Our Friends the Mullahs Tehran and the U.S. Don’t Have a Shared Interest in the Mideast.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/our-friends-the-mullahs-1403047778
Such is America’s strategic disarray in Iraq that the Obama Administration has come up with a new version of an old idea—court Iran as an ally. So in order to defeat Sunni extremists who want to form a potentially terrorist state, we are going to get in bed with a terrorist-sponsoring Shiite regime that wants to dominate the Middle East.
“Let’s see what Iran might or might not be willing to do before we start making any pronouncements,” Secretary of State John Kerry told Yahoo News on Monday in discussing a rapprochement with the mullahs. “I think we are open to any constructive process here that could minimize the violence, hold Iraq together—the integrity of the country—and eliminate the presence of outside terrorist forces that are ripping it apart.”
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The mullahs must be astonished at their strategic good fortune. A year ago they were isolated by global sanctions and scrambling to save their endangered client Bashar Assad in Syria. Then President Obama agreed to spare Assad’s airfields from bombing in return for promising to give up his chemical arms. The chemicals aren’t all gone, but Assad has used the reprieve to retake much of the country.
Now the sanctions on Iran have been eased as part of nuclear talks, and the U.S. is negotiating to be the air force for Iran’s Quds Force that is helping to prop up the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This is the same Quds Force that fashioned the deadly roadside bombs that killed so many Americans after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is the same Quds Force that arms Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel, and the same Quds Force that planned to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. In last year’s report on “state sponsors of terrorism,” Mr. Kerry’s State Department noted that the Quds Force “is the [Iran] regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.”
America does have an interest in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, that has captured much of Sunni Iraq. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. has shared interests with Iran in the region. The mullahs consider America the “great Satan” for a reason. The U.S. lost 4,489 troops and spent billions of dollars to make Iraq a unitary, Western-leaning and independent state. Iran wants the Shiite portions of Iraq as a satrapy.
Iran doesn’t want the Maliki government to fall, but its approach to ISIS is opportunistic. Early in the war and surely with Tehran’s consent, Assad freed Sunni Islamists from his jails and let in foreign fighters. As he knew, the West would be more reluctant to support an extremist opposition. Assad has spared ISIS from his bombing, seeing the moderate Free Syria Army as the greater threat. This is one reason ISIS has been able to create a sanctuary in northeastern Syria that has in turn helped it amass strength in northwestern Iraq.
A Sunni extremist haven in northern Syria and Iraq doesn’t necessarily undercut Iran’s goal of regional dominance. Its more important victory would be securing even greater influence over the Shiite-dominant portion of Iraq from Baghdad south through the oil fields of Basra and the Persian Gulf.
This would provide strategic depth and sources of revenue. It would also further frighten America’s friends in Israel, as well as our Sunni Arab allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states who will conclude that they must come to terms with a new regional hegemon. The result could be a de facto division of Iraq into three countries—Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite—and a new and greater instability.
No doubt some in the Administration, including President Obama, welcome the outreach to Tehran as a giant step closer to signing a nuclear-weapons deal. But that, too, serves Iran’s interests more than America’s. Our guess is that America’s pleading to Iran for help in Iraq will only make the mullahs more likely to drive a harder nuclear bargain.
The munchkin Metternichs in the White House have even grander ambitions of a U.S.-Iran alliance that will remake the world balance of power like Nixon’s breakthrough with China during the Cold War. But that U.S. diplomacy was done to separate a weak China from America’s overriding adversary in Moscow. The U.S. was later pushed from Vietnam but stayed in force in Asia. Mr. Obama’s courting of Iran is intended to make it easier to fulfill his desire to retreat from the region.
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This outreach to Iran smacks mostly of strategic desperation. It is what an Administration does when it realizes its policy has failed and the damage to U.S. interests is becoming too obvious to hide from the American public. His abdication on Syria created a mecca for jihadists and his total withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum for regional sectarians and Iran to fill.
Mr. Obama could still save Mr. Maliki and reclaim U.S. influence with a diplomatic and military intervention of the kind that Danielle Pletka and Jack Keane laid out in these pages on Tuesday. But if would have to be a large enough intervention to convince Mr. Maliki that it was worth making political compromises with his Kurdish and Sunni opponents. Nothing in Mr. Obama’s more than five years as President suggests he will do anything close. So a-courting the mullahs he goes.
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