The primary goals of the United States in its policies toward Iraq and Iran are fivefold. They are first of all to ensure the flow of petroleum and other hydrocarbons from the Persian Gulf, which has two-thirds of all proven petroleum reserves in the world, and nearly half of all known natural gas. Second, Washington would prefer that US energy companies be in a position to develop Iraqi and Iranian petroleum and gas fields, rather than to continue to have to boycott these two countries. Third, the US wishes to prevent rivals such as China and India from locking Iraqi and Iranian energy resources into long-term proprietary contracts that would exclude the US. Fourth, Washington wishes to prevent Iraq and Iran from emerging as regional hegemons determining the politics and economies of the Persian Gulf and its Levantine hinterland. Fifth, it wishes to preserve the leading position of its two major allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, as regional hegemons instead.
Iran and Iraq have been important to US foreign and military policy since World War II, both because of Persian Gulf petroleum and because of the geostrategic importance of the Straits of Hormuz. The US overthrew the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 because it had nationalized petroleum and had accepted Communists into the government, installing the Shah as a pro-American dictator. The US also had foreknowledge of, and may have been implicated in, the 1963 and 1968 Baath coups in Iraq, because of the Arab nationalist Baath party’s antipathy to Communism.
The 1979 Khomeinist revolution in Iran established it as an anti-American force and signaled new ambitions to be a regional hegemon. The revolution pushed the US into an alliance of convenience with Baathist Iraq. That relationship ended with the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in which Iraq made claims to being a regional hegemon willing to risk injuring the US-sponsored order in the Persian Gulf. In the 1990s, the US policy toward Iraq and Iran was one of “dual containment,” with an attempt to marginalize and economically isolate both the Khomeinist theocracy and the Baath state, and to keep both from playing a role as regional hegemons and so challenging the global hegemon. Containment was also aimed at protecting the two major US allies in the region with aspirations of their own for regional hegemony, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was intended to resolve the problems with “dual containment.” Iran in the 1990s continued to do substantial business with Western Europe and with East Asia. Commitment to the deadly sanctions on Iraq was therefore slipping on the part of US allies in Europe and elsewhere. Both Iran and Iraq continued to pose unconventional threats to US ally Israel, through their sponsorship of the Palestinian guerrilla groups and (in Iran’s case) the Lebanese Shiite Hizbullah. There was some danger that Iraq and Iran would both fall into the Chinese sphere of influence and make proprietary contracts for petroleum and gas that would lock the US out of those essential hydrocarbon markets. After 1996, petroleum became a buyer’s market rather than, as it had been, a seller’s market, which increased the power of Iran and Iraq. Turning them into US spheres of influence through military conquest was designed to resolve these challenges.
Ironically, in 2007 the US is still pursuing a policy of dual containment. Although the Baath regime in Iraq was deposed, the Sunni Arab population that formed its backbone has gone into insurgency against the US Occupation, and many have turned to an alliance with Muslim radical opponents of the US. In addition, the fall of the Baath in Iraq has allowed Tehran to exercise influence in Iraq and other Arab Shiite communities. In many ways, the task of containment has remained central and become more difficult and complicated, requiring a much greater commitment of resources than before 2003.
The United States faces several discrete problems in Iraq, any one of which may cause substantial turmoil. These include the ongoing guerrilla war with Sunni Arabs, the Kurdish issue, and the issue of the Shiite paramilitaries. They also include the instability of the Iraqi government as it has been fashioned under American military occupation, in a majoritarian direction. The possible collapse of security in the oil port of Basra and the spread of instability to other local energy producers loom as severe challenges. If the US handles these problems poorly may produce a major social explosion that would force the US from Iraq and result in long-term turmoil in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
Although Iraq uses a proportional voting system, the parliament functions in a majoritarian fashion, risking a tyranny of the majority. There is a single chamber of parliament, which takes most decisions by simple majority (i.e. a majority of the members of parliament present, where there is a quorum). Of 275 seats, 132 were gained by the Shiite religious parties in December of 2005, a slight reduction from January of 2005, when they had 140 or so (138 is an absolute majority).
The Shiites have an alliance with the Kurdistan Alliance (55 seats), whereby the two ethno-religious groups can consistently outvote Sunni Arabs and secularists. The alliance depends on the Shiites respecting Kurdistan semi-autonomy and the Kurds allowing the Shiites to implement Islamic law and their other desiderata in Arab Iraq (i.e. outside Kurdistan). The Sunni Arabs have only 58 seats in parliament, and have been unable to find allies in important votes. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement or “insurgency” continues in part in response to the permanent marginalization promised them by this majoritarian system within the federal parliament. They can be assured of losing every vote in parliament forever, as long as the other groups maintain a majority of 138. Majoritarian systems are more prone to civil war than other systems, where there are large minorities that cannot avoid being continually outvoted.
The US responded to this majoritarian tendency in the parliament by urging Nuri al-Maliki, when he became Prime Minister in spring of 2006, to form a national unity government. This initiative collapsed when several Shiite parties and the Sunni Arab party pulled out of the government in spring and summer of 2007. The US does not appear to have a viable alternative plan.
Some basic preconditions that make political rebellion more likely have been suggested in the literature. Low-income societies experience more rebellion than high-income ones. Natural resource exports are highly correlated with increased incidence of political rebellion (where a quarter of the gross national product derives from a high-priced commodity, violence is five times higher than in states lacking such commodity rents). Finally, a discourse of group social grievance (based on ethnicity, religion or class) is important to such rebellions.
The Iraqi federal government is extremely weak. It lacks a monopoly over the use of force, and its bureaucracies have poor capacity, morale and responsiveness to the orders of superiors. Tens of thousands of experienced bureaucrats, officers and noncommissioned officers were fired by the Shiite parties that came to power after 2003 on suspicion of Baath loyalties. The new, American-formed army is still weak, cannot fight independently, is ethnically divided, and appears to lack morale and the willingness to fight and die for the Iraqi government. That many Iraqis see their government as an American puppet detracts from their loyalty.
Given the virtual collapse of the central state, power has devolved on neighborhoods, clans and regions. These have thrown up guerrilla cells or militias that conduct neighborhood protection patrols but which also usurp the prerogatives of government. Some are engaged in insurgency against the federal government. Others are involved in death squad activities against members of a competing sect or ethnic group. The major Shiite militias include the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (originally trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps while in exile in Iran); the Mahdi Army of the young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr; the paramilitary of the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadila), which predominates in Basra, and the army tribal levies of the Marsh Arabs and other rural Shiite groups, some of whom have now come into cities such as Basra and Amara to compete with the party militias. Members of the Badr Corps and Mahdi Army have infiltrated local police, Interior Ministry special police commandos, and more recently the Iraqi army. The Mahdi Army in particular is implicated in ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad (a city that began in 2003 as roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shiite, but is now 75 percent Shiite).
The Kurds have the Peshmerga paramilitary, which also is the recruitment pool for some units of the Iraqi army and for some police units such as that in Kirkuk. The Sunni Arab guerrillas have large numbers of cells and local organizations. They consist of Baathists, ex-Baathist nationalists, Salafi fundamentalists, radical Salafi jihadis, and the self-styled “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” The Sunni Arab guerrillas are among the more formidable fighters in Iraq, and they are responsible for the vast majority of bombings and shootings aimed at undermining the new government.
The Bush administration initially attempted to deal with the guerrilla war through search and destroy tactics, which were ineffective and fed the war by alienating the civilian population. From January of 2007, it attempted a combination of troop escalation (“the surge”) and new counter-insurgency strategies (taking, clearing and holding Baghdad neighborhoods so as to exclude the guerrillas). These tactics reduced daily death tolls in the capital, but appear to have allowed an acceleration of Shiite ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, so that the city went from 65 percent Shiite to 75 percent Shiite from January of 2007 through late August of 2007. New violence erupted in Diyala province, and Mosul, Kirkuk and even Basra have witnessed increased attacks. The new tactics therefore can only be considered a very limited success, if they can be considered successful at all. The rationale for the “surge” was to provide breathing space to the federal government to make tough compromises without extensive ethno-sectarian violence in the capital. No such political initiative has been taken, nor is the security situation still conducive to one. The “surge” is therefore a political failure.
Iraq as it now stands is an “asymmetrical federal” state. That is, special autonomy is granted to the three provinces of Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniya, which have joined together in a single superprovince, the Kurdistan Regional Government. Political scientist John McGarry argues that symmetrical federalism as a system is not unique to Iraq. Spain gave special perquisites to the Basques and Catalonians. Canada does so to Quebec. Such arrangements tend to work best when the semi-autonomous region is itself ethnically homogeneous.
The asymmetries in Iraqi Kurdistan are greater than in most such systems. The Kurds have so worded the constitution that they can keep oil revenues from new finds in the province rather than allowing them to go to Baghdad. They insist that no Federal Iraqi troops must ever set foot in their province. They are giving out visas to foreign visitors independently of the central state. They are pursuing independent oil exploration contracts, denounced by the Baghdad government.
The ethnic homogeneity of Kurdistan would decline if it were expanded. The Kurds want to extend their Kurdistan to at least parts of six northern provinces, i.e. three more than they currently have. They want the oil province of Kirkuk to be in this Kurdistan, and to annex parts of Diyala and Ninevah provinces (or perhaps the entirety of these provinces) on the grounds that these three have substantial Kurdish populations. Kirkuk has about 1,000 oil wellheads and under ordinary conditions could pump a million barrels a day of petroleum. Political instability and pipeline sabotage has kept it from producing much petroleum for export in the past two years. The expansion of Kurdistan would require the subsuming of large numbers of Arabs and Turkmen under Kurdish rule, to which many have expressed opposition, sometimes violent opposition. While the KRG in its current form, as three former provinces, is now uncontroversial, the Arab Iraqis, both Sunni and Shiite, generally oppose its planned expansion.
Inter-ethnic violence is already occurring in Kirkuk and Mosul, e.g., but it is not massive. A greatly heightened inter-ethnic conflict provoked by the expansion of Kurdistan poses the threat of not only of domestic instability in the north but also of outside intervention. Turkey views the Turkmen as brethren and would intervene to save them from a massacre if there were extensive violence with the Kurds.
As long as no determination is finally made about Kirkuk, the looming conflict can be put off. The 2005 constitution (article 140) specifies that Kirkuk (Ta’mim) province should have a referendum by late 2007 over whether its population wishes to accede to the Kurdistan Regional Government (a confederacy that merged 3 Kurdish-majority provinces). The federal government in Baghdad has dragged its feet on making arrangements for the referendum, and it will certainly slip to 2008. Whenever it is held, it is at that point that violence could begin to break out, with the peshmerga Kurdish militiamen seeking to attain by force what they could not get by legislation.
The expansion of the KRG is a regional issue because it is opposed by Turkey. Ankara accuses the Kurds of harboring some 5000 Turkish-Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). The PKK is implicated in continued bombings and killings in Turkey’s eastern Anatolia region, part of a decades-long struggle for more autonomy from Istanbul for Turkish Kurds. Turkey has threatened to invade if Kurdistan declares independence, and it clearly dislikes the prospect of the annexation of Kirkuk. The Bush administration has attempted to cool rising tensions between Ankara and Irbil, but with few US troops in northern Iraq and virtually none in the KRG, it has limited leverage.
The Bush administration opposes any secession of Kurdistan from Iraq, an aspiration of the vast majority of Kurds. It has supported the current asymmetrical relationship of Kurdistan to Baghdad, however, and appears to have no objection to the likely annexation of Kirkuk and possibly other territory by the Kurdistan Regional Authority. Washington seems strangely oblivious to the severe Iraqi and geopolitical tensions and even violence that could ensue from Kurdish expansionism. US military authorities appear to have made no provision for what will happen when they withdraw from Kirkuk (in all likelihood, the Peshmerga will take it by force).
Another side-effect of the asymmetrical model is that it can be contagious. Seeing that one group has special perquisites can cause other ethnic groups with contiguous territory to seek similar asymmetries. This development has occurred in Iraq, with the campaign of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq to create a regional confederacy out of eight provinces in Iraq’s south.
Athough McGarry argues that asymmetrical federalism does not necessarily produce violence or secession, many of his examples are large states with otherwise centralized rule. Asymmetricality may not be problematic precisely because it frequently is a concession by a powerful, stable central state. In contrast, countries with only a few ethnically-based provinces, such as Nigeria, Afghanistan or Lebanon, tend to be unstable (Powell 1982). Reducing Iraq’s 18 provinces to only 4, with Kurdistan as one, is probably undesirable.
The US invasion of Iraq in many senses failed to contain the strength of anti-American Arab nationalism in that country. It did, however, much weaken Iraq as a society and ended its role as a conventional military force. The other object of dual containment, Iran, has in contrast been much strengthened by the destruction of the Taliban and the Iraqi Baath governments, Tehran’s primary regional enemies. The Bush invasion of Iraq tore down the wall of containment built by the Sunni Arabs during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and allowed extensive Iranian influence to be exercised inside Iraq (among the Kurds as well as among the Shiites). The Shiite government in Baghdad is a natural ally of Tehran, so that regional US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan feel betrayed because they have lost an ally and seen their Iranian enemy gain one. Iran is not only now strong in Iraq, but also has clients in the Hizbullah party-militia of south Lebanon and the Shiite communities of the Gulf.
Bush has therefore made the containment of Iran much more difficult, and may respond to the enhanced Iranian position by a military strike. Outstanding issues between the United States and Iran are rooted partially in the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah in 1979 and the implementation of the theocratic Khomeinist ideology. Khomeinism consisted of several themes, including anti-American populism, insistence on national autonomy against globalization, rule of the nativist Shiite clergy, and state socialism, with much of the economy nationalized. Such a nativist posture, aimed at preventing the penetration of Iran by international capital or the subordination of its political elite to the global hegemon, helps ensure enmity with Washington.
In addition to anti-Americanism and exclusion of Western consumerism and investment, the Islamic Republic of Iran also is pursuing a nuclear energy research program aimed at achieving the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear energy plants. This program is also, like other Khomeinist policies, aimed at securing national independence and exclusion of world economic forces, since Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei (the country’s theocratic ruler) fears that when Iran’s petroleum fields run dry in an estimated 20 to 30 years, the country will be without resources and will be drawn back into the Western orbit. The only way for Iran to maintain its independence in the long term is to have an independent nuclear enrichment capability and a network of nuclear energy plants. Iran is pursuing nuclear enrichment through the use of centrifuges. There is no evidence that it has a nuclear weapons program, though it is not being entirely transparent to UN inspectors and it has sometimes in the past neglected to report experiments that are required to be made public by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Despite the lack of dispositive evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program, both Washington and its regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are consumed with anxiety about this possibility. Nuclear weapons would enhance Iran’s growing role as a regional hegemon, which seeks to undermine and displace the current regional hegemon, Israel, as well as the global hegemon attempting to penetrate this region, the United States.
A further source of tension is Iran’s role in lending support to Shiite fundamentalist parties in Iraq. Although the US Department of Defense accuses Iran of training rogue militia elements and of supplying them with deadly explosively formed projectiles (an especially effective type of roadside bomb), the evidence it has offered for this activity so far is not persuasive. Nor is it logical that Iran is attempting to undermine the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which is composed of two parties that are very close to the ayatollahs in Tehran. Nevertheless, the accusation that Iran is more or less deliberately killing US and British troops by giving arms and training to anti-American Shiite militias has gained some political purchase in the United States, as witnessed by the late September non-binding US Senate resolution condemning Iran in this regard.
George W. Bush announced in winter of 2007 that American troops in Iraq were henceforth authorized to “kill or capture” any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in Iraq. The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush’s threat by saying, “such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms.” This and other belligerent steps have set the stage for growing conflict with Iran, which could turn violent.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US came after a decade attempting “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran in the Persian Gulf. Increasing world demand for petroleum and US frustrations with the way in which “dual containment” prevented the development of the massive Iraqi oil fields may have played a role in the Bush administration’s decision to go to war. In public pronouncements, however, Bush administration officials stressed the danger that international sanctions on Iraq were slipping.
The overthrow of the Baath government did not lead, as the Bush administration had hoped, to the emergence of a stable, democratic, pro-American Iraq that could prove a launching pad for the projection of American influence and the penetration of American capital in the Middle East. Rather, a failed state emerged, beset by a range of ethno-sectarian militias, many of them aiming at pushing it farther into failure. Because of the danger to essential petroleum and gas-producing facilities in the Persian Gulf that would ensue from a collapse of Iraq, and especially from the outbreak of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the US military is still committed on a large scale to the containment of Sunni Arab nationalists and of Iran-linked Shiite militiamen in Iraq. It is not clear that the US public will support the cost, in blood and treasure, of this sort of containment for much longer, and should domestic politics force a US withdrawal there is some danger that the containment will break down.
Containment of Iran is still a high priority for Washington, as well, but it, too, has become substantially more difficult. Part of the dual containment strategy in the 1990s had been to depend on the enmity of the Iraqi Baath and the Iranian Khomeinists. Now that the Baath is largely gone, the Khomeinists have established enormous influence in Shiite Iraq. Their alliance with Syria (ruled by secular Baathists of Shiite ethnic heritage) and with the Hizbullah of south Lebanon, gives them the three stools of Baghdad, Damascus and Tyre (south Lebanon) as geopolitical allies. Tehran has also allegedly established a closer relationship to the Hamas party of Gaza, despite the latter being fundamentalist Sunnis. Iranian influence is strong among Shiites in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The way in which Iran’s arming of Hizbullah allowed the latter to avoid a major defeat in the Israeli war against Lebanon in summer of 2006 underlined Tehran’s newly long reach. Iran’s nuclear enrichment program may not have military implications, but if it did, possession of a nuclear weapon would also enhance Iran’s role as regional hegemon, since it would make it impossible for Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States to take it down a peg through conventional military action.
The biggest danger facing the region is that continued American attempts at dual containment will break down. Domestic opposition to the continued US occupation of Iraq could force a withdrawal under the next president, and sectarian violence could draw in the neighbors, in a repeat of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, this time as a guerrilla war. Guerrillas have already shown a willingness to engage in pipeline sabotage as a tool of war, and if this tactic spread to iraq’s neighbors, it could have a devastating effect on the world economy. There is also some danger that frustrated US and Israeli hawks might launch a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear research facilities, and that the Iranian response may be such as to plunge the region into war. This eventuality, as well, could substantially roil energy markets at a time when supply is tight and new demand from China and India is growing rapidly.
In short, the military option pursued by the Bush-Cheney
administration in Iraq as a means to achieving the country’s goals in
the Persian Gulf has been a huge disappointment. The security of
energy exports from the region clearly has been endangered. US
firms are still unable to operate in Iraq, because of insecurity, or in
Iran, because of the continued US boycott on Iran. China, Russia,
India and European concerns are still in a good position to win
contracts in Iraq (especially since the Iraqi government has a public
mandate and wishes to avoid being trapped in a subservient relationship
to Washington), and China and India may well defy Washington by helping
develop Iranian energy fields. Iraq’s ability to play
regional hegemon has been destroyed for the foreseeable future.
Iran’s ability to play that role has, however, been exponentially
enhanced. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have demonstrably been
weakened as regional hegemons by the insecurity in Iraq and by the rise
of Iranian influence in the Middle East. The new Bush-Cheney game
of dual containment is far more perilous and likely even less
successful than the Clinton-Gore round.
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