Outside Iran, there are limited countries on the face of the earth where Kassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the external missions branch of the IRGC, has the power, the ability and the ability to reach the highest political and military levels - in those countries - compared to the influence of any official Including the high ranks of political and military officials, and indeed the president himself, and we can simply consider Iraq one of the most important, if not the most important, places.
Iranian officials at all levels are always proud of this fact, and are proud of their ability to reach senior Iraqi officials and travel to Iraq publicly, as was evident in Iranian President Hassan Rowhani's March visit to the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and senior Iraqi officials, and signed significant security and economic agreements, in contrast to US diplomats and administration officials who are usually trapped and envelop their visits and activities in Iraq with a degree of secrecy, including President Donald Trump himself He apparently did not lose his ability to surprise everyone by choosing to visit a secret visit to US forces at the Ain al-Assad Air Base in the western Iraqi desert of Anbar in December to congratulate the American soldiers on Christmas. Where he meets with any of the senior Iraqi officials, including the prime minister, who was just installed at the time, "Adel Abdul Mahdi."
It is not exactly clear what Trump thought when he decided to make that surprise and unconventional visit, but some of his remarks during and after the visit may reveal some of what is going on in the president's mind and beyond his administration. Trump announced during the visit that the United States does not intend to withdraw The US military may take Iraq as a base to launch attacks inside Syrian territory, a statement that aroused great anger among Iraqi officials who considered it a violation of the sovereignty of the country, and prompted many of the Iraqi political blocs to escalate their demands to end Including the "reform" parliamentary bloc supported by the nationalist Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr and the "building" coalition led by pro-Iranian militia leader Hadi al-Amiri.
Later, Trump's intentions became clearer when he told CNN two months later, in February of this year, that he wanted to keep an American base in Iraq to monitor Iran, which he considered a "real problem" "Which called for an official diplomatic response from Baghdad this time on the tongue of Iraqi President" Barham Saleh, "who accused Trump of trying to implicate Iraq in its own issues, stressing that the security agreement signed between Baghdad and Washington in 2008 does not grant Washington the right to use land Iraq to fight any third party.
Aside from the verbal debates between the two groups, Trump's secret visit to Iraq amid mounting tensions in US-Iranian relations and his subsequent comments on Iraq's use as a base to fight the Iranians highlighted the fact that the United States may not mind taking its confrontation with Iran to other theaters. The Middle East, especially Iraq, which Washington sees as a bastion of Iranian influence despite the strong American presence in it, something that Tehran itself does not seem to mind, according to press reports published in May and confirmed that Qasim Soleimani visited Iraq and mobilized militias Tehran offers a proxy war against Washington. From Tehran's point of view, Iraq offers an inexpensive theater to target US forces and interests with a reasonable degree of ability to deny responsibility. The first loser in that confrontation remains Iraq's politically fragile Iraq, Regional relations are rooted in the complex historical relationship between Baghdad, Tehran and Washington since the Shah's reign in Iran and before the rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Time of revolution
The United States, Iran and Iraq have a complex history of triangular relations dating back to the Cold War. At that time, the prevailing wisdom in Washington remained that it could not bear the loss of both Tehran and Baghdad, and that its policy in the Middle East required at least one of the two countries to be loyal to it. Since Iraq had decided early on to favor the Soviets, Of its political assets in the region to strengthen the Shah of Iran, built its Middle East policy fully on its regime, and sent billions of dollars in weapons to his army. Otherwise, Tehran served as a spearhead in Washington's policy of undermining the Iraqi regime.
As a result, it was natural for the Shah regime to be the arch enemy of the Iraqi Baath regime. It was not surprising that Iraq decided to host Ayatollah Khomeini, the first enemy of the Shah's regime, after he was expelled from Iran following his protests over Iran's relationship with the United States in the 1960s. He was stationed in 1965 in the city of Najaf, assisted by the Iraqi intelligence in running secret operations to destabilize the shah's regime. Khomeini also used Iranian Shi'a trips to Najaf to recruit supporters inside Iran and smuggle what he wanted inside as well as cassette sermons.
| Saddam Hussein (right) and Khomeini (communication sites) |
In 1968 Saddam Hussein rose to power after a military coup by the Iraqi Baath Party, where he served as vice president and rule of Iraq from behind the scenes for a decade. Saddam Hussein promoted Baathist policy in employing Khomeini against the Shah's regime, which in turn helped the Shah support a strong Kurdish revolt against the Saddam regime with CIA cover. This continued until 1975 when Saddam and the Shah signed a peace agreement in Algeria, On disputed territory along the Shatt of Iraq and vowed to abandon Khomeini in exchange for the Shah's suspension of support for the Kurds.
But the peace agreement did not stop Saddam from continuing to support Khomeini until 1978 when he finally succumbed to the shah's pressure and drove him out of Najaf to settle in Paris and lead the opposition in the following months from the village of Nofal Le Chateau in northern France before returning to Tehran victorious in February In 1979, after the Islamic Revolution, only Saddam realized that he had removed the man he had supported for many years just a few moments before his victory. That was, paradoxically, the most serious error of his political career.
Saddam was not expecting the scale of the revolution he had created when he decided to host Khomeini in Najaf. In his worst nightmares, the Baathist leader did not expect the "charismatic" cleric he thought he used to undermine the shah's regime to establish a more hostile regime for Iraq, (2) Khomeini opposed the smuggling methods he used against the Shah from Najaf and re-engineered and employed to undermine the Saddam regime in Baghdad, to support Iran Through a series of attacks inside Iraq, and in interviews Saddam Hussein brought the former generals of the Shah's army to plan a coup to overthrow Khomeini. Over the following months, the two sides engaged in mutual conspiracies and plots to undermine each other, mainly targeting ethnic minorities in both countries. The Shah before, and in return Saddam supported Iran's Arabs in Khuzestan and Baluchistan.
From Khomeini's point of view, it was not possible to ensure the stability of the Islamic revolution in Iran with an Iraq hostile to its western borders, especially since the two countries share an open border of about 1,500 km. In contrast, Khomeini believed that Iraq was the most suitable environment for exporting Islamic revolution with a large Shiite under the rule of "dictatorial", and in light of this Iranian anti-Iraq orientation, for reasons of personal overlap with the ideological, it was natural that the conflict between the two countries from a proxy political war to undermine each other into a direct military confrontation.
US intelligence early on supported Saddam's efforts to organize the former Shah's army generals, led by Gholam Ali Osei, the last commander of the Iranian army
At the same time, Khomeini Iran quickly turned from a US ally to its biggest enemy, and with the outbreak of the famous hostage crisis in November 1979, it became clear that US-Iranian relations had reached an impasse, and that America could not afford to lose Iran Iraq, as we have already said, began to search quickly for a forced alliance with Saddam's regime against the Iranian regime, even though it had just designated Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism. Earlier, US intelligence supported Saddam's efforts to organize the former Shah's army generals and Their head "Ghulam Ali a Wissi, "the last commander of the Iranian army and close relations with the Pentagon and US intelligence before being assassinated in Paris in 1984 by an Iranian assassination team.
By then, the Iraq-Iran war had already broken out after Saddam invaded Iran on the pretext of liberating the Arab population in the south-west, the region that holds most of Iran's energy. At the same time, Ronald Reagan arrived at the White House with the conviction of supporting the Iraqi invasion of Iran, He has removed Iraq from the lists of state sponsors of terrorism, supplied Saddam with funds, weapons and intelligence services to continue his war. His administration actively engaged in tanker warfare to prevent Tehran from attacking Gulf ships. US support was crucial in enhancing Iraq's ability to continue fighting, On a cease-fire in the end.
The Iraq-Iran war ended, leaving Iraq as a dominant military force in the region, but at the same time paralyzed economically with huge debts to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The issue of debt and disputes over Kuwaiti oil production eventually led Saddam to invade Kuwait itself, "Famous for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Despite the enormity of the US operation, it was not designed in any way to remove Saddam from power, as Washington feared chaos in Iraq, and still believed in Saddam's role as a counterweight to Iran.
The Kurds had the lion's share of anger after Saddam bombed their areas with chemical weapons, accusing them of being agents of Iran and the United States. The United States, Britain and France responded by imposing a flight ban on the Kurdish areas of the north and the Shiite areas in Iraq. And the imposition of sanctions that weakened Iraq economically and militarily to a large extent, and from this face specifically contributed to the Gulf War indirectly to strengthen Iran, and contributed to the areas of non-flying inadvertently to prevent Saddam from bombing Tehran, and the paradox is not surprising, came the Gulf War A relative breakthrough in Iran's relationship with the United States during the reign of the late President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iran continued to sponsor the weak Iraqi opposition movements in exile until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Time of invasion
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, and the invasion weakened Iraq to the point where it was difficult to play the role of counterweight to Iranian influence. Within a short time America began to realize that it needed Iran to organize Shiite communities in Iraq, After a short period of anticipation and approach, I decided that the US invasion gave it an unprecedented opportunity to achieve what it did not achieve in the eight-year war. In short, from a Tehran perspective, post-occupation Iraq was an opportunity to engineer a pro-regime. Baghdad, and at the same time plunge Washington into a quagmire of crises and deadlines The costly blood bodies for a long time.
5 Iran quickly began to use its long-term relations with the Iraqi Shiites who fled to escape from Saddam's regime, established close ties with Iranian officials, learned Persian, and married Iranian families. Some of them even joined the IRGC, All of them returned to Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam and formed the Iraqi political scene and even the military scene, where they established a number of militias close to Tehran, which blocked the security and military vacuum in Iraq, especially after the decision of coalition forces to disband the Iraqi army officially weeks after the invasion and occupation.
These simultaneous changes have deepened the sectarian rift between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, as well as the growing ethnic rifts between Arabs and Kurds there. With the demobilization of 400,000 Iraqi Sunni fighters, Iraq has become a fertile breeding ground for militant Islamist organizations such as al-Qaeda, which clashed with Shiite militias and US forces to spark a bloody civil war that began in 2005, prompting Washington to increase its military presence there, at a time when Tehran exploited the fragile democratic structures established by the US occupation to consolidate its allies in the new Iraq.
These include a long list of militias and affiliated parties, headed by the Supreme Islamic Council led by Ammar al-Hakim and the Dawa Party led by Nuri al-Maliki, a devout Iraqi politician who spent a long time in Iran under Saddam Hussein. Maliki and the Dawa party have dominated the Shiite political scene, with the blessing of both Tehran and Washington, which have been competing to form a political scene in post-occupation Iraq. "Nur al-Maliki" played a long game of self in organizing competition between the two forces, US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 changed Miz And the internal opposition to Maliki's rule has increased, especially from the Sunni tribes that have suffered from marginalization and repression under his sectarian rule. Otherwise, the outbreak of the revolution in Syria and the ensuing war have given the "Iraqi jihadists" the opportunity to organize themselves in Syrian territory. "Organization of the Islamic State".
| Haidar Al-Abadi (networking sites) |
In 2014, the "Organization of the Islamic State" returned to Iraq and seized vast tracts of land and collapsed - in a strange picture - the Iraqi security forces in full, prompting the administration of US President "Barack Obama" to deploy 5,000 US troops and consultants there and mobilize a coalition From 79 countries to face the organization. On the ground, a call by prominent Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to unite rival Shi'ite militias, including pro-Iran, and the establishment of a militia force under the name of "popular mobilization" was the main fighting forces against the "state organization" On the political level, Washington and Tehran implicitly agreed to the inauguration of "Haider al-Abadi" as prime minister in succession to Maliki in 2014, while the countries later lined up on one side in opposition to the Kurdistan independence referendum in September 2017.
This period has witnessed an unprecedented amount of compatibility between the United States and Iran in Iraq. Much of this consensus has been due to the remarkable progress in the negotiations between the two countries over the nuclear agreement, which has shaped Iran's nuclear ambitions and helped create conditions for strategic co-existence between Tehran and Washington Unlike al-Maliki, whose task was to balance the two big powers, Abadi's role was to coordinate two historic rivals and suddenly find common interests. By 2017, the alliance of interests between Washington and Tehran had succeeded in defeating the "state organization" in Iraq.
Although the defeat of the organization provided the opportunity to rebuild the Iraqi state, its end revealed the underlying divisions within the fragile Iraqi political scene, and the protests began to reappear against the corrupt and inefficient governance of the Iraqi elite associated with external forces. The protests this time came from the Shiites themselves, Basra, the oil-rich southern province. The protests gave rise to a new Shiite Iraqi nationalism hostile to Iranian influence and the American presence. The nationalist trend led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has created a new balance in the political landscape. Last year's elections of 2018, where the forces loyal to Iran and the forces opposed to the formation of the government, it took five full months until the agreement between the two blocs on the name of "Adel Abdul Mahdi," as prime minister in October last year, while it took eight months To agree on the sovereign ministries of the government of Abdul Mahdi, Interior, Defense and Justice, in June.
Chicken game
The US invasion of Iraq has led to permanent changes in the game of power within the triangle of "Tehran - Baghdad - Washington." From a frantic two-way rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the United States supports one of its extremes; Iraq's political stability since 2003 has been dependent on the nature of relations and the level of competition between the United States and Iran. The more intense the rivalry between the two countries, the weaker the Iraqi government becomes, as this rivalry paralyzes the balance within the fragile governments of Baghdad and turns Iraq into a battlefield for proxy rivalry between the two powers.
This dynamic has become particularly clear since the middle of last year 2018, as Trump's administration stepped up its diplomatic offensive against Tehran and withdrew from the nuclear agreement and re-imposed sanctions. Trump Pendul transforms US-Iranian relations in the region from covert co-operation and mutual containment into open confrontation, The confrontation did not show any of the parties engaged - or rhetorically - to consider Iraq as one of its fields, and perhaps most of these fields are important and influential.
For Iran, Iraq is much more than a possible battleground with the United States. With Iran suffering from the worst sanctions ever in its history, and with Europeans and Asians unable to keep trade channels open under the nuclear deal under intense US pressure, Iran has no alternative but to circumvent the sanctions themselves by strengthening relations with its immediate neighbors rather than its more distant neighbors in order to avoid restrictions on its international trade and to enhance the ability to hide as much as possible Commercial Mellat.
In this context, Iraq is the geographically and politically closest spot to Tehran, which is relatively open to Iranian exports with an economy relatively linked to the Iranian economy and reduced tariffs. This means that there is no need to use the US dollar or pass through financial institutions exposed to US sanctions , As well as the Iraqi market is already flooded with Iranian products, from dairy products to clothing to Iranian-made cars, where the current volume of total trade between Iran and Iraq $ 12 billion annually with plans to double this amount to 20 billion dollars, Where Iraq depends on Iran in its entirety is generating electricity, where Iraq gets all its exports of natural gas from Iran, and he enjoys exemption from US sanctions on the import of Iranian gas is renewed every three months.
In short, the Iranians view Iraq today as the cornerstone of a possible axis for reorienting their international trade and circumventing US sanctions, a role UAE Dubai had played earlier but now pulled out of under US pressure and political dominance of Mohammed bin Zayed's leadership in the capital Abu Dhabi , And Iraq is particularly qualified to play this role given the long border and ease of transit between the two countries and the possibility of activating the black market in Iran, even if the Iraqi government in Baghdad to close the channel in response to US pressure, for example.
The US Treasury Agency has included the "nebulous" movement on US Treasury sanctions lists, and America can extend its sanctions to other Shiite militias
However, Iran's influence on Iraq far exceeds the requirements of geographical proximity and economic interdependence, where Iran has a real impact on many officials and political and party elites in Baghdad, and can use this influence in order to limit the movements of Washington political, military and even intelligence. For example, Iran could encourage Iraqi parliamentarians to challenge US influence. If things escalate, Tehran could use its influence on Iraqi militias to launch attacks on US interests, such as the rocket attack on the perimeter of the US embassy in Baghdad in May, providing Iraq with an ideal arena for Iranians with the necessary expertise and ability to strike Washington Without reaching a level that could lead the American military to direct retaliation.
On the other hand, the United States has its own cards to manage the conflict in Iraq, led by sanctions. In March, the US Treasury Agency included the "Najba" movement, an Iraqi Shiite militia on the US Treasury sanctions list, and could expand its sanctions to include All the Shiite militias associated with Iran such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Hezbollah. However, these decisions can backfire and push these factions to act parallel to the authority of the government to challenge the weak Iraqi state. At the same time, Likely a They use their political power to challenge the US presence in Iraq in response.
Washington can also choose to punish the entire Iraqi government if it continues to deal economically with Tehran, especially in the energy field, but these sanctions could harm US-Iraqi relations more than they do harm to Iran, especially since it may take years for Baghdad to gain independence in the energy field. And will not be able to respond to US pressure to reduce dependence on Iran in a short time, and finally, America can escalate things to pre-emptive strikes of Iranian militias in Iraq in order to reduce the ability of Tehran to work outside its borders, especially in Syria and the Gulf States, but this scenario In which the militias deliberately target US interests in return.
Whatever the likely scenario for the US-Iran confrontation in Iraq, it is unlikely that the damage inflicted on each other will be entirely subjugated or pushed to surrender. All damage to the interests of Washington or Tehran's interests in Iraq would be marginally detrimental to potential conflicts in theaters And the Strait of Hormuz. The party most affected by this conflict will be Iraq, which has no alternative but to uphold its independence and dance on the ropes of neutrality between the two forces in the hope of preventing a war that will be destroyed and destabilized. During which it is merely a side-view that the warriors do not care about, no matter what otherwise.