Detente declared as US, Iranian interests align over Iraq, Syria
- The Wall Street Journal
- October 30, 2014 12:00AM
The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key US allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, which are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State. Sunni Arab leaders view the threat posed by Shia Iran as equal to or greater than that posed by the Sunni radical group Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Israel contends the US has weakened the terms of its negotiations with Iran and played down Tehran’s destabilising role in the region.
Over the past decade, Washington and Tehran have engaged in fierce battles for influence and power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan fueled by the US overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring revolutions that began in late 2010. US officials still say the option of military action remains on the table to thwart Iran’s nuclear program.
Yet recent months have ushered in a change as the two countries have grown into alignment on a spectrum of causes, chief among them promoting peaceful political transitions in Baghdad and Kabul and pursuing military operations against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to the officials.
The Obama administration also has markedly softened its confrontational stance towards Iran’s most important non-state allies, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Lebanese militant and political organisation Hezbollah.
US diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, negotiated with Hamas leaders through Turkish and Qatari intermediaries during ceasefire talks in July that were aimed at ending the Palestinian group’s rocket attacks on Israel, according to senior American officials.
US intelligence agencies have repeatedly tipped off Lebanese law-enforcement bodies close to Hezbollah about threats posed to Beirut’s government by Sunni extremist groups, including al-Qa’ida and its affiliate al-Nusra Front in Syria, Lebanese and US officials said.
“This shows that although we see Turkey and Arab states as our closest allies, our interests and policies are converging with Iran’s,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a former Obama administration official.
“This is a geostrategic reality at this moment, more than a conscious US policy.”
Obama administration officials stressed they were not directly co-ordinating their regional policies or the war against Islamic State with Iran. They also said pervasive US economic sanctions remained in place on Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Still, the officials said the intensive negotiations the US had pursued with Iran since last year on the nuclear issue could help stabilise the Middle East and had improved understanding.
“The world is clearly better off now than it would have been if the leaders on both sides had ignored this opening,” Wendy Sherman, the lead US negotiator with Iran, said last week.
Iranian officials, including President Hasan Rowhani, have said there could be more co-operation with the US in the war against Islamic State, but only if a nuclear accord was reached.
Administration critics, including Israel and Arab states, see the White House as determined to seal a deal with Iran as a monument to President Barack Obama’s foreign policy record.
“The Iranian regime is revolutionary and can’t get too close to us. So I’d be wary of any rapprochement,” said Scott Modell, a former CIA officer now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I think they are hell-bent on pursuing a number of courses that run counter to US interests.”
Iraq has been at the centre of a regional proxy war between the US and Iran since the George W. Bush administration invaded Baghdad in 2003.
Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards established and trained a network of Shia militias that attacked US and coalition troops stationed in Iraq over the past decade, according to US defence officials. Tehran, according to US officials, also introduced into Iraq the most dangerous kind of improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that the Pentagon says were the largest single cause of deaths among American servicemen who fought in the war.
Since the US resumed military operations inside Iraq in August, however, the Revolutionary Guards corp has explicitly ordered its local proxies not to target American military personnel conducting and co-ordinating attacks against Islamic State from bases near Baghdad and in Iraq’s Kurdish region, according to US officials who have tracked Iranian communications.
General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Guards’ overseas operations, known as the Quds Force, instructed Iraqi Shia militias long at war with the US, such as the Mahdi Army and Kata’ib Hezbollah, that US efforts to weaken Islamic State were in the long-term interests of Tehran and its allies, said the officials.
“It has gone quiet because these guys have been told by the (Revolutionary Guards) not to attack,” said a US intelligence officer who tracks General Soleimani.
“The Iraqi Shi’ite groups went to Soleimani and said they wanted to go after the American embassy and target Americans. Soleimani said: ‘No, no, no. Unless they get into your areas of control, don’t attack’.”
Meanwhile, the US military is planning to play down and avoid publicity for the annual minesweeping exercise being organised by the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. In past years, the exercise has been used to highlight unified opposition to Iranian activities in the Persian Gulf, according to a US official.
Some officials say not emphasising deterrence against Iran could be destabilising, signalling to the Revolutionary Guards that the US isn’t going to take steps to counter their measures.
However, the US now has gone beyond the use of signals. US officials said the Obama administration had passed messages to Tehran by using the offices of Iraq’s new Shia Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shia Islam’s most senior clerics.
The US has also made it clear to Tehran that its stepped-up military strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria won’t be turned on forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to US officials.
Assad is Iran’s closest Arab ally. And the Revolutionary Guards and General Soleimani have mobilised Iranian military personnel and Lebanese and Iraqi Shia militiamen to fight inside Syria in support of the Damascus regime.
Any US strikes on Assad’s security forces could end up hitting Iranian or Hezbollah soldiers and advisers, sparking a broader conflict.
“They (the US) want to focus on ISIL and they are worried about antagonising the Iranians, which they say may cause them to react or the Shiite militias in Iraq to react against our embassy and interests in Iraq and derail the (nuclear) talks,” said a senior US defence official working on Iraq.
“They are articulating in high-level inter-agency meetings that they don’t want to do anything that’s interpreted by the Iranians as threatening to the regime.”
The Wall Street Journal
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