The Iran boogeyman is back

Gen. Petraeus is reportedly going to blame Iran for why we need to stay in Iraq. If he does, it'll be destructive propaganda.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Iran, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War, David Petraeus

April 8, 2008 | In his much-awaited testimony before the U.S. Senate this week, Gen. David Petraeus is reportedly going to cite Iranian aggression to justify keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. According to the Times of London, Petraeus will claim that Iranian troops fought alongside Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army against Iraqi government troops in Basra. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who will also testify, accused Iran of providing some of the rockets that have struck the Green Zone in Baghdad, causing a number of U.S. casualties. "We got the tailfins of what was dropping on us ... This was quite literally made in Iran," Crocker told reporters.

It's blame-blame-blame, blame-blame Iran. We've heard this song before. The Bush administration warbles it every time it needs to justify its failed Iraq policies and rally a skeptical public. Evil Iran, our archenemy, a charter member of the Axis of Evil, is killing American troops, and we can't leave Iraq, or Ahmedinejad and his cronies will take over the whole country. It's an updated version of the Cold War "domino effect" argument, with Iran taking the place of the communist menace. And in the latest version, Muqtada al-Sadr, the vehemently anti-American cleric, is portrayed as Public Enemy No. 1, an Iranian tool fighting the good guys in the Maliki government. U.S. troops have been fighting Sadr's militia in Baghdad's Sadr City in the last few days, making it even easier to portray him this way.

There's just one problem with this story: It's nonsense.

The truth is that the Maliki government and its allied Shiite faction, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly known as SCIRI), are much closer to Iran than the Sadrists are. Maliki's campaign against Sadr isn't a noble crusade by the good Iraqi government against the bad Iranian-backed Sadrists, but a battle waged by a weak Shiite leader backed by one militia, ISCI's Badr Corps, against another, stronger Shiite leader, Sadr, with his own militia, the Mahdi Army. Not only that, the "good" militia, the Badr Corps, was created in Iran by Iran's Revolutionary Guard -- the same organization whose Quds Force the United States notoriously declared to be a "terrorist organization" last year. The maraschino cherry on this sundae of absurdity: It was the head of that Quds Force, an Iranian general, who bailed out Maliki after Maliki's assault on Basra ignominiously failed, forcing him to send officials to Iran to broker a truce.

As Juan Cole, a regular Salon contributor, told me, "The Americans are doing propaganda." I called Cole, a nationally recognized expert on Shiite Islam, because I wanted to get a reality check not just on Petraeus and Crocker's expected Iran-is-to-blame spin, but to hear what Cole thinks the United States should do to extricate itself from Iraq. As it turns out, the two questions are inseparable. Cole makes a disturbing case that the Bush administration's hard-line position on Iran and Sadr could end up wrecking our chances of getting out of Iraq without leaving chaos in our wake.

U.S. claims that Iranian troops were involved in the fighting in Basra have to examined closely. "If what's being alleged is that Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei, theocrat of Iran, ordered Revolutionary Guards into the slums of Basra, that's not plausible," Cole said. "Now, there are Iranians going through Iraq all the time. If you count all the pilgrims who come to Iraq every year, there are probably over a million of them. So let's say there are some Iranians in Basra, and the troops came down and they were caught in the crossfire and had to make a choice. And there may have been some who had friends among the Mahdi Army and decided to support the Mahdi Army. That's possible."

Cole also questioned U.S. claims that Iran was intentionally supplying weapons to the Mahdi Army. "There's no proof for that, and whenever the U.S. Army is pressed for evidence, they always back off." The weapons are available on the black market, and the Mahdi Army, flush with funds, can easily buy them.

Gregory Gause, a Middle East expert who testified before the U.S. Senate last week, also found the idea that Iran would have ordered troops to fight against the Maliki regime extremely unlikely. "I'm open to evidence, but it would be a real departure if Iran had organized units fighting," Gause said. "It wouldn't make sense to make their own guys [Maliki and ISCI] look bad."

In a larger sense, both Cole and Gause said it would make no sense for the Iranians to try to destabilize the Maliki regime. "The status quo is in their interest," Gause said. Iran supports all the Shiite parties and militias, including Sadr's, for obvious reasons: They want to retain influence. "The only strategic logic they might have for aiding the Mahdi Army against their own allies is that the Mahdi Army remains very anti-American and will make life difficult for American forces and perhaps hasten their departure," Gause said. But he pointed out that the Iranians are wary of Sadr. "I've always thought that the Sadrists are actually the least reliable of Iran's Shia relations in Iraq. They're indigenous, homegrown. And Sadr has a reputation for being much more nationalist. He's also always opposed these extreme federalist plans that ISCI have put forward for this Shia super-province."

Cole took the same position. "I don't think the Iranians want chaos in Iraq. It's too easy for it to spill over onto them. I think they want a finger in every pie."

In short, the truth about Iraq, which the Bush administration has withheld from the American people, is that Iran and the United States have an alliance of convenience in Iraq. Both support ISCI and Maliki. Iran does give limited support to the nationalist firebrand Sadr, but the significance of that pales in comparison to the two countries' shared interests.

The Bush administration has concealed that inconvenient truth and pushed its good guys-bad guys narrative on the American people because that narrative is needed to sell the war. The Basra battle made it uncomfortably clear just how much Iraq resembles Lebanon -- a Byzantine place of shifting alliances where there are no heroes and villains, and where you can't even tell the players without a scorecard. If that truth sinks in, public support for the war will dry up. Which is why Iran, the convenient boogeyman, is suddenly coming up again.

Next page: Does Iraq seem like a place that's easy to dominate?