the wall. According to the document, the U.S. believes al-Sheibani’s team consists of 280 members, divided into 17 bombmaking teams and death squads. The U.S. believes they train in Lebanon, in Baghdad’s predominantly Shi’ite Sadr City district and “in another country” and have detonated at least 37 bombs against U.S. forces this year in Baghdad alone.Since the start of the insurgency in Iraq, the most persistent danger to U.S. troops has come from the Sunni Arab insurgents and terrorists who roam the center and west of the country. But some U.S. officials are worried about a potentially greater challenge to order in Iraq and U.S. interests there: the growing influence of Iran. With an elected Shi’ite-dominated government in place in Baghdad and the U.S. preoccupied with quelling the Sunni-led insurgency, the Iranian regime has deepened its imprint on the political and social fabric of Iraq, buying influence in the new Iraqi government, running intelligence-gathering networks and funneling money and guns to Shi’ite militant groups–all with the aim of fostering a Shi’ite-run state friendly to Iran. In parts of southern Iraq, fundamentalist Shi’ite militias–some of them funded and armed by Iran–have imposed restrictions on the daily lives of Iraqis, banning alcohol and curbing the rights of women. Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders, including Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have tried to forge a strategic alliance with Tehran, even seeking to have Iranians recognized as a minority group under Iraq’s proposed constitution. “We have to think anything we tell or share with the Iraqi government ends up in Tehran,” says a Western diplomat.Perhaps most troubling are signs that the rising influence of Iran–a country with which Iraq waged an eight-year war and whose brand of theocracy most Iraqis reject–is exacerbating sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites, pulling Iraq closer to all-out civil war. And while top intelligence officials have sought to play down any state-sponsored role by Tehran’s regime in directing violence against the coalition, the emergence of al-Sheibani has cast greater suspicion on Iran. Coalition sources told TIME that it was one of al-Sheibani’s devices that killed three British soldiers in Amarah last month. “One suspects this would have to have a higher degree of approval [in Tehran],” says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. The official says the U.S. believes that Iran has brokered a partnership between Iraqi Shi’ite militants and Hizballah and facilitated the import of sophisticated weapons that are killing and wounding U.S. and British troops. “It is true that weapons clearly, unambiguously, from Iran have been found in Iraq,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week.How real is the threat? A TIME investigation, based on documents smuggled out of Iran and dozens of interviews with U.S., British and Iraqi intelligence officials, as well as an Iranian agent, armed dissidents and Iraqi militia and political allies, reveals an Iranian plan for gaining influence in Iraq that began before the U.S. invaded. In their scope and ambition, Iran’s activities rival those of the U.S. and its allies, especially in the south. There is a gnawing worry within some intelligence circles that the failure to counter Iranian influence may come back to haunt the U.S. and its allies, if Shi’ite factions with heavy Iranian backing eventually come to power and provoke the Sunnis to revolt. Says a British military intelligence officer, about the relative inattention paid to Iranian meddling: “It’s as though we are sleepwalking.”The Iranian penetration of Iraq was a long time in planning. On Sept. 9, 2002, with U.S. bases being readied in Kuwait, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei summoned his war council in Tehran. According to Iranian sources, the Supreme National Security Council concluded, “It is necessary to adopt an active policy in order to prevent long-term and short-term dangers to Iran.” Iran’s security services had supported the armed wings of several Iraqi groups they had sheltered in Iran from Saddam. Iranian intelligence sources say that the various groups were organized under the command of Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani, an adviser to Khamenei on both Afghanistan and Iraq and a top officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.Before the March 2003 invasion, military sources say, elements of up to 46 Iranian infantry and missile brigades moved to buttress the border. Positioned among them were units of the Badr Corps, formed in the 1980s as the armed wing of the Iraqi Shi’ite group known by its acronym SCIRI, now the most powerful party in Iraq. Divided into northern, central and southern axes, Badr’s mission was to pour into Iraq in the chaos of the invasion to seize towns and government offices, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam’s regime. As many as 12,000 armed men, along with Iranian intelligence officers, swarmed into Iraq. TIME has obtained copies of what U.S. and British military intelligence say appears to be Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence reports sent in April 2003. One, dated April 10 and marked CONFIDENTIAL, logs U.S. troops backed by armor moving through the city of Kut. But, it asserts, “we are in control of the city.” Another, with the same date, from a unit code-named 1546, claims “forces attached to us” had control of the city of Amarah and had occupied Baath Party properties. A 2004 British army inquiry noted that the Badr organization and another militia were so powerful in Amarah, “it quickly became clear that the coalition needed to work with them to ensure a secure environment in the province.”For many Iraqis in the south, the exile militia groups brought with them forbidding religious strictures. “These guys with beards and Kalashnikovs showed up saying they’d come to protect the campus,” says a student leader at a Basra university. “The problem is, they never left.” Militants frequently “investigate” youths accused of un-Islamic behavior, such as couples holding hands or girls wearing makeup. “They’re watching us, and they’re the ones who control the streets, while the police, who are with them, stand by,” says a student leader who did not wish to be identified. “From the beginning, the Islamic parties filled the void,” says a police lieutenant colonel working closely with British forces. “They still hold the real power. The rank and file all belong to the parties. Everyone does. You can’t do anything without them.”Military officials say they believe Iranian-funded militias helped organize a mob attack in the southern township of Majarr al-Kabir on June 24, 2003, that resulted in the execution of six British military-police officers. According to a classified British military-intelligence document, a local militia leader is “implicated in the murder of the 6 RMP [Royal Military Police].” The man heads a cell of the Mujahedin for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (MIRI), a paramilitary outfit coordinated out of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s base in Ahvaz, Iran. Although U.S. and British officers think it unlikely the soldiers were killed on orders from Revolutionary Guard officers, they agree that the slayings fit within the Iranian generals’ broad guidelines to bog coalition forces down in sporadic hit-and-run attacks.The Iranian program is as impressive as it is comprehensive, competing with and sometimes bettering the coalition’s endeavors. Businesses, front companies, religious groups, NGOs and aid for schools and universities are all part of the mix. Just as Washington backs Iraqi news outlets like al-Hurra television station, Tehran has funded broadcast and print outlets in Iraq. A 2003 Supreme National Security Council memo, smuggled out of Iran, suggests even the Iranian Red Crescent society, akin to the Red Cross, has coordinated its activities through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The memo instructs officials that “the immediate needs of the Iraqi people should be determined” by the Guard’s al-Quds Force.More sinister are signs of death squads charged with eliminating potential opponents and former Baathists. U.S. intelligence sources confirm that early targets included former members of the Iran section of Saddam’s intelligence services. In southern cities, Thar-Allah (Vengeance of God) is one of a number of militant groups suspected of assassinations. U.S. commanders in Baghdad and in eastern provinces say similar cells operate in their sectors. The chief of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, has publicly accused Iranian-backed cells of hunting down and killing his officers. In October he blamed agents in Iran’s Baghdad embassy of coordinating assassinations of up to 18 of his people, claiming that raids on three safe houses uncovered a trove of documents linking the agents to funds funneled to the Badr Corps for the purposes of “physical liquidation.”A former Iraqi official and member of Saddam’s armored corps, who identifies himself as Abu Hassan, told TIME last summer that he was recruited by an Iranian intelligence agent in 2004 to compile the names and addresses of Ministry of Interior officials in close contact with American military officers and liaisons. Abu Hassan’s Iranian handler wanted to know “who the Americans trusted and where they were” and pestered him to find out if Abu Hassan, using his membership in the Iraqi National Accord political party, could get someone inside the office of then Prime Minister Iyad Allawi without being searched. (Allawi has told TIME he believes Iranian agents plotted to assassinate him.) And the handler also demanded information on U.S. troop concentrations in a particular area of Baghdad and details of U.S. weaponry, armor, routes and reaction times. After revealing his conversations to U.S. and Iraqi authorities, Abu Hassan disappeared; earlier this year, one of his Iraqi superiors was convicted of espionage.Intelligence agencies say Tehran still funds various political parties in Iraq. Documents from Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps files obtained by TIME include voluminous pay records from August 2004 that appear to indicate that Iran was paying the salaries of at least 11,740 members of the Badr Corps. British and U.S. military intelligence suspect those salaries are still being paid, although Badr leader Hadi al-Amri denies that. “I’ve told the American officers to bring us the evidence that we have a deal with Iran, and we will be ready, but they say they don’t have any,” he says.What remains murky is the extent to which Iran is encouraging its proxies to stage attacks against the U.S.-led coalition. Military intelligence officers describe their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps counterparts’ strategy as one of using “nonattributable attacks” by proxy forces to maximize deniability. What’s uncertain, says a senior U.S. officer, is what factions within Tehran’s splintered security apparatus are behind the strategy and how much the top leaders have endorsed it. Intelligence sources claim that Brigadier General Sullaimani ordained in a meeting of his militia proxies in the spring of last year that “any move that would wear out the U.S. forces in Iraq should be done. Every possible means should be used to keep the U.S. forces engaged in Iraq.” Secret British military-intelligence documents show that British forces are tracking several paramilitary outfits in Southern Iraq that are backed by the Revolutionary Guard. Coalition and Iraqi intelligence agencies track Iranian officers’ visits to Iraq on inspection tours akin to those of their American counterparts. “We know they come, but often not until after they’ve left,” says a British intelligence officer.Shi’ite political parties do not dispute that the visits occur. And a steady flow of weapons continues to arrive from Iran through the porous southern border. “They use the legal checkpoints to move personnel, and the weapons travel through the marshes and areas to our north,” says a British officer in Basra. Top diplomats and intelligence officials know that some Iranian officers are providing assistance to Shi’ite insurgents, but it’s dwarfed by the amount of money and matériel flowing in from Iraq’s Arab neighbors to Sunni insurgents.Western diplomats say that so far, the ayatullahs appear to be acting defensively rather than offensively. An encouraging sign is that even Shi’ite beneficiaries of Tehran exhibit strains of Iraqi and Arab nationalism; and many have strong familial and tribal ties with the Sunnis. “We are sons of Iraq. The circumstances that forced me to leave did not change my identity,” says Badr leader al-Amri. He’s proud of his cooperation with the Revolutionary Guard to battle Saddam but says it extended only “to the limit of our interests.” An informed Western observer thinks that while those groups maintain a “shared world view” with Tehran, much as Brits and Americans share each other’s, they are now trying to balance their interests with those of their backers and are eager to wield power in Baghdad in their own right. “I think you’ll never break a lifelong relationship,” says the senior U.S. military officer, “but as time goes by, as they become politicians fighting local issues, they will change.”That may be true. But Iran shows every sign of upping the ante in Iraq, which may ultimately force the U.S. to search out new allies in Iraq–including some of the same elements it has been trying to subdue for almost 2½ years–who can counter the mullahs’ encroachment. The Western diplomat acknowledges that Iran’s seemingly manageable activities could still escalate into a bigger crisis. “We’ve dealt with governments allied to our enemies many times in the past,” he says. “The rub, however, is, Could it affect [counterinsurgency efforts]? To that I say, ‘It hasn’t happened yet, but it could.’” The war in Iraq could get a whole lot messier if it does.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1093747-5,00.htmlIs Iran Aiding Iraq’s Militias? Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007 By MARK KUKIS/SEDDAH It’s just before 3 a.m. in the southern Iraqi town of Seddah, and the Americans are rushing down a darkened street that smells of eucalyptus and gasoline. A moment later the sound of a door crashing in splits the nighttime hush. U.S. troops barrel into a gritty little house in search of militants thought to be responsible for a series of roadside bombings using armor-piercing explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, which U.S. military officials say come directly from Iran. The soldiers immediately corral the women and children into one room and force three men in the house to lay face down at gunpoint on the floor of another in front of a television glowing blue-green on mute. As other troops begin tossing the place to find any hidden weapons and propaganda, a scene from a late-night newscast flickers. There’s Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in Tehran that day, smiling and shaking hands with the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the flashbulbs from cameras silently pop. U.S. military commanders in Baghdad have aired their strongest accusations yet against Tehran’s leadership in recent weeks, saying Iranian forces are guilty of nothing less than training, arming and controlling a shadow army of Shi’ite militants in Iraq. U.S. allegations of Iranian arms trafficking and political meddling in Iraq are longstanding. But American assertions about Iran have grown increasingly severe amid overt gestures of friendship between Maliki and Iranian leaders. Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the ground commander for U.S. forces in Iraq, says Shi’ite militia fighters backed by Iran are now killing and maiming more U.S. troops than are Sunni insurgents, who have until now been the most deadly U.S. enemy in Iraq. According to Odierno, 73% of attacks against U.S. troops in Baghdad that left soldiers dead or wounded in July came from Shi’ite guerrillas linked to Iran one way or another. That’s nearly double the number from six months ago. Deadly EFPs have killed more than 200 troops in Iraq since May of 2004, the military says. In the eyes of many American commanders, a legion of fighters set loose in Iraq by Iran is now deadlier even than the country’s al-Qaeda contingent. Iran, while denying the charge, makes no secret of its interest in shaping events in neighboring Iraq. And few doubt that Tehran offers some support to the country’s leading Shi’ite militias, the Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Brigade. But how deeply is Iran really involved in Iraq’s violence? The answer remains elusive, even to U.S. officials who firmly believe the worst. U.S. officials contend that Iraqi recruits from the Mahdi Army have traveled in groups numbering between 20 and 60 to Iran in a training program organized by the Quds Forces that dates back to 2004. Once inside Iran, U.S. officials say, Quds Force handlers transport recruits to training camps near Tehran. It’s there, allegedly, that Iraqi militia fighters hone skills needed to effectively use EFPs, mortars and rockets against targets in Iraq. Quds Force trainers, working at times apparently with experienced instructors from the Lebanese militia Hizballah, also school Iraqi guerrillas in intelligence techniques, sniper shooting and kidnapping operations before transporting them back across the border. Once inside Iraq again, militants who’ve undergone Iranian training reportedly form cells that U.S. officials now refer to as “special groups.” These cells, U.S. officials say, then continue to receive weapons, funds and direction from the Quds Force as they unleash some of the bloodiest violence American forces face. “The Quds Force goal was to develop the Iraqi special groups into a network similar to the Lebanese Hizballah,” says Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq. “Special groups would be unable to conduct their terrorist attacks in Iraq without Iranian-supplied weapons and other support.” Bergner says U.S. forces have taken more than 20 special groups operatives off the streets of Iraq this year, and a military intelligence officer tells TIME that several of the captured fighters have detailed the training they underwent in Iran during interrogations. The veracity of these claims is unknowable, however, since the Americans have offered no solid proof to support their allegations. Iranian officials have scoffed at the notion publicly. And Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, says emissaries from Tehran he meets keep up the denials behind closed doors as well. No one associated with Iraq’s militias is any more revealing. “Sorry, but all these claims are not true,” says Falah Shanshal, a parliamentarian loyal to Sadr. “We are not the bad guys as they think.” However, both U.S. military officials and Sadr himself say that many fighters from the Mahdi Army have broken ranks and now operate on their own, conducting criminal enterprises and staging guerrilla strikes. No one knows how independent such breakaway factions are. Any string-pulling from afar cannot be detected by U.S. soldiers chasing down suspected EFP shooters and rocketeers armed with Iranian missiles, the surest Quds Force fingerprint in the minds of many in the U.S. military. Staff Sgt. Kenneth Del Valle, a military interrogator who works in southern Iraq, eyes detainees carefully as they are brought to him one by one by other soldiers. Another nighttime raid targeting farmhouses near Seddah has netted five suspected members of a rocket team believed to be responsible for several attacks on a nearby U.S. base. Del Valle’s makeshift interrogation chamber is a sweltering side room in one of the houses with a cement floor and grimy walls. Tattered curtains on the barred windows hang limply in the heat, which leaves both Del Valle and his bound subjects sweating heavily as they peer at each other nose to nose in the glow of a flashlight. One after another the detainees speak nervously to Del Valle through a translator he has with him. No one seems to know anything about rockets. There is no mention of Iran or the Quds Force. Nobody has seen anyone from the Mahdi Army, either. Del Valle is sure they are lying. About what he cannot say. “It’s too early to tell,” says Del Valle, who only gets a chance to put a few questions to each detainee before they are hustled onto a helicopter for further interrogation back at the U.S. base. “I got too many pieces that are missing.”http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1653385,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar 

The Iran Factor

Sunday, Jul. 16, 2006 By JOE KLEIN When I visited Iran a few years ago, my favorite question was, “Who runs this country?” The response often was nervous laughter, followed by a raised eyebrow, a shrug and a stage whisper: “The dark forces.” My next question–”The dark forces?”–would elicit the weaving of my interlocutor’s own fabulously intricate conspiracy theory. “It’s very Persian,” a young businessman told me. “We’re very conspiracy-minded.” So let’s indulge ourselves and think like Persians about recent events in the Middle East. Here’s my conspiracy theory:It starts with the fact that no one really does know who runs Iran. There are all sorts of competing institutions–governmental and religious and bazaari. There is a secular President, mouthy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a supreme leader, the Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. There is a constitutional tension between those two offices, a tension that may have been heightened in the past year by Ahmadinejad’s close relationship with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Corps is a strange institution. It is an extremist religious militia that exists outside the Iranian state apparatus. It is funded by semiprivate charitable institutions, called bonyads, that manage the Shah’s confiscated assets, which are enormous. The bonyads aren’t part of the government, either. They–and the Revolutionary Guards–are the patrons of Iran’s external terrorist organization, Hizballah. In fact, there are Iranian Revolutionary Guard trainers currently stationed in Lebanon. Complicated enough for you? I haven’t even begun to conspire yet.So let’s speculate that there’s a difference of opinion between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei about how to proceed on nuclear negotiations with the West. Let’s say Ahmadinejad doesn’t want to negotiate. Let’s say he wants to send a message to the West, to the Israelis and also to Khamenei: I’m not a powerless figurehead like my predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. My friends in the Revolutionary Guards give me veto power over any deal. It would not be difficult for Ahmadinejad to send the message, via the Guards, to both Hizballah and the military wing of Hamas, which is based in Damascus and funded in part by Iran: Let’s rile up the Israelis and start a crisis. Let’s change the subject from the Iranian nuclear negotiations. At the very least, let’s lay down an opening marker in the negotiations: If you mess with Iran, we have a multitude of ways to mess with you.Just a theory, of course. “We really don’t have any real idea about what goes on inside that government,” a senior U.S. diplomat told me recently. But it’s not implausible, either. “My sense was that Khamenei didn’t want to start trouble anywhere else in the world because it might hurt the nuclear negotiations,” says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, author of a recent book about Iran. “But I don’t think Hizballah would have crossed the border into Israel without approval from a much higher–Iranian–authority, either.”If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue–and the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran’s oily economy. But it is also clear now that a major consequence of George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy has been an emboldened Iran. The U.S. “has been Iran’s very best friend,” a diplomat from a predominantly Sunni nation told me recently. “You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq.”Indeed, last week’s Middle East confrontation had Bush-folly written all over it–and not just because the Iranian government’s cowboy faction might be strutting its stuff. Bush’s failure to patiently broker a real Middle East settlement–mostly because he refused to speak to Yasser Arafat or demand concessions from the Israelis–helped lead to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal policy in Gaza. Peace isn’t made unilaterally. An unstated part of Israeli policy was that provocations by Hamas and Hizballah would have to be met with real force, lest it seem that Israel was merely retreating from a tough fight. Furthermore, it was the Bush Administration–not the Israelis, not the Palestinian Authority–that insisted the Palestinian elections go forward last January, with disastrous consequences. “The only people who want those elections are Condi Rice and Hamas,” a prominent member of Israel’s Kadima party told me just before Hamas won the election. A more careful and collegial U.S. Middle East policy might have forced the simultaneous disarming of Hizballah as Syrian troops left Lebanon in 2005. This is not to say that the Bush Administration caused last week’s explosion, or even that meticulous diplomacy might have prevented it. But it couldn’t have hurt. Instead, the U.S. and Iran may have become unwitting co-conspirators, pouring gas onto a petroleum fire–a dreadful twist that only a Persian could love.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1214964-2,00.html 

Why is Iran Shelling Iraq?

Monday, Aug. 20, 2007 By ANDREW LEE BUTTERS Iraqi Kurdish media are reporting that the Iranian military is massing at the main border crossing into northern Iraq, possibly for an incursion against PEJAK. Clashes between PEJAK and the Iranians have been increasing steadily, and Iraqi Kurdish officials say that about 40 Iranian soldiers were killed on Saturday. Whether or not the Iranians attack, the timing of the buildup is ominous. Last week, the United States announced that it may list Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — a branch of the country’s military — as a terrorist organization for supplying explosives to Shi’ite militias in Iraq for use against American soldiers. The statement was part of a growing White House campaign aimed at either intimidating the Iranian regime, or at building a case for an American strike against Iran. In that light, yesterday’s shelling is a reminder that Iran has the ability to confront the U.S. not just on the streets of Baghdad but also in the one part Iraq so safe that there are hardly any American soldiers: Iraqi Kurdistan. But Iraq’s Kurdish region — the country’s only success story — is looking increasingly beleaguered. Besides the Iranian army, the Turkish army is also massed at their border with northern Iraq, threatening an invasion if Iraq’s Kurds don’t do something about another Kurdish radical group, the PKK, which is fighting its own insurgency against the Turkish state. The ruling Kurdish parties of northern Iraq say there is little they can do about these radical groups. Not only are the PKK and PEJAK hardened guerilla fighters in formidable terrain, but the Iraqi Kurds’ own security forces are stretched pretty thin keeping their territory safe from Arab terrorists in the rest of the country. That threat is as real as ever. The official death toll from last week’s suicide attacks against several towns near Iraqi Kurdistan has risen to over 400 and continues to climb. Iraq’s Kurdish leaders have long been trying to steer a course between their patrons in Washington and their powerful neighbors in Tehran. Though they have America to thank for freeing them from the genocidal grip of Saddam’s regime, many Iraqi Kurdish political parties took refuge in Iran during those grim years. This spring, Kurds protested vigorously when American soldiers captured several Iranian agents posing as diplomats in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil. An Iranian incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan would be a poor way of saying thanks. But these days Iraq’s Kurds aren’t feeling the love from anyone. Last week, America’s ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said he didn’t think that it would be possible to hold a referendum on the status of Kirkuk this year. Iraqi Kurds consider the oil-rich city of Kirkuk — which is currently under control of the central government of Baghdad — to be the “Jerusalem” of Kurdistan, stolen from them by a Ba’athist ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. The Kurds have made the return of Kirkuk a central precondition to their participation in a federal Iraq, and will regard any delay as a betrayal. But then again, they are used to betrayal. As the saying goes, the Kurds — a small ethnic group living in the shadows of great empires — have never had any true friends but the mountains.http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1654449,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar 

Crocker Sees Signs of Hope in Iran

Friday, Oct. 26, 2007 By MARK KUKIS/BAGHDAD Listening to Administration officials in Washington this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking Iran is an incorrigible hegemon, making violent mischief in every corner of the Middle East in order to drive the U.S. out of the region. Iraq is often presented as Exhibit A in the indictment of Iranian malfeasance. And yet, the outlook appears a little different from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Although the Iranian officials with whom U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker has met in recent months have shown little flexibility, Crocker has lately begun to suspect that Iran may have begun to heed U.S. demand that it desist from supporting and training Shi’ite militia fighters. Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, Crocker cited a virtual cessation of mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone — strikes that military officials had claimed were becoming more accurate because of help the shooters were getting from Iran. Crocker also pointed to the announcement by Shi’ite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr calling for a cease-fire, which the ambassador suggested might have come at the behest of Tehran. (Iran may also have had a hand in brokering a truce between the two key Shi’ite militia groups, Sadr’s Mahdi Amy and Badr Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council, which is a key element of the Iraqi government.) “We’ve seen some interesting developments over the last couple of months,” said Crocker. “How is Iran tied to it all? Very hard for us to say.”There’s little reason to believe Iran has had a change of heart about the U.S. presence in Iraq. But if what Crocker suspects is true, Tehran might be more responsive to U.S. pleas than its rhetoric suggests — though even for a seasoned Middle East diplomat like Crocker, who began his career as a foreign service officer in Iran, it’s hard to tell. “What are Iranian intentions?” Crocker asked. “It’s a question very much on my mind.” Still, even the murky indications he’s sensing are enough to encourage Crocker to press forward with another round of stilted conversations with Iranian officials. Crocker expects the working group of U.S. and Iranian officials set up after the last ambassadorial meeting on Iraq’s security situation to convene again, although no date has been set. “It continues to be a mixed and cloudy picture,” said Crocker. “Since it’s a mixed picture, it’s certainly a picture we want to stay engaged in.” http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1676988,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar  The Atlantic recently asked a group of foreign-policy authorities about Iran’s role in the Iraq conflictQ.   Does the Bush administration’s public assessment of Iran’s involvement in the insurgency and sectarian violence in Iraq overstate Iran’s role, understate it, or get it about right?48%: Overstates“Iran is playing a role, but so are others.  There is little doubt that funds are flowing from Saudi Arabia in support of the Sunni insurgency, which has claimed the greatest number of Iraqi lives and American troops.  There are many bad actors, and we need to sustain attention on all of them — and we need to talk to all of them as well.” “The fundamental problem in Iraq isn’t Iran (or Syria for that matter), but the fact that the U.S. invasion opened up a Pandora’s Box of sectarian tensions.  The result is the civil war we are now witnessing. And it shouldn’t be surprising that sectarian factions will look for financial, material, and moral support from wherever they can get it. For many Shiites, that means Iran. And there are all too many people in Tehran who are willing to provide such support, if only to hasten our defeat.” “It doesn’t so much overstate Iran’s role as belatedly calls attention to something that has existed for at least the past 3 years. The question is whether [Iranian intervention is now any] worse (I suspect it isn’t) — and, if not, why are we [now] paying such febrile attention to it?”  “Actually it overstates Iran’s role in terms of the overall pattern of violence and the incredible misjudgment of Iraq politicians and it misstates Iran’s role. Iran has certainly tried to gather intelligence on the various Shia groups and to increase its influence with some of these groups with a view to ensuring that it has a friendly neighbor after the inevitable American departure. It also is probably true that Iran has encouraged and assisted limited attacks on American forces to make clear that any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could be quite costly to American forces in Iraq. The major escalation of sectarian violence that followed the attack on the Golden Mosque, however, sprang from internal forces in Iraq — not as part of a grand Iranian plan. The inability of Iraqi politicians of all stripes to recognize their shared interests and to move to isolate the fanatical fringe has not been of Iranian doing. And this is far more important than any arms supplied by Iran.” “It overstates, and misstates, which is different.”  “They mis-state Iran’s role, which is indeed very active in support of the Shia but is driven primarily by their commitment to establish a Shia-controlled neighbor. It is targeted primarily against the Sunni insurgency, and secondarily the U.S.” “Iran is neither the solution to all of Iraq’s problems nor the cause of them.  The Administration has never been willing to accept that Iraq’s problems are almost entirely the fault of atrocious American decisions and has consistently insisted that they were the result of someone else–al-Qaeda, Syria, Muqtada al-Sadr, and now Iran.  All of those villains have played some role in the chaos, but it was America’s reckless disregard for sound military, political, and diplomatic approaches to the inevitable problems of postwar reconstruction in Iraq that allowed each of them to play a small role in the unfolding tragedy.” “The problem is that the Administration treats Iran as monolithic, when there are multiple policy actors who can do things without coordinating or clearing with others. So there is a lot of “Iranian” messing around, but how much this is decided by the highest level is hard to say.”  “The Quds Forces are likely getting weaponry into Iran, but Bush is over-using the reach and the assessment.” 40%: Gets It About Right“Iran isn’t the main problem in Iraq, but it is certainly a contributing factor, and it’s about time the administration made a bigger public complaint about Iran’s undeclared war on the United States and on Iraqi democrats.”  “[About right,] but the administration has further injured the U.S. standing in the region by talking as if Iran was ascendant and the U.S. on the run. The fact is, Iran is a poor and divided country whose power is only a small fraction of ours.”  “I don’t know the answer to #1, but I assume that the administration is
being very cautious not to overstate the intelligence, given the experience
with the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD stockpiles.” “I think their statements are technically correct, but meant to imply a
greater involvement than the data can support.  They probably understate
the Iranian political involvement in Iraq.” “Are they the last people on earth to realize Iran might meddle in
a neighbor’s politics, when that neighbor is invaded by an enemy of
Tehran?” 12%: Understates“The administration has been focusing primarily on the presence of Iranian arms in Iraq, perhaps overstating how much centralized control Iran has on the transfer of weapons.  But it has understated Iran’s political influence, which is quite substantial due to longstanding ties to clerics and Shiite militias.”“I don’t think we have the intelligence information to know just how much political influence Iran is wielding over the Shia leadership in Iraq.  I would suspect Sadr as well as the SCRI folks are more influenced by Iran and they hold big blocks of power in parliament. Ultimately the political influence is strategically more important than providing weapons and training to Iraqis.” “Given the nature of the Iranian regime and the window of opportunity offered by Iraq’s chaos, I’d guess that the Mullahs are doing more there than our government mentions.”  Iran in IraqArticle Toolssponsored by:

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Q.  Would a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq within the next year help or hinder Iran’s objectives in the region?Help: 59%“It will help [Iran’s] objectives, if it does not trigger a major reaction from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. If it does trigger that reaction, it will hinder Iran’s objectives.” “America fought Iraq and Iran won.” “At this stage probably the U.S. presence helps Iran, so its departure can’t make things worse.”“No doubt that if we had to leave Iraq within a year, it would be ignobly done.  Hence Iran would then seem the 800 pound gorilla in the region.”  “Iran’s objectives in the region can’t be realized with the U.S. in the region.  A U.S. withdrawal would be a big victory for the hardliners in Tehran.” “Help in the short-term.  Iran will be able to say that America has been defeated.  In the long-term, it is hard to say.  If the Iraq civil war evolves into uncontrolled chaos, Iran may not be so happy.  And Sunni states will likely come in behind the Sunni insurgency, fueling a wider regional conflict.”  “The answer for the U.S. lies in 1) developing a comprehensive security structure and plan for the region; 2) offering Iran an end to sanctions and security guarantees in exchange for a) absolute transparency for its nuclear program; b) ending support for terrorism; and c) help in Iraq; and 3) on that basis engaging Iran directly.”  “A withdrawal would likely mean unchecked Shiite dominance in Iraq, and great Iranian influence.  However, a U.S. withdrawal could also precipitate a full-scale civil war and the regional spread of the conflict, which is not in Iran’s interest.  Iran wants a stable Iraq dominated by the Shiites, not a failed state that exports violence and instability.”  “We are truly between a rock and a hard place on this one.”  Hinder: 41%“Hinder, but only if we do not just abandon Iraq, and instead disengage [while] keeping modest, holding garrisons in a couple of bases.”“Let’s not count on the Iraqis being as servile to Tehran as now appears likely; that’s just not likely, given their history.”  “Withdrawal would hinder Iran if done properly,”  “Withdrawals must be tied to and subordinate to a viable political strategy. We can’t just take the troops out and cross our fingers.” “Iran relies on the U.S. presence to provide for relative stability, give Iran a role in assisting major Shi’ia elements in Iraq, and to assure long-term democracy and therefore a Shi’ia ascendancy in Iraq.”  “It would release us precisely from the entanglement that Iran has taken such tremendous satisfaction from finding is in. Our extrication would also likely result in a reversal of roles, with Iran being sucked into and becoming stuck in the Iraq morass much as we have been.”  “It will hinder more than help. Right now this is a freebie for Iran. We protect a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, and our troop commitment ties us down. As we withdraw, the parties in Iraq will need to accommodate each other more, which might check Iranian influence. And Iran will have to deal with the regional opposition to its attempts to dominate Iraq.” “Certainly over the longer run it would hinder Iran’s interests in [portraying] itself as the defender of the faith and the major bulwark against U.S. domination of the Middle East. It would also throw a large element of uncertainly into Iran’s calculation as to what type of neighbor it will have in Iraq. The Shiia inferiority complex ensures that even if a Shiia government emerges in Iraq after a U.S. withdrawal, Iran would continue to worry that it might be usurped at some point by a Sunni strongman and a very hostile government accompanied by an autonomous Kurdish state  with expansionist goals. Iran’s preference for a stable, Shiia government that controls all of Iraq would go out the window with a U.S. withdrawal. “  Other:“Both A and B.  In the short term, American withdrawal would open up new opportunities for Iran to make mischief and exert influence, creating a sense that Iran was the rising new hegemony.  Over the longer term, Iran’s own internal weaknesses and its probably inevitable inability to gain control over the chaos of Iraq will likely swamp its short-term gains.”  “Neither. Iran was greatly helped by our invasion of Iraq, which removed one of its arch enemies and put in power people with close ties to Tehran.  The damage has been done – and whether we stay or leave will have no real impact on Iran’s regional ascendancy.”  “This depends on the circumstances of a U.S. withdrawal (or redeployment).  If we pull back our troops and at the same time engage in serious regional diplomacy to bring stability to Iraq, Iran’s capacity to increase its own influence would probably decline.” “Have little effect.  Do we know what those objectives are?” “[The question is] impossible to answer as stated.”  PARTICIPANTS (43):  Kenneth Adelman, Graham Allison, Ronald Asmus, Samuel Berger, Daniel Blumenthal, Max Boot, Stephen Bosworth, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Daniel Byman, Wesley Clark, Richard Clarke, William Cohen, Ivo Daalder, Douglas Feith, Jay Garner, Leslie Gelb, Marc Grossman, John Hamre, Gary Hart, Bruce Hoffman, John Hulsman, Robert Hunter, Tony Judt, Robert Kagan, David Kay, Andrew Krepinevich, Charles Kupchan, John Lehman, James Lindsay, Edward Luttwak, John McLaughlin, Jessica Mathews, Richard Myers, William Nash, Joseph Nye, Carlos Pascual, Thomas Pickering, Kenneth Pollack, Joseph Ralston, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, Ann-Marie Slaughter, James Steinberg.Not all participants answered both questions.http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/poll/2  Foreign Involvement in the Iraqi InsurgencyBy Ahmed Hashim

The Iraqi insurgency spiked again in August 2004 when Muqtada al-Sadr took the offensive against the transitional Iraqi government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the Multi-National Force of U.S. and other foreign troops, as the former coalition is now known. It was optimistically believed that following the return to Iraqi sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency by both Sunni and Shi’a groups would wither away. It has not, and the issue of foreign involvement with insurgent groups – which has hovered in the background since last year – came to the foreground in the summer of 2004. U.S. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, highlighted the issue with regard to Syria when he adamantly stated: “We know that the pathway into Iraq for many foreign fighters is through Syria. It’s a fact. We know it. The Syrians know it.” [1] More recently, the claim by the Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Sha‘alan in July that Iran was interfering in Iraqi domestic affairs by allowing or promoting infiltration into Iraq has led to a significant contretemps between the two neighbors.

The question of foreign insurgents in Iraq presents a particularly tangled problem. Layers of complexity beneath a seemingly simple surface make it difficult to untangle fact from fiction when discussing the issue. Though the Bush administration has maintained that attacks are the work of “regime dead-enders” and foreign infiltrators, hard empirical evidence – often from the U.S. military forces – indicates that the foreign element is minuscule. Evidence which shows that of 8,000 suspected insurgents detained in Iraq, only 127 hold foreign passports, supports this latter claim. But a simple head-count does not tell the whole story. The insurgency’s foreign element has had a greater impact than mere numbers would lead us to believe.

Un-sponsored Foreign Insurgents

This insurgency has seen its share of outraged and disgruntled individuals, Arab nationalists, and “un-sponsored” religious extremists make their way into Iraq to fight the foreign occupation. Many Palestinians were recruited to fight in Iraq in 2002, and some joined the regime’s irregular force, the Feda‘yeen Saddam. [2] Similarly, large numbers of Syrian volunteers with close tribal and cultural links to Iraqis across the border felt it was their duty to fight. These individuals received no encouragement from their government. One such fighter, a 26-year-old Syrian named “Abed,” decided to fight in Iraq barely a week after the war began because, as he put it, “there was something inside that made me explode.” Another, a Saudi captured in Iraq named Mohammad Qadir Hussein, was a poor, disgruntled individual who had no military training, but who was motivated by an abiding desire to help other Muslims in distress. [3]

The collapse of Iraqi border controls facilitated the entry of un-sponsored insurgents into Iraq, while Iraqi middlemen or facilitators provided logistical support (i.e. food, directions, and weapons and ammunition) once these individuals had gained entry into the country. Un-sponsored foreign infiltrators are then “passed on” to Sunni imams who became their mentors. Many of these foreign infiltrators entered Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. While poorly trained and ill-equipped, a substantial number of them fought doggedly and to the death in some of the battles between Iraqi irregular forces and the coalition advancing from the south. After the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, some returned home, while others remained and fought in the insurgency. Many of these gravitated towards the more disciplined jihadist insurgents.

Non-State Actors and Organizations

Foreign insurgents who come in as part of a “package” sent into Iraq by non-state actors are a more formidable force than un-sponsored foreign infiltrators. There is growing evidence that Iraq has begun to attract foreign Islamists and anti-American groups such as al-Qaeda and the Tawhid organization of the elusive and enigmatic Jordanian-Palestinian terrorist, Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, for whom Iraq is a new and easily accessible battlefield.

Uncertainty regarding the level or depth of al-Qaeda presence in Iraq remains due to a lack of non-politicized intelligence on its activities in that country. Osama bin Laden and his subordinates did not think much of Saddam Hussein and his regime, with evidence showing that the feelings were mutual. In the early days of the war, when there was an influx of foreign volunteers into Iraq, Hussein apparently warned the Ba‘ath party against close links with outsiders, especially religious extremists. [4] A senior Islamist operative (now deceased) allegedly authored a text entitled “The Future of Iraq and the Peninsula After Baghdad’s Fall: The Religious, Military, Political and Economic Future.” The work argues that the fall of the Ba‘athist regime was “better for the Islamists than the victory of the Iraqi Ba‘athists, because the collapse of Arab Ba‘athism means the collapse of the atheist, pan-Arab slogans that swept the Muslim nation…the demise of the Ba‘ath government in Iraq heralds the hoisting of the Islamic banner over the debris.” [5] Such fighters were attracted to Iraq following the war precisely in order to fight the U.S. presence in that country for the sake of Islam.

Once in Iraq, “sponsored” jihadists needed to create a logistical infrastructure, as infiltrating heavy weapons and explosives across the borders of Iraq’s neighbors is difficult. [6] For this they needed the help of Iraqis. Mutual suspicion between Sunni Islamists and former regime loyalists, secular-minded nationalists, and tribal elements actively opposing the Coalition does not mean that the latter groups are averse to providing logistical support for the former. Attempts by foreign jihadist organizations to operate in Iraq depend on the resources, protection and concealment provided to their fighters by Iraqis. Unable to enter into Iraq with the resources they need or blend in with the local population, these foreign elements would be lost without support from within Iraq.

Salafists in Iraq

The importance of the foreign jihadists who adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam (known properly as Salafism but popularly as Wahhabism) lies in three distinct areas. Firstly, these foreign jihadists have coupled with local Iraqi Salafists – who emerged into the open following the downfall of the Saddam regime – to successfully introduce a cohesive and extreme ideology to the public. While many of these groups, like the Mujahideen al-Salafiyah in Balad, have even reached out to members of the former Feda‘yeen Saddam as long as the latter drop their allegiance to Saddam.

Secondly, they have increased the prospects for communal violence by waging a campaign of deliberate and focused attacks against leaders of other Muslim communities, promoters of “moral laxity,” and non-Muslims. In the fall of 2003, Islamists were particularly active in Mosul, where they attacked a nunnery, killed a well-known writer, bombed a popular cinema, and torched four liquor stores. The worst atrocity came with the bombings of Christian churches this summer.

Thirdly, they have been responsible for the suicide bombing campaigns in Iraq between early fall 2003 and summer 2004. August 2003 saw three massive car bombings. Some of the most devastating suicide attacks came in mid-November 2003 against Italians in Nasiriyah and in mid-January 2004 outside a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) compound in Baghdad. In March 2004, the Shi‘a religious celebration of Ashura witnessed multiple suicide bombings which killed hundreds. [7]

However, as of summer 2004, it is increasingly evident that the different agendas and modus operandi of the nationalist Iraqi insurgency and their ostensible jihadist allies have caused considerable tensions between these groups. While they admire the motivation and skills of the foreigners, many mainstream Islamist and tribal insurgents resent an ideological agenda which has resulted in the killing of Iraqis simply for not adhering to a strict religious line. The foreign fighter’s apparent blood lust, which has led to indiscriminate attacks and the beheading of abductees, also angers Iraqi nationalists. [8] In early summer 2004, nationalist insurgents in Fallujah were about to assault a group of foreign jihadists based in the Jolan suburb, led by a Saudi with the nom de guerre of Abu Abdullah. Later, insurgent “authorities” in Fallujah – largely made up of former military personnel and Iraqi police and led by clerics – succeeded in evicting a number of non-Iraqi terrorists from the area.

State Support for the Insurgency

The Bush Administration has accused two of Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Iran, of facilitating or actively encouraging foreign fighters to cross the Iraqi border. The singling out of these two countries, despite the fact that Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey also maintain porous borders with Iraq, reflects the political dynamics at play as the U.S. tries to stabilize the Great Middle East.

Syria and Iran fear the U.S. will succeed in its (unstated) goal of implementing a pro-American “puppet regime” in Baghdad. Such a regime would allow U.S. bases to operate in Iraq, giving U.S. forces the ability to threaten these countries. Both Tehran and Damascus see each other as the next U.S. target for regime change. The logical response is to support anti-US operations in Iraq, thereby ensuring that the hostile Bush Administration remains mired there. However, this is a very risky endeavor on many levels.

Both countries understand that to overtly support anti-US forces in Iraq risks incurring America’s wrath. Not long after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, warnings from the Bush administration to Syria and Iran not to help the nascent insurgency were issued from a position of strength. Both Syria and Iran bent over backwards to avoid irritating a U.S. that was itching for a fight. Indeed, there were reports that U.S. Special Operations Units undertook actions across the border into Syria and actually clashed with Syrian border guards. Therefore, the growing U.S. problems in Iraq by fall 2003 must have been a source of considerable satisfaction to both Tehran and Damascus.

While neither could overtly support the insurgency, it is not too far-fetched to assume that they did so covertly or turned a blind eye to pro-insurgent activities conducted by elements within their respective countries. Both Syria and Iran have domestic constituencies that are thoroughly hostile to the U.S., and furthermore, alarmed by the belligerent attitude taken by Washington towards their respective countries. Arab nationalists in Syria, for example, are inclined to lend support to the remnants of the Iraqi Ba’ath party. Meanwhile, Iranian groups like the Revolutionary Guards might be inclined to support Shi’a insurgents such as the Mahdist Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

But there are attendant risks. Firstly, neither country wants continued instability on their borders. Secondly, neither country is particularly enamored of the leading ideological elements responsible for the violence in Iraq. As a regime dominated by the minority ‘Alawis (thoroughly despised by Sunni extremists), Syria does not want to see the growth of Sunni extremism in Iraq. Nor does secular Damascus wish to see a theocratic Baghdad, despite its sympathy for and traditional alliance with the Shi‘as. For its part, Iran is hardly likely to support Sunni extremists or Arab nationalists. Both are antithetical to Tehran’s agenda. Instead, Iranians continue to support Shi’a groups that are not fighting the U.S., in the plausible and logical expectation that these parties will play a leading role in Iraqi politics once the U.S. has left Iraq.

So, while the restraints of Middle Eastern realpolitik keep states from openly supporting foreign insurgents against the coalition in Iraq, there are many other factors and organizations that contribute to this continuing and complex problem.

Notes:
1. Quoted in The Washington Times, April 30, 2004.
2. Islamist groups, on the other hand, recruited from among the growing population of disgruntled Islamists in Jordanian cities such as Ma‘an.
3. Personal interviews with the author.
4. New York Times, January 14, 2004, p.1.
5. Quoted in al-Hayat, December 20, 2003, p.4.
6. Cross-border traffic between Iraq and its neighbors by smugglers and tribes existed even in the best of times when Iraq was able to police its borders. Now even though the borders are not effectively policed, foreign infiltrators are unlikely to come into Iraq on their Sports Utility Vehicles – which outrun the two-wheel drives of the border patrols – laden with large quantities of light weaponry or explosives. Nor do they have to since Iraq is one huge ammunition dump.
7. The Independent (London), March 07, 2004.
8. For more see The Daily Star (Beirut) July 16, 2004. http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?issue_id=3047 

How deep the Iranians are involved in the Iraqi Fighting?

by Hichem Karoui(Friday, June 24, 2005)

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“What may be of a significant concern to the new Iraqi government is rather related to the kind of involvement Tehran has been viewing and planning for itself in post-Saddam Iraq. We say this with full knowledge and admittance of the spiritual ties between the Shiites, the political ties between some major actors in the Iraqi political spectrum and those who in Iran have helped and assisted them when they were harassed and hunted down by Saddam.”

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 When the top American commander in the Gulf tells Congress that the Iraqi insurgency has not grown weaker over the past six months, despite a claim by Vice President Dick Cheney that it was in its ”last throes, we’d better trust that something is really going wrong out there…Something that has not been predicted – at least not in these terms – in the plans for war and forcing change. Gen. John Abizaid’s testimony came at a contentious Senate Armed Services Committee hearing at which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly clashed with members of both parties, including a renewed call by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts for him to step down. Abizaid told the panel: ”I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago.” As to the overall strength of the insurgency, Abizaid said it was ”about the same” as six months ago. With the situation in Iraq worsening on the security level, and even going out of control either for the new government of M. Jaafari or for the American troops, the question about how far involved are the Iranians and what kind of involvement are they implicated with, deserves to be raised. Besides, it sounds that through Iraq (and about it), Washington and Tehran have settled themselves up to a fighting that has gone so far on the media, diplomatic and psychological levels. Yet, nothing may hinder it from evolving and hardening up in next days, if there is no progress in the situation of Iraq while the “deaf-dialogue” about the nuclear program goes on. Some little incidents push forward that dark picture. For example, according to some reports, in an effort to undercut Iran’s presidential election Friday, June 17, by a turnout, a new US-sponsored broadcasting station went on the air. Called Ahwaziya, it has been beaming programs directly from America to Iran calling on the ethnic Arabs of Khuzestan to boycott the vote as part of their revolt against the Islamic regime. The station ran a film exposing the damage their bombings had caused government buildings in Ahwaz, capital of the oil-rich province last Sunday, June 12. One of the slogans aired is: “Khuzestan is occupied land. Persians do not belong there.” A special satellite relay facility brings the broadcasts to all parts of Iran. The Americans have also activated probably from some of their basis in the Gulf, four radio stations that speak for various Arab factions in Khuzestan and 12 Internet radio stations whose programs address the Balochi, Azeri, Kurdish, Bakhtiyari and Zoroastrian minorities of Iran with a call not to cast their ballots. And let us not omit that in a sharp election-eve statement, President George Bush condemned Iran as a state ruled by “men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world.” Hence, one cannot help to state that even if the Iranians were as innocent as babies and remote from any involvement in the Iraqi fighting, the people in Washington around the President Bush do believe that they are guilty. The question is: what are the grounds of such a hypothesis that apparently run against the widespread belief that the revolt is Sunnite? Indeed, the role of the Sunnite pro-al Qaeda militiamen in the insurgency is beyond doubt. Yet, curiously enough, and in parallel with all that media concentration upon Al Zarqawi and the like, the role of the Iranians has gone almost unnoticed, although it is obvious that their influence has grown to an unimaginable degree in a country that had sustained an 8 years long war with Iran. The fact is that nobody can today doubt of the Iranian presence in Iraq, on different levels. And let it be clear: the true problem is not related to the Shiite influence, or even to what some observers call somewhat viciously « Shiite revenge ». There are Shiite citizens in other Arab countries as well, and we should remind the reader that the Shiites had ruled over great parts of the arabo-islamic world, from North Africa westward to the Gulf, some centuries ago. There are still mosques and libraries and buildings and relics dating from the Middle Age in Tunisia and Egypt, which belong to the great Fatimide (Shiite) dynasty that succeeded to the Aghlabides, founded Mahdia (their capital in Tunisia) and expanded their kingdom to Egypt where the Caliph al Mu’iz li Din Allah al Fatimi founded Cairo. Thus, the greatest capital of the contemporary Arab world is a Shiite foundation. What may be of a significant concern to the new Iraqi government is rather related to the kind of involvement Tehran has been viewing and planning for itself in post-Saddam Iraq. We say this with full knowledge and admittance of the spiritual ties between the Shiites, the political ties between some major actors in the Iraqi political spectrum and those who in Iran have helped and assisted them when they were harassed and hunted down by Saddam. For one ought to acknowledge that much of the current imbroglio as well as the growing insecurity would ease itself out of the impasse if the relations with the neighbors were clearer. Additionally to that, it is obvious that the Iraqi insurgency – what is labeled resistance- is not a totally internal matter. With the fighting and terrorist bombing going on, one may rightly assume that the fighters receive assistance from outside the country. The Sunnite terrorist network has extensions from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Caucasus and the former Soviet-Union states. Some of those insurgents have also a plan to upset the situation in the Arab Gulf states, beginning from Saudi Arabia with the objective of extending their « guerilla » to the whole region. The question is here: who would be the beneficiary of such a plan? Initially, this was an Iranian plan. When we remember the speeches of the Iranian revolutionary leaders since 1979 through 1988 (when the war with Iraq ended), we recall also how they were calling the peoples of the Arab Gulf states – and the others – to arise against their governments. The first years of the Iranian revolution were indeed those of its exportation, and this was also the very cause behind the cautious but effective involvement of the Arab Gulf states, the USA and the Western states, in assisting Saddam’s war against Iran. Today, Saddam is out of the game, but Iran is inside it, and maybe even making some advantages out of the mess in Iraq. The dilemma of the ruling elite Since the battle of Fallujah and the January 30th elections, there has been continuing sabotage of key targets like Iraq’s oil facilities, and a constant campaign of intimidation. Some observers note that a split between the Arab Shiites and the Kurds remain possible within the major factions of the elite in power. Yet, would such divisions be barred if the insurgency remains largely Sunni dominated? It would be an awful perspective if in order to keep the government united the terror operations should continue. Should the purpose of the current Government – or anyone in the future – be to help the country return to a normal life or to make of Iraq the frontline of the « shock of civilizations »? To give up the democracy step by step build up for a complete implication in a military process with the US supervision seems to be the turn Iraq would take if the insurgency continues. It is a dangerous turn, because the only justification for the war, from the Iraqi point of view as planned by the ex-opposition (which is today’s ruling elite), was to bring down the dictatorial regime and to replace it with a democracy. That is the only legitimacy the elite in power may claim while facing its enemies and rivals who accuse its elements to be the US pawns. The dilemma is huge and complicated, for not only the new ruling elite has to fight for its own political survival, but also to justify rationally and convincingly its choices and to explain why the American troops are still in the country, and whether they are still a liberating force or an occupying one. Assessing the role of the Sunni insurgents About 35 Sunni Arab groups [1] have made some kind of public announcement of their existence, or claimed responsibility for terrorist or insurgent attacks. An overwhelming majority of those captured or killed have been Iraqi Sunnis, as well as something like 90-95 % of those detained. The main Sunni insurgent groups are concentrated in cities like Mosul and Baghdad; in Sunni-populated areas like the « Sunni Triangle », the Al Anbar Province to the west of Baghdad, and the so-called « Triangle of Death » to the southeast of Baghdad; and in Sunni areas near the Iraqi and Turkish borders. As a result, four of Iraq’s Provinces – among 18 – have both a major insurgency threat and a major insurgent presence. Yet, 4 out of 18 is not what we may call an « overwhelming threat ». The hubs of resistance are localized. Resistance may be ended with a huge and efficient military means if it were not using the cities and the villages full of innocent civilians as a shield. The tragedy of Fallujah as the world media has reported it is not encouraging to rehearsing in other places. The risk of a counter-insurgency slipping out of control towards gratuitous killings and feud is not totally absent. A lot of those terrorist operations are mere provocations appealing to such absurd involvements. The insurgents do know that they are unable to defeat the Americans by military means, but they hope to bring them down to an irregular fight, which is at once an attrition war and a guerilla (cities’ battles), in order to discredit the government that depends on such an assistance, if the American troops indulge in street’s fighting with its lot of gratuitous killings (collateral damage). According to some reports, the Sunni are divided into a complex mix of Sunni nationalists, pro-Baath/ex-regime, Sunni Iraqi Islamists, outside Islamic extremists, foreign volunteers with no clear alignment, and paid or politically motivated criminals. U.S. officials kept repeating estimates of total insurgent strengths of 5.000 from roughly the fall of 2003 through the summer of 2004. In October, they issued a range of 12.000 to 16.000 but have never defined how many are hard-core and full time, and how many are part time. [2] All estimates have a margin of guess and inaccuracy, as it is difficult to verify the validity of those « statistics ». Whatever the numbers advanced, we should always bear in mind that nobody – no reliable institution – has obtained the right estimates, because even the CIA has no means of knowing the real number of al Qaeda fighters and the other terrorists involved in the fighting. Neither Usama bin Laden nor any of his lieutenants kept a record of the « troops ». The Americans can probably count the detainees and the killed. Yet, how would they count those who are living and fighting or lurking in the dark? Besides, some of those groups (or cells) are still unknown or new. The overall estimates rely upon human intelligence, which is at once the most sensitive and the most deficient or efficient (according to the case). In the spring of 2005, US officials estimated that there might be fewer than 1000 foreign fighters in Iraq or as many as 2000. Many felt the number flowing in across the Syrian border and other borders was so high the total was rapidly increasing. A few press estimates went as high as 10.000 before the fighting in Fallujah. Verifying the part of the Iranians in the insurgency Iraqi Arab Shiites resent the US presence, but they realize that within a secure new political system they would hold political dominance. Even a hard-core leader like Moqtada al Sadr cannot ignore the fact that the political process – even if (and despite) it is monitored by the USA- is not oppressive to the Shiites. Thus, it has been remarked that the various battles and political compromises that led Sadr to turn away from armed struggle in the late fall and early winter of 2004 have changed the situation significantly [3]: US officials indicated that the number of attacks had dropped significantly to between zero and five a week in early 2005, and they remained at this level through May 2005. By the late spring of 2005, the Mahdi army seemed to be the largest independent force in Basra played a major role in policing Amarah, and had effectively struck a bargain with the government police in Nasiriyah that allowed it to play a major role. Unlike most militias, it also seemingly has the support of some people inside the Shiite clergy. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the faction of Abdelaziz al Hakim also still have large militia elements. Al Da’wa, the Badr Corps, and the Iraqi Hezbollah also remain potential security problems, if not because the main ally of the new Iraqi government (the USA, that is) does not trust them, then because it is highly doubtful that we could speak of governance, of reconstruction of civil peace and democracy, with the presence of militias in the country. More to the point: what is exactly their legal status anyway? Does the law control them or do they act as if they have their own laws that have nothing to do with Iraq’s legislation? For if such is the case, what is the difference between Sunnite and Shiite militias as regards the law? We are told that the Sunnites are terrorists, because they refuse to abide by the law? Which one? The American or the Iraqi? And what about the Shiite militias? Is their activity controlled by the parties and the political organizations or by the State? The main concern here is the fact nobody ignore about the ties some of these militias keep with Iran, since the time Iraqi Shiite political and religious leadership has taken refuge in Iran prior to Saddam’s downfall. But this is not all the story. Iran still keeps close ties with key political parties, including the Shiite-based United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) that emerged as Iraq’s most important political coalition in the January 2005 elections: SCIRI, al Da’wa and al Da’wa-Tanzim al Iraq. Of course, one may say Iran has changed. But in fact, its record is a mixed one.[4] On the one hand, it no longer actively seeks to export its religious revolution to other Islamic states. It reached a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the other Southern Gulf states in the late 1990s. It has since avoided further efforts to try to use the Pilgrimage to attack the Kingdom, or to exploit Shiite versus Sunni tensions in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries like Bahrain. Iran maintains an active presence in the Gulf, conducts large scale-exercises, and maintains an active intelligence and surveillance presence in both the Gulf and Neighboring states. It has avoided provocative military action, however, and there is no Evidence of active hostile attacks on Southern Gulf targets or US targets since the Al
Khobar bombings.On the other hand, Iran no longer seems to be evolving towards a more moderate
and democratic regime, and this is probably not only because it is actively supporting the Hezbollah in Lebanon and hard-line groups like Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad. Iran is also well aware that Sunni and Shiite tensions are rising throughout the Islamic world, driven in part by Salafi extremist and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Iran plays at least some role in the political instability in Iraq and may take a more aggressive role in trying to shape Iraq’s political future and security position in the Gulf. That’s the point!Former Prime Minister Allawi repeatedly expressed his concern over Iran’s actions during 2004 and early 2005, as did other senior officials in the Interim Iraqi Government. What is the ground of such apprehension? For example, Iraqi Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan claimed in July 2004 that Iran remained his country’s « first enemy », supporting « terrorism and bringing enemies into Iraq (…) Iran interferes in order to kill democracy ». In another declaration, Shaalan – who is Shiite – said that the Iranians « are fighting us because we want to build freedom and democracy, and they want to build an Islamic dictatorship and have turbaned clerics to rule Iraq ».[5] The Iranian meddling was expected, though. As early as April 24, 2003, the Los Angeles Times wrote: « As Shiite Muslims in Iraq flexed their political muscle, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it had warned Iran’s fundamentalist Shiite government against interfering with its neighbor’s ‘road to democracy’… » On May 28, Reuters quoted US administrator Paul Bremer as saying: « We have seen a rather steady increase in Iranian activity here, which is troubling…What you see at the most benign end of it is Iranian efforts to sort of repeat the formula which was used by Hezbollah in Lebanon. [That] is to send in people who are effectively guerillas and have them get in the country and try to set up social services and decide that these social services are their ticket to popularity. And then they start to arm themselves and you wind up with a serious problem if you let it go too far ». No wonder! A month after the fall of Saddam’s regime, it has been reported, Tehran summoned all Ninth Badr Corps commanders and leaders of the Supreme Council for Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). These meetings were held on Wednesday and Thursday, 21 and 22 May 2003, at the Qods Forces’ headquarters at the former US embassy in Tehran. A number of Badr commanders also attended special meetings with the commanders of the Qods Force and the Ramazan Garrison. After an initial assessment, Ali Khameinei – Iran’s spiritual leader and the effective chief of the country – received all Ninth Badr Corps commanders at his residential quarters to finalize the discussions.[6] According to the same report, it was decided in the meeting that « the Ninth Badr Corps be organized based on the revolutionary Guards Corps Bassij format. Accordingly, the Ninth Badr Forces will set up cells in mosques in their regions and begin to recruit young and new forces from all regions. In light of problems raised by the Badr Corps commanders, the Qods Force pledged to provide logistic support to it. Salaries for all Ninth Badr personnel were approved for two years and no personnel would be forced in to early retirement. The Revolutionary Guards and the Bassij pledged to share their experiences with the Ninth Badr Corps in a series of political briefings… »[7] The US top officials were not late to react. « US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice took tough aim at Iran on Thursday, warning them to halt any illicit weapons programs », reported France Press.[8] « We cannot tolerate circumstances in which Iran, with a different vision of what Iraq ought to look like, tries to stir trouble in southern Iraq », she told the Town Hall speakers’ forum in Los Angeles. Rice also cautioned Tehran to crack down on any international terrorists and stop them from passing through Iran. The independent Inter Press Service reported on 4 July that Tehran had offered $200 to $ 300 to young Iraqis clerics to go on six to nine month missions to Iraq and promote its policies.[9] According to Ali Behbehani, an Iraqi Shiite who fled with his family to Iran in the 1980s and returned after the Baath’s downfall, the program was started in June by the International Centre for Islamic Studies at Qom, which is home to about 500 Iraqi students and about 2000 international pupils from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Europe, and the United States. Some remaining questions So, at last what would we make of all this? Is Iran involved or not in the insurgency? Some Western observers do not acknowledge such a part, because they do not see a clear major effort to destabilize the country. Yet, we do not see the evidence of the Iranian abstention either. The point is that with the Sunnite factions (followers of Zarqawi) occupying the field on the military and media levels, although the regions of trouble concerned with their activity are much smaller than the rest of the Provinces, the observers know little about the Shiite inspired activism. The media are most often concerned with Al Qaeda and al Ansar. How much important are they effectively? Does it require hundreds of men to make a bomb or put it under a car? We know that if terrorism is actually the weapon of the coward, it is also that of the weaker. And if many observers seem very concerned about Sunnite inspired terrorism, is it really because all the terrorist threats are planned and carried out by Sunnite cells, or rather because the Sunnite are nowadays the minority in Iraq, which make of them the first suspect? What about those parties interested in setting up an Islamic republic – which would be a copy of Iran since the majority of Iraqis, are Shiites? Do they really want a peaceful political process that would lead them out of the game for the next years? Is it that hard to put a bomb under a car and to make someone claim that it is Zarqawi’s action or one related to the Sunnites? And if the latter do not deny, is it not because they deem it « glorious » to fight the US supported regime besides making themselves dreadful? Notes: [1]. Many of these « groups » may be little more than cells and some may be efforts to shift the blame for the attacks or make the insurgent movement seem larger than it is. [2]. We rely on the statistics reported by Anthony H. Cordesman, Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): Iraq’s Evolving Insurgency; May 19, 2005. [3]. The Mahdi army presented a serious threat to Coalition and government forces in Najaf, in Sadr City in Baghdad, and in other Shiite areas in the south during much of the summer and early fall of 2004. US officials indicated that US forces faced up to 160 attacks per week in Sadr City between August and September 2004. [4]. Anthony H. Cordesman , Arleigh A. Burke Chair: Iran’s Developing Military Capabilities, December 8, 2004. CSIS. [5]. Iran in Iraq: How Much Influence? Crisis Group Middle East Report, n° 38, March 21, 2005. [6]. Mohammad Mohaddessin, Enemies of the Ayatollahs, Zed Books, London-New York, 2004. Pp159-160. [7]. Idem. [8]. France Press, June 12, 2003. [9]. Reported by M. Mohaddessin; op. Cit. P162 http://usa.mediamonitors.net/headlines/how_deep_the_iranians_are_involved_in_the_iraqi_fighting 

Iraq confident of Iranian help against insurgency

Tuesday, November 22, 2005 – ?2005 IranMania.com

Related Pictures   LONDON, November 22 (IranMania) – Iraqi President Jalal Talabani kicked off a landmark visit to Iran, voicing confidence he could win the Islamic republic’s support in the fight against the insurgency raging in his country, according to AFP.“I am sure they will help us. Terrorism is against everyone: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. I am sure the Iranian side will give us any kind of help to eradicate terrorism,” said Talabani, the first Iraqi head of state to visit Iran in nearly four decades.Ties between Iran and Iraq’s new authorities have been relatively close, with Baghdad’s new government dominated by Kurdish figures like Talabani and Shiites who were backed by Tehran during ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s rule, AFP mentioned.But relations remain clouded by allegations of Iranian support for insurgents fighting US and British troops in Iraq.Speaking alongside Talabani in a press conference laden with diplomatic niceties, Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated denials of such accusations, which hold that the Iranian regime is using Iraqi soil to wage a proxy war against Washington and London, AFP added.Several Arab officials have also voiced concern over the confessional influence the Shiite clerical regime in Tehran over events in Iraq, where the ousted Sunni minority and the empowered Shiite majority are at loggerheads.“These kind of claims will not have any effect on our deep-rooted relationship. An independent, strong and popular Iraq is to the benefit of all countries in the region, including Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.“We support Iraq’s integrity, sovereignty, independence and progress,” he added, going as far as to describe Iran and Iraq as “one soul in two bodies” and saying Talabani was an “old friend” and a “brother soldier”.Talabani will be in Iran for three days at the head of delegation that includes Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq Rubaie.He is lined up for a series of closed door talks with Ahmadinejad, top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani and is also expected to meet supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according o AFP.The last Iraqi head of state to tour Iran was Abdel Rahman Aref, Iraq’s president between 1966 and 1968. Iran and Iraq went on to fight a devastating war from 1980-88 after Saddam attempted a land grab in the wake of Iran’s Islamic revolution.Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan received major Iranian backing in its fight against Saddam, and he publicly thanked Iran for its support.But his attention is now clearly focussed on clearing up concerns over Iran’s present role in his country, AFP noted.“He’s certainly going to focus on the insurgency,” a Western diplomat close to the Iraqi authorities said.“I imagine Talabani will be repeating similar concerns already raised by the British and Americans. But the difference is that he has been dealing with Iranians for years, knows who to deal with and can open doors.”In October a furious British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior officials accused Iran and its allies in the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah of involvement in attacks against British troops in Iraq.Similar allegations has been levelled by senior US officials.Iraq’s authorities are also hoping Iran will use its influence with Damascus to secure Syria’s cooperation in sealing off the Iraqi border to insurgents. Iran is Syria’s closest regional ally, AFP added.

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Plan to create a ‘New Middle Eastern Region’

August 17, 2006

Bush’s New Middle East

By Jed Babbin

It’s been three years since Saddam’s fall and three days since the cease-fire took hold in Lebanon. From the former, President Bush proclaimed a new Middle East would rise in which democracy would prove an irresistible force that would spread and eradicate terrorism and despotism. From the latter, Iran’s Amadinejad and Syria’s Assad have both announced the birth of a different “new Middle East,” in which Mr. Bush’s version was more hallucination than vision. The region has changed, Assad said, “”because of the achievements of the [Hizballah] resistance.” The facts on the ground compel the conclusion that Assad’s assessment is closer to the truth than Mr. Bush’s, and Ahmadinejad’s intent will cast the region into the fire.

Little signs are scattered all over. Iran’s “Holocaust Cartoon” exhibition. The Saudi government press agency warning President Bush against linking Islam with fascism. Those, and many others like them, can be shrugged off as Middle Eastern politics. But what we – and the Israelis – cannot shrug off are the events that demonstrate the ground truths that have changed in the Middle East, and in the West some of the worst have been reaffirmed in the West. On the Arab side, the changes are significant.

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah has done what no other Arab leader has before: he has withstood Israel’s military might, losing many men and much equipment but not an inch of ground. For years, he had been the member of a very select club, a state-sponsored terrorist whose organization beleaguered Israelis occasionally and cohabited with UN “peacekeepers” on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Now, after a month of war, he is the de facto ruler of Lebanon, setting the terms for UN agreements, and the acclaimed hero of the Middle East. As a column in the Saudi government-sponsored daily “Arab News” said, “The Lebanese resistance’s month-long stand against the region’s mightiest army has earned it praise in the Arab world and raised hopes of a possible change in pro-Israeli Western policies. It has energized the Arab street and is being viewed as a cause for celebration despite the incredible toll the war has taken on Lebanon.” Already the Palestinian Hamas terrorist organization-cum-political party has proclaimed its admiration of Nasrallah’s methods, and is working hard to emulate them. Other than Iran’s Ahmadinejad, there is no more prominent figure in the Islamic world. Among terrorists, even bin Laden stands in Nasrallah’s shadow. And Nasrallah’s principal enemy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is diminished in direct proportion to Nasrallah’s enhancement.

Olmert’s indecisiveness – which achieved a level hitherto unknown outside Old Europe – mistook hope for a foundation stone of policy. Olmert hoped that Hizballah could be demolished by air power even though he hobbled it with rules of engagement that guaranteed the Hizballah forces would escape. He hoped that his military would bring him plans to win easily, without the loss of many Israeli troops and without inflicting many civilian casualties. But Olmert never had a plan to win or a clue of what it would take to do so. Olmert’s bitter experience is new to him, but as old as Caesar to military historians. Hope is not a policy, and wishing doesn’t win wars. Which is not to say that apocalyptic visions can’t come true.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the biggest winner of all, his power in the Middle East now secure against Israeli intervention. Ahmadinejad engineered the Israeli-Hizballah war to divert the West’s attention from his nuclear weapons program at the July G-8 summit. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Not only is the Iranian nuclear weapons program off the West’s agenda, Israel has lost a war: not even to Iran itself, but to Ahmadinejad’s subordinate.

Abandoned weapons and the other detritus of combat discovered in destroyed Hizballah positions proves redundantly that Iran was the source of most of the weaponry that Hizballah used to considerable effect against Israeli troops and armor. The Tuesday Daily Telegraph reported Israel was “humbled by arms from Iran.” Ahmadinejad — reclaiming the spotlight from Assad — said Hizballah “hoisted the banner of victory” over Israel and defeated plans “to create the so-called new Middle East … a Middle East that would be under the domination the U.S., Britain and Zionists.” The Iranian leader created a small war and directed it to a conclusion that reduces his adversaries – America and Israel – to penitents at the UN’s table. He is immeasurably emboldened to take the next step against Israel and America. That step – be it a larger war against Israel or another small war designed to bring America to battle but not conclusively — to test us as he just tested Israel – may happen at any time. And we seem unable to even grasp the reality of what has just happened.

Israel’s failure to break Hizballah’s hold on the Lebanese government was exacerbated by the failure of the Bush administration to hold the line it set when the war began. The president said over and over that any cease-fire would have to be predicated on a settlement that precluded Hizballah from continuing as a state-within-a-state in Lebanon. The Monday cease-fire does nothing of the sort. In fact, it accomplishes the opposite.

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Secretary of State Rice wrote of the Lebanese UN deal was a “path to lasting peace.” But her idea of a path to lasting peace is much at odds with reality. She wrote that UN Resolution 1701 was a defeat for Iran and Syria, that it imposes an international arms embargo to prevent Hizballah from rearming, and a new UN force with a “robust mandate” will help the Lebanese government impose its sovereignty in the southern part of its territory. Rice’s explanation parallels that of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who declaimed that the UN deal would, result in a “change in the rules of the game” between Israel and Lebanon, and that the UN cease-fire resolution “can lead to the real change in the Middle East that we have all been waiting for.” For both Rice and Livni, a more complete detachment from reality would be very hard to craft.

Neither America nor Israel have grasped the simple fact that the Lebanese government is held captive by Hizballah and as long as that condition lasts Lebanon will allow Syria and Iran to fund, arm, and reinforce Hizballah. The restoration of the status quo ante bellum that President Bush said we would prevent has occurred. And then, by agreeing to the French-imposed, Arab-demanded terms of the UN resolution, the situation has been materially worsened.

From America’s and Israel’s actions, a clear message was sent to the state sponsors of terrorism: neither the United States nor its allies are at all serious about defeating and disarming terrorists. The scope of victories the West can achieve over terrorists is defined by the limits of what the Arab League will insist upon in the UN. All the West’s military might is powerless against a highly motivated, well-funded and well-trained adversary who refuses to stand and fight on the conventional battlefield. The only reason this is true is because we are too irresolute to match the enemy’s determination to win. We — and the Israelis — choose to not apply the force we have in a manner that will achieve the effect we say we desire. Pardon me, but this is where I came in. In 1973.

Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. He is a contributing editor to The American Spectator and author of Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States (with Edward Timperlake, Regnery 2006) and Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think (Regnery 2004).

© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_new_middle_east.html

The ‘New Middle East’ Bush Is Resisting

By Saad Eddin IbrahimWednesday, August 23, 2006; Page A15

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may be quite right about a new Middle East being born. In fact, their policies in support of the actions of their closest regional ally, Israel, have helped midwife the newborn. But it will not be exactly the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it will be neither secular nor friendly to the United States. For another, it is going to be a rough birth.

What is happening in the broader Middle East and North Africa can be seen as a boomerang effect that has been playing out slowly since the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath of those attacks, there was worldwide sympathy for the United States and support for its declared “war on terrorism,” including the invasion of Afghanistan. Then the cynical exploitation of this universal goodwill by so-called neoconservatives to advance hegemonic designs was confirmed by the war in Iraq. The Bush administration’s dishonest statements about “weapons of mass destruction” diminished whatever credibility the United States might have had as liberator, while disastrous mismanagement of Iraqi affairs after the invasion led to the squandering of a conventional military victory. The country slid into bloody sectarian violence, while official Washington stonewalled and refused to admit mistakes. No wonder the world has progressively turned against America.

Against this declining moral standing, President Bush made something of a comeback in the first year of his second term. He shifted his foreign policy rhetoric from a “war on terrorism” to a war of ideas and a struggle for liberty and democracy. Through much of 2005 it looked as if the Middle East might finally have its long-overdue spring of freedom. Lebanon forged a Cedar Revolution, triggered by the assassination of its popular former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. Egypt held its first multi-candidate presidential election in 50 years. So did Palestine and Iraq, despite harsh conditions of occupation. Qatar and Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf continued their steady evolution into constitutional monarchies. Even Saudi Arabia held its first municipal elections.

But there was more. Hamas mobilized candidates and popular campaigns to win a plurality in Palestinian legislative elections and form a new government. Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt achieved similar electoral successes. And with these developments, a sudden chill fell over Washington and other Western capitals.

Instead of welcoming these particular elected officials into the newly emerging democratic fold, Washington began a cold war on Muslim democrats. Even the tepid pressure on autocratic allies of the United States to democratize in 2005 had all but disappeared by 2006. In fact, tottering Arab autocrats felt they had a new lease on life with the West conveniently cowed by an emerging Islamist political force.

Now the cold war on Islamists has escalated into a shooting war, first against Hamas in Gaza and then against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, to be an agent acting on behalf of U.S. interests. Some will admit that there was provocation for Israel to strike at Hamas and Hezbollah following the abduction of three soldiers and attacks on military and civilian targets. But destroying Lebanon with an overkill approach born of a desire for vengeance cannot be morally tolerated or politically justified — and it will not work.

On July 30 Arab, Muslim and world outrage reached an unprecedented level with the Israeli bombing of a residential building in the Lebanese village of Qana, which killed dozens and wounded hundreds of civilians, most of them children. A similar massacre in Qana in 1996, which Arabs remember painfully well, proved to be the political undoing of then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres. It is too early to predict whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will survive Qana II and the recent war. But Hezbollah will survive, just as it has already outlasted five Israeli prime ministers and three American presidents.

Born in the thick of an earlier Israeli invasion, in 1982, Hezbollah is at once a resistance movement against foreign occupation, a social service provider for the needy of the rural south and the slum-dwellers of Beirut, and a model actor in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics. Despite access to millions of dollars in resources from within and from regional allies Syria and Iran, its three successive leaders have projected an image of clean governance and a pious personal lifestyle.

In more than four weeks of fighting against the strongest military machine in the region, Hezbollah held its own and won the admiration of millions of Arabs and Muslims. People in the region have compared its steadfastness with the swift defeat of three large Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967. Hasan Nasrallah, its current leader, spoke several times to a wide regional audience through his own al-Manar network as well as the more popular al-Jazeera. Nasrallah has become a household name in my own country, Egypt.

According to the preliminary results of a recent public opinion survey of 1,700 Egyptians by the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldun Center, Hezbollah’s action garnered 75 percent approval, and Nasrallah led a list of 30 regional public figures ranked by perceived importance. He appears on 82 percent of responses, followed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (73 percent), Khaled Meshal of Hamas (60 percent), Osama bin Laden (52 percent) and Mohammed Mahdi Akef of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (45 percent).

The pattern here is clear, and it is Islamic. And among the few secular public figures who made it into the top 10 are Palestinian Marwan Barghouti (31 percent) and Egypt’s Ayman Nour (29 percent), both of whom are prisoners of conscience in Israeli and Egyptian jails, respectively.

None of the current heads of Arab states made the list of the 10 most popular public figures. While subject to future fluctuations, these Egyptian findings suggest the direction in which the region is moving. The Arab people do not respect the ruling regimes, perceiving them to be autocratic, corrupt and inept. They are, at best, ambivalent about the fanatical Islamists of the bin Laden variety. More mainstream Islamists with broad support, developed civic dispositions and services to provide are the most likely actors in building a new Middle East. In fact, they are already doing so through the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, the similarly named PJD in Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine and, yes, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

These groups, parties and movements are not inimical to democracy. They have accepted electoral systems and practiced electoral politics, probably too well for Washington’s taste. Whether we like it or not, these are the facts. The rest of the Western world must come to grips with the new reality, even if the U.S. president and his secretary of state continue to reject the new offspring of their own policies.

The writer is an Egyptian democracy activist, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, and chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082200978.html

THE ANTI-IRANIAN FRONT: EGYPT, SAUDI ARABIA, AND JORDAN
Ayellet Yehiav*

The following article was adapted from a lecture presented at a GLORIA Center conference entitled “After Lebanon: A New Middle East?,” made possible by the generosity of Mr. Joel Sprayregen.

This article discusses the coalition of the relatively moderate Arab countries–Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, and Jordan–and how they have dealt with the threat of the Shi’a axis.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan regard the Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah triangle (as voiced through the press, and not from the regimes themselves) as a sort of axis of radical policy, the muqawamah–the “Shi’a storm” as King Abdallah of Jordan dared call it–or as a group that strives for an Islamic Middle East. Such terms were being applied to this axis even before the Lebanon War of the summer of 2006. The Arab countries were aware of Iran, the ambitious giant that rose up from the East, at least since Ahmadinejad’s election as president, but they consciously chose to ignore this. In the accord from the March 2006 Arab summit in Khartoum, the only reference to Iran was, as in the past, the demand to return the three islands over which there is dispute between Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

It appears there was a conscious decision not to deal with the threats of the Shi’a axis and to avoid confrontation with Iran. Following the events of last summer, including the abduction of Gilad Shalit followed by the kidnapping of two more Israeli soldiers in the north of Israel, and then the war in Lebanon, it appears that the leading Sunni Arab countries were dealt a blow. It finally became clear to them that the Arab collective was beginning to fall apart. The Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian axis, which once determined the decisions of the Arab summit by concluding matters ahead of time and thus preventing disagreement, simply broke down and slowly dissipated. It appeared that a vacuum was created, but this was not really the case.

This vacuum was filled by other forces, forces that in the eyes of the leading Arab countries in the world were external: The United States with its invasion of Afghanistan and then the coalition in Iraq is one; Turkey, with its eyes on Europe, but also seeing itself as a mediator in the region clearly has interests in northern Iraq and its border with Syria; Israel succeeded unilaterally to dictate matters in the region, for example, the disengagement plan, which the Arab states did not like at all; and of course Iran–which is also not part of the Arab world–under Ahmadinejad, who since his election has not missed a single chance to voice revolutionary rhetoric, which is perceived by some leading Arab countries as the revival of the export of the Islamic Revolution.

Therefore, every reference to what goes on in the region or in response to the Sunni countries refers first and foremost to Iran’s hegemony in the region and its potential power. This creates a sort of dichotomy in the region that is unifying. The common denominators of all of these countries are:

The perception of the threat posed by Iran and its allies, whether the threat is real or whether simply perceived.

The importance each country attributes to the Iranian nuclear issue; viewing the Iranian nuclear campaign as a way to achieve hegemony, involvement, and security in the region.

Urgently calling together–and the key word here is urgent–the countries defending themselves against the challenge of a new representation of the regional narrative. This does not only refer to events, but also to the perception of the region and its future.

Among these different attitudes toward this group of countries, many different political science definitions can be applied, but unfortunately none of these definitions suit the countries defending themselves against this threat. The first definition is “axis,” or mihwar in Arabic. We often mention the axis of the radical countries–the Shi’a axis (though Syria is not Shi’a)–but does a moderate axis exist? Egypt and Jordan negate this possibility of a unified axis in the region, as the two countries disapprove of the axis policy. What is interesting is that the Saudis remain quiet, as the Saudis are not big talkers when it comes to policy exposure.

The second definition is “camp” or “front.” This definition does not exist in the Arabic press; rather it refers to “saf,” or a “line,” which of course brings up the perception of “wahdat al-saf”–Abd al-Nasser’s unification line. In this case, those trying to find a “wahdat al-saf,” a unification line, can forget about it. There is no such unification. This isn’t an alliance nor is it a bloc. Once we examine the characteristics of this joining or coalition, matters will be clearer.

A “front,” the definition we reach by compromise, better describes the situation. This is an opposition coalition of like-minded countries. One could call it the “moderate coalition.” I am purposely emphasizing the terminology, because, in my opinion, it represents the fragility of this joining or coalition versus the Shi’a cohesiveness.

This is not just a definition. There is also ambiguity in determining where this group belongs, because this coalition was created with the consultation between the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians on the eve of the Rome Conference on July 26, 2006, in order to find a solution to the war in Lebanon. Apparently, this was nothing more than a consultation. They became an axis–at least in the eyes of those who wanted this–in response to the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah axis, but under different circumstances. We also see such a group but with additional players, in the form of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

The GCC is made up of six countries in the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. One could also talk about an “Arab Quartet” consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This usually appears in the context of the international quartet’s refusal to answer Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’s request to first make them observers in the international quartet and eventually to allow them to play a much greater role in the quartet.

In addition to the issue of who belongs to this coalition, there are many built-in problems. As I mentioned previously, there is first and foremost a negative common denominator–their cohesiveness is low. Moreover, their decisiveness is well-measured, particular, and cautious. They are very hesitant. They lack almost any regional institutional framework. There are many differences among the countries and they lack clear leadership. Sometimes the Saudis lead, and sometimes the Egyptians lead. Though it is often claimed that everything is coordinated, this is not the case; it is simply a role-playing game.

There is also a much more serious problem here, the lack of trust among the countries. Egypt, for example, has a hidden agenda in being part of this coalition; it wants to improve its status and regain influence. Jordan is seeking a substitute for its loss of strategic depth following Iraq’s collapse; and Saudi Arabia wants to become a leader of the region once again. The Saudis were in this position for a while during the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, when the summit adopted a Saudi initiative that then became an Arab initiative.

These countries also have completely conflicting interests, or at least competing interests. The differences are not in the nuances, but rather in their perceptions. For those who want an example, this is displayed in their behavior in regard to Lebanon. For Egypt, for example, Lebanon was never a priority. The most important thing for Egypt was regional stability, not having Syria dragged into the conflict, and maintaining Egyptian mediation on the Palestinian issue. Saudi Arabia on the other hand, sees Lebanon as a very high priority; it has ties with the Hariri family, financial investments in the country, and the religious conflict certainly bothers the Saudis more than it does Egypt.

In light of the aforementioned facts, we must seriously question whether this coalition, this joining, this front for a specific and very objective goal is ad hoc or whether it will prove durable, will overcome its shortcomings, and will survive in the long-term. The more important question is whether this coalition will succeed in demonstrating new energies, which are lacking in the conduct of each of the countries that make up this coalition. Yet another problem that should be taken into account is if this decisiveness is adopted and they display the required energy and cohesiveness, whether or not the leaders of these three countries–Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia–or the countries that join them under the various guidelines that I mentioned have the courage to stand up against their publics. One of the main problems they are up against is the Arab public, which the leaders view as an obstacle.

Aside from naming babies after him, I will mention another indication of Nasrallah’s popularity. During Ramadan, it is very common to eat dried fruit, and there are many different kinds of dates. The best type of date in the Egyptian market was called “Nasrallah” and the slightly less superior type of date was called “Ahmadinejad.” An additional, more scientific indication was a survey conducted in mid-August 2006 by the Ibn Khaldoun Center headed by Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim. Approximately 2,000 people were asked to rate the popularity of 80 Arab figures (This doesn’t reflect the beliefs of everybody in Egypt, but this is certainly gives some indication.). Nasrallah was voted the most popular, receiving 82 percent; Ahmadinejad received 73 percent; Khalid Mashal received 60 percent; bin Ladin 52 percent; and Muhammad Mahdi Akef, head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, received only 45 percent. Where do all those who do not have an Islamist agenda place? Far, far behind.

There is an opening or opportunity, but it is unclear to what degree the leaders of the moderate countries will be wise enough to take advantage of this. This opportunity was clearly revealed following the Iranian fervor in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution. There is great anger in the Arab world toward Iran, even among the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and Egypt, because they felt the Iranians pushed for and inspired Saddam’s hasty execution, particularly on the first day of the Id al-Fitr.

Finally, it is impossible not to note the central U.S. role in this coalition of moderate countries. According to the leaders, Iran doesn’t just pose a threat to their stability and the stability of the region, but also sabotages the image of moderate Islam that those countries have attempted to project to the outside since September 11.

The moderate leaders were busy for too long trying to prevent the “al-Qa’idaization” of Islam. Suddenly, they are now finding themselves in a situation in which they must prevent their own “Hizballahization.” The six plus two coalition: the GCC countries, plus Egypt and Jordan is a coalition that would not have been created without American backing. The Americans pushed for some sort of bloc that could be relied upon.

The moderate countries would be very interested in being not only the United States’ stick toward Iran and toward Iran’s allies in the region, but also to present a positive agenda, to be a carrot for a certain purpose, if you will; and they do not hide this. This was already expressed in the second meeting of the six plus two countries with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Cairo in October 2006. Their goal is to encourage as much contact as possible between Israel and the Palestinians and to urge the peace process on the Palestinian side and press them to reach solutions–the sooner the better, and not necessarily according to the Road Map.

They feel this urging will not only serve to prove their abilities to produce something positive, but will also signal to Syria that “you played the wrong game, and now you are out of the game.” Meaning, if Syria wants to be integrated in the peace process, it had better think twice about its connections with Iran. How successful will this process be? Egypt, at least, thinks that it can influence and draw in Syria more than Iran, but under no circumstances does Egypt think Syria can be cut off from Iran, only that Syria’s world perspective might become more balanced.

*Ayellet Yehiav is a Middle East expert and is a director at the Center for Political Research in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2007/issue1/jv11no1a2.html

Sheikh Hamad bin Jabr al-Thani was in Tehran this week to call for a diplomatic solution. “We should realize that the stability of the region is very important and instead of using force, a solution should be found through talks,” he said.

Last week, Iran asked Saudi Arabia to help ease tensions through a letter delivered by Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani to Saudi King Abdullah from Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. According

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to an unnamed Saudi official, Iran would like key regional US ally Saudi Arabia to “help bring opinions together”.

But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice passed through Riyadh in confrontational form as she concluded a tour of US allies in the region. She shot down Saudi attempts to intercede between the two antagonists by announcing that “there is no need for mediation” between Iran and the United States and demanded that “Iran needs to respond to the requirements of the international community” as a whole.

“She [Rice] is a smart, attractive and articulate woman who exudes confidence and integrity and is sent out by her bosses to lie, frighten, twist the truth and exaggerate,” said Charles W Naas, a retired American career diplomat who was posted in Tehran shortly before the US Embassy and dozens of diplomats were seized by a group of revolutionary students in 1979 and held for 444 days.

With tensions mounting as the US adds to its forces in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian military is responding with a three-day military exercise testing its Zalzal and Fajr-5 missiles in the desert southeast of Tehran. Last week, Russia completed delivery of 29 advanced TOR-M1 surface-to-air missile defense systems to Iran. They can strike airplanes, helicopters and incoming cruise missiles and have been deployed around Iran’s nuclear facilities in central Iran, according to European diplomatic sources in Tehran.

“If the [US] administration does anything military with respect to Iran in the context of its effort to assist its rather forlorn surge [in Iraq], it would likely take the form of pinpricks – say, a quick jab at some target just over the border, hot pursuit for a few kilometers into Iran – but nothing like the contingency plans for massive, wide-ranging air strikes related to the ongoing nuclear impasse,” said Wayne White, a veteran State Department intelligence analyst.

A US task force led by the aircraft carrier John C Stennis is on its way to the Gulf, where it will join another carrier. Analysts point out that the two carriers would have a combined capacity to launch around-the-clock bombing raids. The Pentagon is reportedly considering hitting 24 targets to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability and potential for striking back, in case diplomacy fails to resolve the crisis surrounding the Iranian nuclear program.

“An air campaign against Iran of this magnitude would almost certainly include efforts to knock out potential Iranian retaliatory capabilities in the Gulf, such as Iran’s array of coastal anti-ship missiles,” said White. “Perhaps one new point of emphasis was how difficult such a confrontation could be to end once initiated.”

With tension mounting, the Iranian military shot down a US pilotless spy plane last week, according to Seyed Nezam Mola Hoveyzeh, an Iranian lawmaker. The parliamentarian gave no exact date of the incident and no further details, but added that “the United States sends such spy-drones to the region every now and then”.

A source familiar with the security situation on Iran’s borders added that the downing of pilotless US spy-planes is common, but neither side is willing to publicize it. The Pentagon carries out overflights to prompt the Iranians to turn on their radars and expose their positions to electronic tracking.

“Most actions require extensive lead time, usually for unglamorous activity like logistics,” said James Spencer, a Middle East expert specializing in defense and security issues. “Contingency plans usually therefore take the form of identifying a vague concept of operations, and consequently troop numbers, logistic requirements, timelines etc. When the politicians suddenly have their brilliant idea, the file can be opened and the flesh put on the prepared bones with more thoroughness than haste.”

In an e-mail titled “Pieces in place for escalation against Iran”, retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner listed the arrival of US military hardware to the region and noted that “the pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.”

Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA26Ak03.html

Under the Veil of Ideology: The Israeli-Iranian Strategic Rivalry

Trita Parsi

June 9, 2006

(Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States [Yale University Press, forthcoming].)

When Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” in October 2005, the world appeared to be light years away from the end of history. It seemed that ideologues had once more taken the reins of power and rejoined a battle in which there could be no parley or negotiated truce — only the victory of one idea over the other.

Even before Ahmadinejad pulled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s poisonous anti-Israel rhetoric from the dustbin of history, the tense relations between Iran and Israel were often seen as one of history’s last ideological clashes. On one side was Israel, portrayed as a democracy in a region beset by authoritarianism and an eastern outpost of Enlightenment rationalism. On the other side was the Islamic Republic of Iran, depicted as a hidebound clerical regime whose rejection of the West and aspiration to speak for all Muslims everywhere were symbolized by its refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The Israeli-Iranian confrontation is far more complex than this ideology-based understanding would indicate, however. Exclusive focus on the mudslinging between the two countries has come at the expense of a deeper understanding of the strategic nature of their conflict. That the conflict is strategic is underscored by the fact of past Iranian-Israeli cooperation. Prior to the overthrow of the Shah, the conventional view in both countries was that non-Arab Iran and Israel — both surrounded by a sea of innately hostile Arabs — enjoyed a natural alliance. Indeed, as long as Iran and Israel faced common Arab threats, they forged close clandestine security ties that survived the Islamic Revolution of 1979. It was not just the Shah who traded and cooperated with the Israelis; Khomeini had his fair share of Israeli dealings as well.

But since the fall of the Shah, and especially beginning in the 1990s, the mutually condemnatory rhetoric issuing from Iran and Israel has blinded most observers to a critical common interest shared by these two non-Arab powerhouses in the Middle East: the need to portray their fundamentally strategic conflict as an ideological clash.

“DEATH IS AT OUR DOORSTEP”

Since late 1992, Israel has pursued a policy of seeking Iran’s international isolation. In particular, according to a former Israeli ambassador in Washington, decision makers in Tel Aviv viewed the prospect of a US-Iranian rapprochement as a threat, since improved relations between Washington and Tehran could come at the expense of Israel’s strategic weight in the region.[1] Ironically, the shift against Iran took place under the Labor government headed by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, two leaders who only a few years earlier had initiated the attempts to improve relations between the US and Khomeini’s Iran that culminated in the Iran-contra scandal.The inflammatory rhetoric employed by Rabin and Peres was unprecedented. Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, accused Iran of “fanning all the flames in the Middle East,” implying that the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was rooted in Iran’s meddling rather than in the shortcomings of Israel and the Palestinians.[2] In January 1993, Prime Minister Rabin told the Knesset that Israel’s “struggle against murderous Islamic terror” was “meant to awaken the world which is lying in slumber” to the dangers of Shiite fundamentalism. “Death is at our doorstep,” Rabin concluded of the Iranian threat, though only five years earlier he had maintained that Iran was a strategic ally.[3] Israeli politicians began painting the regime in Tehran as fanatical and irrational. Clearly, they maintained, finding an accommodation with such “mad mullahs” was a non-starter. Instead, they called on the US to classify Iran, along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as a rogue state that needed to be “contained.”

IMMUNE TO DETERRENCE

Initially, the American establishment was skeptical of Israel’s change of heart with regard to Iran, though the Israelis advanced the same argument they do today, namely that Iran’s nuclear research program would soon afford the black-turbaned clerics access to the bomb. “Why the Israelis waited until fairly recently to sound a strong alarm about Iran is a perplexity, unless the answer is no more complicated than that the Iranian nuclear potential has grown to a worrisome point,” Clyde Haberman of the New York Times wrote in November 1992. Haberman went on to note: “For years, Israel remained willing to do business with Iran, even though the mullahs in Teheran were screaming for an end to the ‘Zionist entity.’”[4] Eventually, however, the mad mullah argument stuck. After all, the Iranians themselves were the greatest help in selling that argument to Washington.From the Israeli perspective, rallying Western states to its side was best achieved by emphasizing the alleged suicidal tendencies of the clergy and Iran’s apparent infatuation with the idea of destroying Israel. As long as the Iranian leadership was viewed as irrational, conventional tactics such as deterrence would be rendered impossible, leaving the international community with no option but to have no tolerance for Iranian capabilities. How could a country like Iran be trusted with missile technology, the argument went, if its leadership was immune to dissuasion by the larger and more numerous missiles of the West?

The Israeli strategy was to ensure that the world — particularly Washington — would not see the Israeli-Iranian conflict as one between two rivals for military preeminence in a fundamentally disordered region that lacked a clear pecking order. Rather, Israel framed the clash as one between the sole democracy in the Middle East and an illiberal theocracy that hated everything the West stood for. Cast in those terms, the allegiance of Western states to Israel was no longer a matter of choice or real political interest.

PAYING LIP SERVICE

Ironically, Iran too preferred an ideological framing of the conflict. When revolution swept Iran in 1979, the new Islamic leadership forsook the Pahlavi regime’s Persian nationalist identity, but not its yen for Iranian great-power status. Whereas the Shah sought suzerainty in the Persian Gulf and parts of the Indian Ocean, while hoping to make Iran the Japan of western Asia, the Khomeini government sought hegemony in the entire Islamic world. The Shah’s means for achieving his goal were a strong army and strategic ties to the United States. The Ayatollah, on the other hand, relied on his brand of political Islam and ideological zeal to overcome the Arab-Persian divide and to undermine the Arab governments who opposed Iran’s ambitions.

Throughout the 1980s, when Iran’s strategic interest compelled it to cooperate with Israel in order to repel the invading Iraqi army, the Khomeini government sought to cover up its Israeli dealings by taking Iran’s rhetorical excesses against Israel to even higher levels. In 1981, for instance, Ayatollah Khomeini introduced the ritual of observing an al-Qods Day — Jerusalem Day — during Ramadan precisely to pay lip service to the Palestinian cause at the same time that his regime was scheming to buy arms from the state it denounced as the “occupier of Jerusalem.”

The more Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership pressed the Iranian regime to live up to its promises to the Palestinians, the more Khomeini used his rhetorical weapons to cover up the fact that Iran refused to take any concrete measures against Israel.

The Iranian-PLO honeymoon turned sour from the very outset. Arafat and his entourage of 58 PLO officials showed up in Tehran uninvited on February 18, 1979, only days after the victory of the revolution.[5] Though the revolutionaries were caught off guard, several Iranian officials greeted Arafat at the airport and provided the Palestinians with high-end accommodations at the former Government Club on Fereshteh Street in northern Tehran.[6] Hours after arriving, Arafat held a two-hour meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini. Much to Arafat’s surprise, Khomeini was quite critical of the PLO and lectured the Palestinian leader on the necessity of dropping his leftist and nationalistic tendencies to get to the Islamic roots of the Palestinian issue.[7] The two revolutionaries did not meet again. Arafat quickly understood that Islamic Iran would lend the Palestinians only verbal and rhetorical backing. The significant Palestinian investments in the Iranian opposition to the Shah — primarily in leftist groups such as the Mojahedin-e Khalq — would simply not yield a high return.[8] In spite of his anti-Israel rhetoric, for instance, Khomeini decided against a request to send Iranian F-14 fighters to Lebanon, where the PLO was then battling the Israeli army alongside Syrian and Lebanese allies, indicating yet again that Iran did not intend to take an active role on the Arab side against Israel beyond its verbal condemnations of the Jewish state.[9] Thus, the Iranians showed little interest in extending practical support to the Palestinians even before Arafat and the Arab states (except Syria and Libya) threw their weight behind Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. US diplomats in Iran took note of Khomeini’s tense relations with the PLO. A confidential memo sent to Washington from the US Embassy in Tehran in September 1979 noted that “Iran enthusiastically and unreservedly supports the Palestinian cause,” but that “relatively little is said about the PLO itself.”[10]

Iran’s policy “was to avoid getting entangled in the Palestinian conflict,” explained Mahmoud Vaezi, a former Iranian deputy foreign minister. Iran’s “moral duties” overshadowed strategic considerations during the first years after the revolution, he added, preventing Iran’s enmity toward the Arabs from translating into a full-blown Iranian alliance with Israel.[11] Yet the revolutionary regime’s ideology and lurid rhetoric successfully veiled its pursuit of realpolitik. “INSULT TO ISLAM”

After the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf war, the strategic considerations that had put Iran and Israel on the same geopolitical side evaporated. Soon enough, absent any common foes, Israel and Iran found themselves in a strategic rivalry for the ability to redefine the regional order after the decimation of Iraq’s military might. But it was clearly not possible to rally the Arab Muslim masses to Iran’s side for the sake of Iran’s power ambitions. Again, Iran turned to ideology to conceal its true motives, while utilizing the plight of the Palestinian people to undermine the Arab governments who were willing to partake in the Oslo process of the 1990s.

So Iranian speechwriters took the lead in inveighing against Israel’s “never-ending appetite for Arab lands,” its oppression of the Palestinians, its disregard for UN Security Council resolutions and the “insult to Islam” embodied that its continued occupation of Jerusalem. Indeed, until this day, the rhetoric of Tehran preaches that its struggle against Israel is not about geopolitical gains or even about Iran itself, but rather about justice for the Palestinians and honor for Islam.

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cast in these terms, and fearing a backlash from their own populations, pro-Western Arab rulers have to tread carefully so as not to come across as belittling the announced goals of Tehran. In the eyes of many Arab states, the power of Iran’s rhetoric has made public opposition to Iran equivalent to acquiescence in or even approval of the Israeli and US stance on the Palestinian issue. Indeed, anti-Iranian statements such as Jordanian King Abdallah’s warning of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran through post-Saddam Iraq into Lebanon or Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s denunciation of Iraqi Shiites as Iranian loyalists have been poorly received by the Arab public. Tehran’s pro-Palestinian reputation is one reason why.

TWO CAMPS IN TEHRAN

Ahmadinejad’s reinvigoration of anti-Israel rhetoric beginning in 2005 must also be seen in the context of Iran’s larger conflict with the US, in particular the nuclear standoff that is pushing the conflict to its climax. In November 2005, an intense debate took place in Tehran over the new president’s invocation of Khomeini’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map. The international backlash had taken Tehran by surprise and angered the nuclear negotiators, who argued that such language was undermining their fine-tuned balancing act that sought simultaneously to avoid referral to the Security Council and to defend Iran’s right to uranium enrichment.

The Ahmadinejad camp forcefully argued that Iran should enlarge the conflict and make Israel a critical and visible part of the international debate. Viewing Iran’s nuclear program in isolation only benefited the West. Only by expanding the scope of the issue could Iran find the necessary levers to defend its position. At a minimum, the Ahmadinejad camp argued, a cost should be imposed on Israel for having made the Iranian nuclear program a subject of grave international concern and for having convinced Washington to adopt a no-enrichment policy.

While less radical elements in the Iranian government agreed on the necessity of putting Israel on the defensive and enlarging the conflict, they strongly differed as to the best way to achieve those objectives.

According to a senior Iranian official, people close to Ahmadinejad favored putting into question issues Israel had managed to settle over the last two decades: Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist, the reality of the Holocaust, and the right of European Jews to remain in the heart of the Middle East. Such an approach, they argued, would resonate with the discontented Arab street and reveal the impotence of the pro-US Arab regimes, who would be in equal parts pressured and embarrassed.

More moderate voices in Tehran strongly opposed this approach, due to the difficulties they predicted it would cause for Iran’s nuclear diplomacy. They favored former President Mohammad Khatami’s tactic of invoking the suffering of the Palestinian people and Israel’s unwillingness to make territorial concessions, but avoiding hot-button issues such as Israel’s right to exist and the Holocaust. Taking the rhetoric to such levels, they argued, could backfire and turn key countries like Russia and China against Iran. Though the regime did not reach a full consensus, much to Ahmadinejad’s frustration, a decision was made that no Iranian official would be permitted to repeat the venomous Holocaust remarks. That decision stood for a couple of months until it became clear that the West was in retreat.

LOOKING FOR THE EDGE

What was conspicuously absent from the internal debate in Tehran, however, was the very ideological motivations and factors that Iran uses to justify its stance on Israel. Neither the honor of Islam nor the suffering of the Palestinian people figured in the deliberations.

Rather, both the terms of the debate and its outcome were of a purely strategic nature. Both camps aimed at giving Iran the initiative in the confrontation with the US and Israel, rather than see Iran suffer the fate of Iraq, where from 1991 until the invasion Washington remained largely in firm control of events. Both Ahmadinejad and his major rival, National Security Council Adviser Ali Larijani, believe that Iran cannot make headway by playing nice with the Bush administration. In their view, Iran committed a mistake when it accepted suspension of uranium enrichment for two and a half years during negotiations with the Europeans.

The Ahmadinejad and Larijani camps further concur that Iran is better off taking the initiative to put its adversaries constantly in a defensive position. Iran should force the West to adopt a defensive position, rather than defend itself against the never-ending array of Western initiatives.

Whether agreeable or not, whether effective or not, the ideological pronouncements emanating from Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures are an effect, rather than a cause, of Iran’s strategic orientation. Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s description of Iran as a “dark and gathering storm casting its shadow over the world” in his May 24, 2006 speech to Congress should not be taken at face value. There are distinct echoes of the Rabin-Peres approach in his further admonition: “A nuclear Iran means a terrorist state could achieve the primary mission for which terrorists live and die: the mass destruction of innocent human life.” Nevertheless, for now, both Iran and Israel seem to (mis)calculate that portraying their struggle in ideological and apocalyptic terms will provide them with a critical edge against each other in their efforts to define the order of the Middle East to their own benefit. Then again, those entangled in hegemonic struggles always do.

Endnotes

[1] Interview with Itamar Rabinovich, Tel Aviv, October 17, 2004.[2] Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 43.

[3] Washington Post, March 13, 1993.[4] New York Times, November 8, 1992.

[5] Nader Entessar, “Israel and Iran’s National Security,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 27/4 (Summer 2004), p. 5.[6] Interview with Abbas Maleki, former Iranian deputy foreign minister, Tehran, August 1, 2004.

[7] Telephone interview with Nader Entessar, January 25, 2005. Ibrahim Yazdi, foreign minister in Iran’s first revolutionary government, informed US Embassy staff that Khomeini had appealed to the PLO to adopt an Islamic orientation and replicate the methodology of Iran’s non-violent revolution. The Iranians argued that an Islamic orientation would increase the prospects of a Palestinian victory and would disable Marxists and radical elements among the Palestinians. Bruce Laingen to Department of State, October 1979. Available through the National Security Archive. [8] Behrouz Souresrafil, Khomeini and Israel (London: Researchers, Inc., 1988), p. 46.

[9] US Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, late September 1979. Available through the National Security Archive. [10] US Embassy in Tehran to Department of State, September 30, 1979. Available through the National Security Archive.[11] Interview with Mahmoud Vaezi, Tehran, August 16, 2004

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060906.html

Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Global Research, November 18, 2006

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“Hegemony is as old as Mankind…” -Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor

The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was credited by the Western media for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.”

This shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon. Prime Minister Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched from Lebanon.

This announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap” in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.

The “New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.

New Middle East Map

Secretary Condoleezza Rice stated during a press conference that “[w]hat we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do we [meaning the United States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.”¹ Secretary Rice was immediately criticized for her statements both within Lebanon and internationally for expressing indifference to the suffering of an entire nation, which was being bombed indiscriminately by the Israeli Air Force.

The Anglo-American Military Roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech on the “New Middle East” had set the stage. The Israeli attacks on Lebanon –which had been fully endorsed by Washington and London– have further compromised and validated the existence of the geo-strategic objectives of the United States, Britain, and Israel. According to Professor Mark Levine the “neo-liberal globalizers and neo-conservatives, and ultimately the Bush Administration, would latch on to creative destruction as a way of describing the process by which they hoped to create their new world orders,” and that “creative destruction [in] the United States was, in the words of neo-conservative philosopher and Bush adviser Michael Ledeen, ‘an awesome revolutionary force’ for (…) creative destruction…”²

Anglo-American occupied Iraq, particularly Iraqi Kurdistan, seems to be the preparatory ground for the balkanization (division) and finlandization (pacification) of the Middle East. Already the legislative framework, under the Iraqi Parliament and the name of Iraqi federalization, for the partition of Iraq into three portions is being drawn out. (See map below)

Moreover, the Anglo-American military roadmap appears to be vying an entry into Central Asia via the Middle East. The Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are stepping stones for extending U.S. influence into the former Soviet Union and the ex-Soviet Republics of Central Asia. The Middle East is to some extent the southern tier of Central Asia. Central Asia in turn is also termed as “Russia’s Southern Tier” or the Russian “Near Abroad.”

Many Russian and Central Asian scholars, military planners, strategists, security advisors, economists, and politicians consider Central Asia (“Russia’s Southern Tier”) to be the vulnerable and “soft under-belly” of the Russian Federation.³

It should be noted that in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus⁴) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Map of the “New Middle East”

A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been causally allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

HYPERLINK “http://www.globalresearch.ca/images/harita_b.jpeg”Map: click to enlarge

Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.

This map of the “New Middle East” seems to be based on several other maps, including older maps of potential boundaries in the Middle East extending back to the era of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and World War I. This map is showcased and presented as the brainchild of retired Lieutenant-Colonel (U.S. Army) Ralph Peters, who believes the redesigned borders contained in the map will fundamentally solve the problems of the contemporary Middle East.

The map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the public on July 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published, under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.⁵

It should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy.

It has been written that Ralph Peters’ “four previous books on strategy have been highly influential in government and military circles,” but one can be pardoned for asking if in fact quite the opposite could be taking place. Could it be Lieutenant-Colonel Peters is revealing and putting forward what Washington D.C. and its strategic planners have anticipated for the Middle East?

The concept of a redrawn Middle East has been presented as a “humanitarian” and “righteous” arrangement that would benefit the people(s) of the Middle East and its peripheral regions. According to Ralph Peter’s:

International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam, but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant “cheated” population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia [Muslims], but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.

Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosphorus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. ⁶

(emphasis added)

“Necessary Pain”

Besides believing that there is “cultural stagnation” in the Middle East, it must be noted that Ralph Peters admits that his propositions are “draconian” in nature, but he insists that they are necessary pains for the people of the Middle East. This view of necessary pain and suffering is in startling parallel to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s belief that the devastation of Lebanon by the Israeli military was a necessary pain or “birth pang” in order to create the “New Middle East” that Washington, London, and Tel Aviv envision.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the subject of the Armenian Genocide is being politicized and stimulated in Europe to offend Turkey.⁷

The overhaul, dismantlement, and reassembly of the nation-states of the Middle East have been packaged as a solution to the hostilities in the Middle East, but this is categorically misleading, false, and fictitious. The advocates of a “New Middle East” and redrawn boundaries in the region avoid and fail to candidly depict the roots of the problems and conflicts in the contemporary Middle East. What the media does not acknowledge is the fact that almost all major conflicts afflicting the Middle East are the consequence of overlapping Anglo-American-Israeli agendas.

Many of the problems affecting the contemporary Middle East are the result of the deliberate aggravation of pre-existing regional tensions. Sectarian division, ethnic tension and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States and Britain in various parts of the globe including Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Iraq is just one of many examples of the Anglo-American strategy of “divide and conquer.” Other examples are Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan.

Amongst the problems in the contemporary Middle East is the lack of genuine democracy which U.S. and British foreign policy has actually been deliberately obstructing. Western-style “Democracy” has been a requirement only for those Middle Eastern states which do not conform to Washington’s political demands. Invariably, it constitutes a pretext for confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are examples of undemocratic states that the United States has no problems with because they are firmly alligned within the Anglo-American orbit or sphere.

Additionally, the United States has deliberately blocked or displaced genuine democratic movements in the Middle East from Iran in 1953 (where a U.S./U.K. sponsored coup was staged against the democratic government of Prime Minister Mossadegh) to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the Arab Sheikdoms, and Jordan where the Anglo-American alliance supports military control, absolutists, and dictators in one form or another. The latest example of this is Palestine.

The Turkish Protest at NATO’s Military College in Rome

Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters’ map of the “New Middle East” has sparked angry reactions in Turkey. According to Turkish press releases on September 15, 2006 the map of the “New Middle East” was displayed in NATO’s Military College in Rome, Italy. It was additionally reported that Turkish officers were immediately outraged by the presentation of a portioned and segmented Turkey.⁸ The map received some form of approval from the U.S. National War Academy before it was unveiled in front of NATO officers in Rome.The Turkish Chief of Staff, General Buyukanit, contacted the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and protested the event and the exhibition of the redrawn map of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.⁹ Furthermore the Pentagon has gone out of its way to assure Turkey that the map does not reflect official U.S. policy and objectives in the region, but this seems to be conflicting with Anglo-American actions in the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.

Is there a Connection between Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Eurasian Balkans” and the “New Middle East” Project?

The following are important excerpts and passages from former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives. Brzezinski also states that both Turkey and Iran, the two most powerful states of the “Eurasian Balkans,” located on its southern tier, are “potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts [balkanization],” and that, “If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable.”¹⁰

It seems that a divided and balkanized Iraq would be the best means of accomplishing this. Taking what we know from the White House’s own admissions; there is a belief that “creative destruction and chaos” in the Middle East are beneficial assets to reshaping the Middle East, creating the “New Middle East,” and furthering the Anglo-American roadmap in the Middle East and Central Asia:

In Europe, the Word “Balkans” conjures up images of ethnic conflicts and great-power regional rivalries. Eurasia, too, has its “Balkans,” but the Eurasian Balkans are much larger, more populated, even more religiously and ethnically heterogenous. They are located within that large geographic oblong that demarcates the central zone of global instability (…) that embraces portions of southeastern Europe, Central Asia and parts of South Asia [Pakistan, Kashmir, Western India], the Persian Gulf area, and the Middle East.

The Eurasian Balkans form the inner core of that large oblong (…) they differ from its outer zone in one particularly significant way: they are a power vacuum. Although most of the states located in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East are also unstable, American power is that region’s [meaning the Middle East’s] ultimate arbiter. The unstable region in the outer zone is thus an area of single power hegemony and is tempered by that hegemony. In contrast, the Eurasian Balkans are truly reminiscent of the older, more familiar Balkans of southeastern Europe: not only are its political entities unstable but they tempt and invite the intrusion of more powerful neighbors, each of whom is determined to oppose the region’s domination by another. It is this familiar combination of a power vacuum and power suction that justifies the appellation “Eurasian Balkans.”

The traditional Balkans represented a potential geopolitical prize in the struggle for European supremacy. The Eurasian Balkans, astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link more directly Eurasia’s richest and most industrious western and eastern extremities, are also geopolitically significant. Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East.

The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy, and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.

Access to that resource and sharing in its potential wealth represent objectives that stir national ambitions, motivate corporate interests, rekindle historical claims, revive imperial aspirations, and fuel international rivalries. The situation is made all the more volatile by the fact that the region is not only a power vacuum but is also internally unstable.

(…)

The Eurasian Balkans include nine countries that one way or another fit the foregoing description, with two others as potential candidates. The nine are Kazakstan [alternative and official spelling of Kazakhstan] , Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia—all of them formerly part of the defunct Soviet Union—as well as Afghanistan.

The potential additions to the list are Turkey and Iran, both of them much more politically and economically viable, both active contestants for regional influence within the Eurasian Balkans, and thus both significant geo-strategic players in the region. At the same time, both are potentially vulnerable to internal ethnic conflicts. If either or both of them were to be destabilized, the internal problems of the region would become unmanageable, while efforts to restrain regional domination by Russia could even become futile. ¹¹

(emphasis added)

Redrawing the Middle East

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up the First World War. In the wake of the the First World War the borders of the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn. This region experienced a period of upheaval, violence and conflict, before and after World War I, which was the direct result of foreign economic interests and interference.

The reasons behind the First World War are more sinister than the standard school-book explanation, the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Economic factors were the real motivation for the large-scale war in 1914.

Norman Dodd, a former Wall Street banker and investigator for the U.S. Congress, who examined U.S. tax-exempt foundations, confirmed in a 1982 interview that those powerful individuals who from behind the scenes controlled the finances, policies, and government of the United States had in fact also planned U.S. involvement in a war, which would contribute to entrenching their grip on power.

The following testimonial is from the transcript of Norman Dodd’s interview with G. Edward Griffin;
We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting, for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?

Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country [the United States], than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows [wars] in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department.

And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly. And finally, of course, the war is over.

At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out.

(emphasis added)

The redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian Plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military objectives, which are part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region.

The Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is ready to explode with the right trigger, possibly the launching of Anglo-American and/or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in the Middle East could result in redrawn borders that are strategically advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.

NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan has been successfully divided, all but in name. Animosity has been inseminated in the Levant, where a Palestinian civil war is being nurtured and divisions in Lebanon agitated. The Eastern Mediterranean has been successfully militarized by NATO. Syria and Iran continue to be demonized by the Western media, with a view to justifying a military agenda. In turn, the Western media has fed, on a daily basis, incorrect and biased notions that the populations of Iraq cannot co-exist and that the conflict is not a war of occupation but a “civil war” characterised by domestic strife between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Attempts at intentionally creating animosity between the different ethno-cultural and religious groups of the Middle East have been systematic. In fact, they are part of a carefully designed covert intelligence agenda.

Even more ominous, many Middle Eastern governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, are assisting Washington in fomenting divisions between Middle Eastern populations. The ultimate objective is to weaken the resistance movement against foreign occupation through a “divide and conquer strategy” which serves Anglo-American and Israeli interests in the broader region.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is in an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Notes

1 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Special Briefing on the Travel to the Middle East and Europe of Secretary Condoleezza Rice (Press Conference, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C., July 21, 2006).

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/69331.htm

2 Professor Mark LeVine, The New Creative Destruction, Asia Times, August 22, 2006.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HH22Ak01.html

3 Professor Andrej Kreutz, The Geopolitics of post-Soviet Russia and the Middle East, Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) (Washington, D.C.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, January 2002).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_1_24/ai_93458168/pg_1

4 The Caucasus or Caucasia can be considered as part of the Middle East or as a separate region

5 Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899

6 Ibid.

7 Crispian Balmer, French MPs back Armenia genocide bill, Turkey angry, Reuters, October 12, 2006.

James McConalogue, French against Turks: Talking about Armenian Genocide, The Brussels Journal, October 10, 2006.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1585

8 Suleyman Kurt, Carved-up Map of Turkey at NATO Prompts U.S. Apology, Zaman (Turkey), September 29, 2006.

http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&hn=36919

9 Ibid.

10 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives. (New York City: Basic Books, 1997).

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0465027261

11 Ibid.

Related Global Research articles on the March to War in the Middle East

^{US naval war games off the Iranian coastline: A provocation which could lead to War? 2006-10-24}

^{“Cold War Shivers:” War Preparations in the Middle East and Central Asia 2006-10-06}

^{The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean 2006-10-01}

^{The March to War: Iran Preparing for US Air Attacks 2006-09-21}

^{The Next Phase of the Middle East War 2006-09-04}

^{Baluchistan and the Coming Iran War 2006-09-01}

^{British Troops Mobilizing on the Iranian Border 2006-08-30}

^{Russia and Central Asian Allies Conduct War Games in Response to US Threats 2006-08-24}

^{Beating the Drums of War: US Troop Build-up: Army & Marines authorize “Involuntary Conscription” 2006-08-23}

^{Iranian War Games: Exercises, Tests, and Drills or Preparation and Mobilization for War? 2006-08-21}

<sup>Triple Alliance:” The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon 2006-08-06

The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil 2006-07-26</sup>

<sup>Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust? 2006-02-22

The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War 2006-02-17</sup>

<sup>Nuclear War against Iran 2006-01-03

Israeli Bombings could lead to Escalation of Middle East War 2006-07-15</sup>

^{Iran: Next Target of US Military Aggression 2005-05-01}

^{Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran 2005-05-01}

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a frequent contributor to Global Research. ^{Global Research Articles by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya}

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NAZ20061116&articleId=3882

 

^{The New Middle East: Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Actually Get It.}

“What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.” Condoleezza Rice in a Press Conference on July 21, 2006.

Madam Secretary, one question please: Will your country claim the newborn if it happens to be the wrong color?

I remember reading about the new Middle East in a document written back in 1996 called “A Clean Break:A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (ACB). It was authored by a group of policy advisors to Israel. Subsequently, nearly all members ascended to influential policy making positions within US government, media, and academic circles and were instrumental in taking the US to war against Iraq under false pretenses. Many of the ACB policies, such as toppling the government of Iraq, are now in full implementation and present new challenges to the global community. The ACB contained six pages of policy recommendations for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The authors of this policy paper included Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser amongst others, who became known as the Neo-conservatives or Neocons for short.

The paper was an outline of what Israel should do to subjugate not just the Palestinians but also everyone else around it. It was written: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” They also did not like the ” Land for Peace” deal that Israel signed with the its neighbors including the Palestinians and suggested Israel should pursue a different formula based on “Peace for Peace”. This means that they would create a situation on the ground that is so big, using Israel’s military might in order to change the “Land for Peace” formula into a plea to “just please give us peace and take our piece”, or so they thought. Therefore, they would be creating a “New Middle East” once they neutralized Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria by following the new formula for peace. They wrote about : “Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, “New Middle East”

Aha, so this is where I heard what Rice murmured on July 12 2006. It was actually written 10 years before !!!

I believe we are watching these very painful birth pangs. I just don’t think Israel and America will like, or even claim the baby, once it’s delivered. Israel’s attack on Lebanon has accomplished something the Lebanese have been trying to do for over a 100 years….. Unity. For 19 years, the Lebanese fought each other in one of the bloodiest conflicts witnessed in the 20th Century. The Phalanges Kataeb Party fought the people who have now belonged to the Hizbullah and Amal movements for years.

Last night, the Secretary General Karim Bakradoni of the Phalanges Party said that he supports the Government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Resistance, which is a term used solely to describe Hizbullah. We are witnessing a new Middle East, because the Phalanges is the same Party that lined itself up with the Israelis back in 1982 and was rewarded by Israel’s making its Chief, the late Bashire Jumayel, the President of Lebanon. Things are different now. Hizbullah represents close to 35 percent of the population in Lebanon and is represented in all aspects of the government; the military, civil and social organizations in Lebanon. Before it’s all over, and no matter who wins this war, Hizbullah has already won, even if it looses. Its policies will end up making the next Lebanese government’s policy. This is something similar to what happened in Palestine with Hamas. Would the United States like to raise this baby? I think not.

This will strengthen relations between Syria and Lebanon to levels never seen before and, of course, will spill over to other countries in the Middle East who will put pressure on their governments to take a harder position towards Israel and the United States in particular, and the West in general. We will then see new alliances made with regional and continental powers other than the US. We already see a total sympathy with Hizbullah all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood offered to send 10,000 highly trained and equipped fighters to help Hizbullah in Lebanon. If the United States is having a hard time in Iraq, wait until you see Lebanon.

The United States somehow missed its bidding again when it bid on leaders such as the Arab leader who called Olmert, in the first days of fighting, and asked him to fight until Hizbullah is destroyed: Or like the Foreign Minister of an Arab country with no official relations with Israel, at least not public, cut his vacation in Tel-Aviv short because of the war and was forced three weeks later to send a private Jet to pick up his family, who was still vacationing in Tel-Aviv, because Hizbullah threatened to attack Tel-Aviv.

You want a new Middle East? You will get a New Middle East. You will have a Middle East, which sees Israel and the US as the enemy, an enemy to despise and fight, one that will one day be united in its struggle against the new invaders, and colonizers. This time around, Sykes-Picot will not be around to decide on whom rules the pieces. This time around, they will be faced with a New Middle East just like they wanted.

In Kuwait, people took to the streets; the same people who took to the streets in 1992 celebrating the liberation of their country by waving American flags and pictures of George Bush the father. However, today they were burning the American flag and chanting “death to Israel and America.”

America has lost dearly in the Arab and Muslim worlds due to its policies in the Middle East that are biased towards Israel. American interests are being threatened due to this blind support for a state that cannot survive without state terrorism.

Just be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it.

2006 by Hesham Tillawi, PhD

http://heshamtillawi.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/the-new-middle-east-be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-actually-get-it/

 

 

“نيويوك تايمز”: العصابات الصفوية تسعى لجعل بغداد “شيعية خالصة”

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=25348

بيان سري..الشيعة يخططون لنقل تجربتهم في العراق للدول الإسلامية

 Secret statement .. Shiites planning to transfer their experience in Iraq of Islamic States

9 Januari 2007

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=27624

فرق الموت الشيعية تعترف بدعم إيران لحرب الإبادة للسنة

Shiite death squads support Iran to recognize genocide of the Sunnist

27 Januari 2007

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=30311

Arrest battalion commander in the Iraqi army member of the “militia criminal”

14 September 2007

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=50787

Press sources: the Mahdi Army militia receive training in Iran

15 April 2007

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=40070

Hashemi: Maliki recruited thousands of militias in the security ministries

12 November 2007

http://islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=54560