A Reporter's Take on Iran in Iraq

For an alternative look at Iran in Iraq, read Nir Rosen's provocative piece on Steve Clemons' Washington Note. Rosen challenges the conventional wisdom of Beltway policymakers and media narrative-setters. He pulls no punches in taking on everybody from the U.S. military's Gen. Petraeus to the Washington Post's editorial board. Nir, a former colleague of ours in TIME's Baghdad Bureau, has written extensively for the New Yorker, the New York Times and others. He's a reporter who has covered America's military involvements after 9/11 more closely on the ground as anybody has. His reporting on that is contained in his book, just re-issued in paperback, The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.

A few excerpts from his take on Iran in Iraq, "Selling the War With Iran":

I have remained shocked, like many journalists and academics familiar with the region and its languages, that the Americans have shown no improvement in their understanding of the Muslim world with which they are so deeply engaged militarily and as an imperial power... too often the so called experts are equally ignorant. Remarkably, their lack of background, expertise or language skills and their repeated errors have not diminished the credibility of people such as Fred Kagan of the far right American Enterprise Institute (a Russia expert!), or Kenneth Pollock of the Brookings Institute or their cohorts...

Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don't want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army's ceasefire is still in effect. I expect this from the Bush administration and the ideologues who back it. But when the American media, which, in the build up to the American attack on Iraq abdicated its duty to challenge those in power and inform the public, continues to demonstrate the same lack of skepticism, it is very distressing...

The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer. The Supreme Council is of course also the main proxy for the US in Iraq and somehow in the Senate testimony it was forgotten that its large Badr militia was established in Iran and is actually the only Iraqi opposition group to have fought on the Iranian side against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Moreover, the Badr militia was a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is so demonized today, and Badr dominates the ministry of interior, if not most of Iraq at the higher echelons. But none of this openly available information made its way to the Post's editorial writers or the dominant discourse in the US...

There is no proxy war in Iraq, because the US and Iran share the same proxy and the US installed that proxy and empowered it. Today, to the extent that we can talk about an Iraqi "state," it is dominated by the Supreme Council and its Badr militia. The Sadrist movement of which the Mahdi Army is a loose militia is also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing homes, security, rations, clothes and other services to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a complex movement and certainly is as guilty of crimes as all the other groups that took part in the Iraqi civil war, including the Americans...

Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq's Shiites much to the consternation of America's so called "moderate" Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the "New Middle East." But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again...

I believe that in fact Iran is a positive influence in Iraq, that it has a close relationship with the Kurds and the Shiites and that the Iranian regime, unlike its Sunni neighbors, is not sectarian and is very pragmatic. If Iraq's Sunnis dislike Iran it is because Saddam Hussein initiated a war of aggression against Iran and succeeded in demonizing Shiites. Admiral Mullen was wrong when he said that Iran prefers "see a weak Iraq neighbor." Iran and the former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari even discussed Iran training Iraq's security forces. Iran has close relations with Sunni Islamist Hamas and its foreign policy is not a Shiite one at all. Iran does not seek to conquer or control its Arab neighbors but it also chooses not to be an American puppet or client regime, and that has always been the sin the American empire will never pardon...

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo