In the wake of the Iraqi parliamentary elections on March 7, there has been a steady stream of commentary among foreign policy pundits and others about the nature and extent of Iran’s ongoing influence in post-Saddam Iraq.
Predictably, Vice President Biden said last month that Iran had been “clobbered” in the elections. Alternatively, one of the Iranian officials with whom we spoke during our trip to Tehran in February—roughly two weeks before the Iraqi elections—said to us that the Islamic Republic has good relations with all of the major Shi’a coalitions and parties (as well as with the major Kurdish parties). Under these circumstances, Iran would do fine whichever of the three Shi’a led electoral lists ended up taking the lead in forming the next governing coalition. But, our Iranian interlocutor asked (perhaps somewhat rhetorically), if you Americans keep sticking up for disqualified Baathists, what kind of influence do you expect to have in Iraq?
As Iraq’s post-electoral drama has unfolded, it has become increasingly clear that our Iranian interlocutor was closer to the mark in his observations about current trends in Iraqi politics than Vice President Biden was in his.
It seems ever more likely that the core of the next Iraqi government will be a partnership between the “State of Law” list, headed in the March 7 elections by incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the Iraqi National Alliance, which probably has the strongest ties to Iran of any of Iraq’s major Shi’a political groupings. Among other things, such a scenario would almost certainly exclude Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya list from a place in government. Iraqiya is an explicitly secular political slate, and while Allawi is nominally Shi’a, he drew some of Iraq’s most important Sunni parties into Iraqiya as critical parts of his support base.
As the Sadrists—who emerged from the balloting on March 7 as the largest single party in the INA—strongly oppose Maliki’s retention as Prime Minister, State of Law and the INA must sort through the difficult challenge of either moving Maliki aside or persuading the Sadrists to go along with his continuation in office. Reports conflict as to how this question is likely to be resolved. But Iran seems likely to be centrally involved in brokering the eventual outcome.
Juan Cole draws on two articles from Al-Hayat (in Arabic) to explore this. Specifically, he notes that
“Iran had brokered the coalition [between State of Law and INA] in order to deny secular ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi, a known CIA asset, out of the prime ministership, and to stop any move to internationalize the process of forming an Iraqi government (as Allawi has called for). Internationalizing the deliberations would give the United States, which supports Allawi, a disproportionate influence on the outcome”.
As Cole points out, Iraqiya has already “denounced the [coalition between State of Law and the INA] as having been orchestrated by Iran and returning Iraq to the sway of sectarian religious parties”. (Cole points out, though, that Iraqiya “failed to form a government in its own right in part because of frictions between Sunni Arabs in the North and Kurds in the East, over the division of spoils.”)
Furthermore, as Cole goes on to note,
“The two wings of the new coalition are said to be continuing their negotiations in Iran even now. Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Badr Corps is there. Badr is the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and it had been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Amiri is likely an intermediary with Brig. Gen. Qasim Sulaimani, head of the Jerusalem Brigades special forces of the IRGC, who is generally the liaison to Shiite militant groups outside Iran. Also there is Shaikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, another stalwart of the fundamentalist Supreme Council, and Abd al-Halim al-Zuhairi of the Da’wa Party as well as the head of one of its splinter groups, the ‘Da’wa Party – Iraq Organization.’ They are negotiating with Muqtada al-Sadr and Iranian officials in order to maintain the unity of the coalition and to reach final terms on the coalition.”
While we are not often in agreement with the analyses produced by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, we thought that the Institute’s Michael Knight drew the strategic implications of all this quite nicely, at least as far as the relative balance of influence in post-Saddam Iraq between the Islamic Republic and the United States is concerned:
“Hand in hand with its proxies in the INA, Iran has successfully stymied the development of a strong nationalist government in Baghdad for at least another four years—the ultimate payoff for its virtuoso performance in manipulating Iraqi politics. With the U.S. government’s horizon limited to its military withdrawal, an exhausted Washington does not appear capable of making such fine distinctions and will likely greet the formation of a new Iraqi government, any government, with relief.”
So, Vice President Biden—just who has been “clobbered” in Iraq?
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