last chunk

The Iranian-Iraqi relationship blossoms
The Iraqi elections in January and their aftermath made the growing symbiosis between the two neighboring areas fully visible. Though the Sadrists officially boycotted the election, the SCIRI and Da'wa parties, having asserted leadership within Sistani's Unified Iraqi Coalition, won a majority of the seats in the new parliament. The prime minister they selected, Da'wa leader Ibrahim Jaafari, had spent nine years in exile in Iran.

More open and formal relationships followed as soon as the new government took office. As Juan Cole, perhaps the foremost academic observer of Middle Eastern politics, put it: The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia." Beyond facilitating pilgrimages in both directions across the border and formalizing plans for Najaf airport, the new government facilitated connections that affected almost every economic realm in depressed Iraq. Among the many projects settled on were substantial improvements in Iraq's transportation system; agreements for the exchange of products ranging from detergents to construction materials and carpets; a shift of Iraqi imports of flour from the US to Iran; the Iranian refining of Iraqi crude oil pumped from its southern fields; and a billion-dollar credit line to be used for the Iraqi purchase of Iranian "technical and engineering services".

Though the Bush administration, with its control over both the purse strings and the armed forces of the new Iraqi government, undoubtedly had the power to nullify these unwelcome agreements, circumstances on the ground made it difficult for its officials to intervene. Any overt interventions in matters that touched on Iraqi economic sovereignty would surely have triggered loud (and perhaps violent) protests from at least the Sadrists, who might well have been joined by the governing parties in the regime the US had just installed. The most spectacular agreement, a proposed mutual defense pact between Iraq and Iran, was indeed abrogated under apparent pressure from the Bush administration, but American officials said nothing when "the Iraqi government did give Tehran assurances that they would not allow Iraqi territory to be used in any attack on Iran - presumably a reference to the United States".

The increasingly desperate circumstances that constrained Bush administration actions when it came to the developing Iranian-Iraqi relationship were addressed by Middle East scholar Ervand Abrahamian, who pointed to a similarly precarious American situation in Afghanistan. He concluded that the US could not afford a military confrontation with Iran, since the Iranians were in a position to trigger armed revolts in the Shi'ite areas of both countries: "If there's a confrontation, military confrontation, there would be no reason for them to cooperate with United States. They would do exactly what would be in their interests, which would be to destroy the US position in those two countries."

A "senior international envoy" quoted by Christopher Dickey in NewsweekOnline offered an almost identical opinion: "Look at what they can do in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon. They can turn the whole Middle East into a ball of fire, and [American officials] know that."

In light of all these developments, Juan Cole commented: "In a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime - but succeeded only in defeating itself."

The ironies of conquest
In a memorable insight, historian and writer Rebecca Solnit has suggested that the successes of social movements should often be measured not by their accomplishments, but by the disasters they prevent:
What the larger movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated, rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources unextracted, species unexterminated.
The Iraqi resistance, one of the least expected and most powerful social movements of recent times, can lay claim to few positive results. In two years of excruciating (if escalating) fighting, the insurgents have seen their country progressively reduced to an ungovernable jungle of violence, disease and hunger. But maybe, as Solnit suggests, their real achievement lies in what didn't happen. Despite the deepest desires of the Bush administration, to this day Iran remains uninvaded - the horrors of devolving Iraq have, so far, prevented the unleashing of the plagues of war on its neighbor.

Not only will that "success" be small consolation for most Iraqis, but such a negative victory might in itself only be temporary. Reading the geopolitical tea leaves is always a perilous task, especially in the case of Bush administration intentions (and capabilities) toward Iran. While there are signs that some American officials in Washington and Baghdad may be accepting the defeat of administration plans for "regime change" in Iran; other signs remind us that a number of top officials remain as committed as ever to a military confrontation of some sort - and that frustration with a roiling defeat in Iraq, which has until now constrained war plans, could well set them off in the end.

Among signs that a major military strike against Iran may not be in the offing are increasingly visible fault lines within the Bush administration itself. This can be seen most politely in various calls for accommodation with Iran from high-profile former Bush administration officials like Richard Haass. The director of the State Department's policy planning staff from 2001 to 2003, Haass published his appeal in Foreign Affairs, a magazine sponsored by the influential Council for Foreign Relations. More tangible signs of a surfacing accomodationist streak can be found in modest gestures made by the administration, including the withdrawal of a longstanding US veto of Iran's petition for membership in the World Trade Organization. Beyond this, one would have to note the rather pointed leaking of crucial secret documents, including the Military Quadrennial Report, in which top commanders gave a negative assessment of US readiness to fight two wars simultaneously, and a National Intelligence Estimate - the first comprehensive review of intelligence about Iran since 2001 - which evidently declared Iran about than 10 years away from obtaining "the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon". And, finally, the Bush administration endorsed a European-sponsored nuclear treaty with Iran that was almost identical to one it had opposed two years earlier.

But perhaps the most striking sign that some acceptance of regional realities and limitations is afoot can be found in the strident complaints by various neo-conservatives about Bush administration failures in Iran. Michael Rubin, a key figure in the development of Iraq policy, spoke for many when he complained in an American Enterprise Institute commentary that the Bush administration showed "little inclination to work toward" regime change there. He followed this claim with a catalogue of missed opportunities, policy shifts and other symptoms of a lack of will to confront the Iranians.

On the other hand, as military analyst Michael Klare reports, the Bush administration has never ceased its search for an on-the-cheap, few-boots-on-the-ground military solution to its Iranian dilemma. While the US military (like any modern military) develops contingency plans for all manner of battles and campaigns, and while most such plans are never executed, their existence and persistence give credence to the claims that an attack on Iran is still possible.

Most of the extant contingency plans evidently take into account the "immense stress now being placed on US ground forces in Iraq" and therefore seek "some combination of airstrikes and the use of proxy [non-American ground] forces". One plan, for example, evidently envisions several brigades of American-trained Iranian exiles entering Iran from Afghanistan. Other plans involve simultaneous land and sea assaults, coordinated with precision bombing of various military sites currently being charted by manned and unmanned aerial invasions of Iranian airspace.

Ominously, the Bush administration appears to recognize that these sorts of assaults would not even fully destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, no less topple the Iranian regime itself, and that an added ingredient might be needed. Since 2004, therefore, contingency plans authorized by the Department of Defense have mandated that the use of nuclear weapons be an integral part of the overall strategy. Washington Post reporter William Arkin, citing the already adopted CONPLAN 8022, mentions "a nuclear weapons option" specifically tailored for use against underground Iranian nuclear plants: "A specially configured earth-penetrating bomb to destroy deeply buried facilities." Such a nuclear attack would - at least on paper - be coordinated with a variety of other measures to ensure that the Iranian government was replaced with one acceptable to the Bush administration.

Recently, former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi asserted in the American Conservative magazine that, as of late summer 2005, the Pentagon, "under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office" was "drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan mandates a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

The breadth and depth of the assault, according to Giraldi's Air Force sources, would be quite striking: "Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option." Since many targets are in populated areas, the havoc and destruction following such an attack would, in all likelihood, be unrivaled by anything since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After escaping the Cold War specter of nuclear holocaust, it seems unimaginable that the world would be forced to endure the horror of nuclear war in a regional dispute. However, the record of Bush administration belligerence makes it difficult to imagine America's top leadership giving up the ambition of toppling the Islamic regime in Iran. And yet, given that the conquest of Iraq led the administration unexpectedly down strange Iranian paths, who knows where future Washington plans and dreams are likely to lead - perhaps to destruction, certainly to bitter ironies of every sort.

(Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz)