Iran’s Plan to Destabilize Iraq
Iranian Hegemony
As Henry Kissinger once said, Iran needs to decide whether it is “a
nation or a cause.” The Ayatollah Khamenei stubbornly prefers Iran
remain a “cause.”
The record of meddlesome, terror-laden interference throughout the
Middle East by Tehran is growing longer by the day. The oppressive
military dictatorship may be fronted by a so-called “moderate” President
Rouhani, but Iran is undeniably under the control of the Revolutionary
Guards and their political hacks within the Ayatollah Khamenei’s
clerical politburo. As it stubbornly clings to the cause of belligerence
and revolution the regime has been resuscitated and emboldened by a
nuclear agreement that has imposed nary a speed bump on its road to
fulfilling its regional ambitions.
Cases in point: the incendiary and venomous anti-Israel/anti-Semitic
rhetoric emanating from the highest reaches of the regime have become
more dangerous and more provocative than ever. The terror-funding money
laundered cash flowing into Hezbollah and Hamas coffers has accelerated,
fueled in part, from U.S. and European unfrozen asset transfers and
sanctions relief. Elie Weisel’s passing was met with another
Holocaust-denying tirade from several high level hardliners. The number
of Iranians hanging from the gallows under President Rouhani has reached
tallies higher than under his predecessor: the notorious Ahmadinejad.
Oppression has escalated against average Iranians as the regime stomps
hard on any effort to leverage assets relief for fear of breathing new
life into Iran’s suppressed democratic movement.
In the Middle East, Iran is waging a proxy war in Yemen against the
U.S. and Saudi-backed government. Its provocative and destabilizing
ballistic missile tests — intended to directly threaten Israel and our
Sunni Arab allies — are deemed by the UN to be in violation of existing
Security Council resolutions. And let us not forget, the
“atomic ayatollahs” have never ever given up on their ambition to build
a bomb; the nuclear agreement merely postpones its capacity for doing
so for ten years, and will have all arms sanctions lifted against it in
about 7 years.
Ground zero on Iran’s revolutionary menu is Syria and Iraq. It is the
Ayatollah’s “front line” against all of the real and imagined foes of
the regime. The Revolutionary
Guard is massively deployed inside Syria defending fellow Shiite Bashar
al Assad, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are deployed in ISIS battle
zones in northern Iraq. If only those deployments were for the
cause of peace and stability in the Middle East. They are not. On the
contrary, those deployments are part and parcel of Iranian designs to
prevent the emergence of a stable Iraq and to prevent a restoration of a
durable UN-sponsored cease-fire in Syria.
The Iranian government’s propaganda arm is running at warp speed
warning Iranians that should Assad’s regime fall ISIS will soon be on
Tehran’s doorstep. The Farsi-language media is relentlessly pounding
this nonsense into every crevice of Iranian society. Iran, in other
words, is figuratively and literally getting away with murder in both
Iraq and Syria “in defense of Iran.”
The regime’s apologists demand patience and excoriate those who
question any effort to hold Iran accountable for these actions. Soon the
regime, they argue, will inevitably bend to the winds of globalization
and confront the exigencies required of a “proper” nation state. After
all, Boeing just signed a major deal with Iran. More such deals will
surely follow. Isn’t that evidence, they assert, that the Ayatollah’s
iron grip will weaken under the weight of western investment.
Hope springs eternal.
A new, more moderate regime, the Iranian amen choir chant, will
surely emerge. Just give it time. The great Iranian gamble is buttressed
by U.S. assurances that it is doing everything possible to challenge
Iran’s expansionism. Not true! What are we to make then of Secretary of
State’s recent comments that Iran’s presence in Iraq to be “helpful” to
American attempts to beat back the threat of ISIS, given their common
enemy?
It appears that Mr. Kerry, whose inclination is to sugar-coat
anything that may give rise to criticism of Iran, has turned a blind eye
to what U.S. commanders in Iraq are reporting up their chains of
command to the Pentagon. Moreover, Mr. Kerry’s limited interest in the
future of Iraq’s independence and integrity reflect the Obama
Administration’s own indifference to Iraq’s long term future.
Time will tell whether U.S. national security interests can sustain
the gamble, but given Iran’s international and regional conduct in
recent months, Mr. Kerry may need to adjust his assessment if Iraq’s
future stability is of consequence to the U.S.
U.S. commanders stationed on the ground in both the battles to
liberate Falluja and Ramadi from ISIS forces have expressed alarm that
rogue Iranian-commanded Shiite militias (aka The Popular Mobilization
Units (PMUs)) are moving into these towns after their liberation and
committing sectarian abuses against Sunnis, thus making refugee and
displaced persons more sympathetic to the remnants of ISIS operatives in
the region. The New York Times reported a few weeks ago that a Shiite
militia leader, in a widely circulated video, was seen rallying his men
with a message of revenge against the imprisoned civilians of Falluja,
whom they accuse of being sympathizers of ISIS: “Falluja is a terrorist
stronghold,” said Iranian-backed militia leader Aws al-Khafaji, the head
of the Abu Fadhil al-Abbas militia.
Make no mistake about it, the
awful, painstaking battles being waged to liberate Iraqi territory from
ISIS are intended eventually by Iran to gain more control north of
Baghdad at the expense of Iraqi sectarian reconciliation and U.S.
national security interest. Incorporating Iraq and Syria (as well as
Lebanon) into a Shiite Crescent under the thumb of Tehran is so evident
it’s as if the Ayatollah has hung out a neon light declaring it so. Is
this Shiite Crescent an outcome which Mr. Kerry considers an acceptable
consequence of U.S. retrenchment, inadequate strategy, and Iranian
expansionism?
As Iraq reels from a grave escalation of ISIS-inspired terrorism
across the country in recent days, Iran-backed Shiite militiamen (often
with the connivance of the Iraqi leadership) have used the growing chaos
inside Iraq to launch a series of attacks against Iranian adversaries
in Iraq, including a heinous attack yesterday against innocent civilian
Iranian dissidents imprisoned against their will at Camp Liberty,
wounding more than 40 residents. There is no doubt that this attack, as
previous ones on Camp Liberty, are the work of Iranian controlled forces
operating virtually at will, both covertly and overtly in Iraq. All the
while, Iran is doing everything possible to fallaciously present itself
as the ultimate and only reliable savior of the truncated Iraqi state.
Iran’s meddling in Iraq is incessant, albeit with mixed results.
Tehran’s goals are overt and evident: subjugate the central government
to its whim while marginalizing the minority Sunni population without
driving it back into the hands of whatever remnants of ISIS remains
after it is driven from the all-important city of Mosul. A balancing
act? Surely. But isn’t Iran really interested in having Iraq
disintegrate – leaving it gobble up as much of Iraq’s territory as
possible up to the very frontier of the Sunni heartland?
Iran is determined to resist a revitalized and reinvigorated American
effort to politically, militarily, and financially stabilize a
pro-secular, reform-minded Iraqi central government. Iran takes an
extraordinarily dim view of national Iraqi reconciliation, and will
apparently do everything possible to sabotage that goal – a goal 180
degrees opposite to U.S. policy.
Who wins in the end from Iran’s deviousness in Iraq? ISIS, or
whatever remnants there are of ISIS. Tehran’s machinations, intended to
force Baghdad and the south to fall directly under its sway, will doom
any hope for national reconciliation among Iraq’s three major sects
(Sunnis, Kurds, and Shiites) – giving rise to ISIS 2.0 inside of Iraq.
That is the hope of any future ISIS leadership…living to fight another
day to restore the Caliphate in northern Iraq…and the cycle of terror
will find yet another home from which to reconstitute itself.
The next president faces an extraordinary challenge again in Iraq,
and it all goes back to Iran and its loathsome, meddling regional
militant strategy to stir as much terrorism and instability as possible
to thwart any semblance of normalcy and stability.
The people of Iran deserve a government that is democratic,
transparent, and willing to be a nation, rather than a cause.
Unfortunately, as we see in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, and in Palestine, the
regime in Tehran is determined to break our will, and the will of the
Iranian people in the bargain, to create its vaunted “Shiite Crescent”
any cost, no matter the how many innocent lives perish in the bargain.
Had the Obama Administration
incubated the Iran nuclear agreement with an effective national security
strategy to deter Iran’s regional designs, our Middle East allies and
the world would have been better off. But the White House preferred rolling the dice without such insurance.
The next president will have to reconstruct that very missing
regional strategy, but at a severe disadvantage given how much the Obama
Administration intentionally dropped the ball – brushing aside all the
warnings to avoid empowering Iran to at the expense of core American
national security interests in the Middle East.
