Five Years After: Tehran Remains Enemy No. 1 in Iraq
Fox News, March 22, 2008
Transcript
Five years after the launch of
Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, we are faced with the grim
reality that despite gains in recent months in curtailing
sectarian strife and improving security, Tehran has emerged
as the de facto winner in Iraq. Without a major shift in the
political and security status quo, that will not change.
That’s the bad news. The good news is, there is still a
window of opportunity to reverse the ayatollahs' gains if
the United States, with a sense of due urgency and creative
realism, adjusts its policy.
Back in early 2003, as U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq,
the rulers of Iran moved to turn Iraq into the frontline in
their confrontation with the United States. Their goal? To
make Iraq their avenue to spread Islamic extremist rule in
the Middle East. Although Iran’s nuclear weapons program is
of great consequence, Iraq is the crucial battleground that
will make or break the ayatollahs’ grand vision of
establishing a global Islamic rule.
Tehran’s No. 1 foreign policy agenda is, and always has
been, to export its extremist brand of Islamic rule to the
rest of the Middle East and the world. Iraq, given its
Shiite-majority population, important Shiite shrines, and
extensive border with Iran, was the natural cornerstone of
this grand agenda. These global ambitions are hard-coded
into their constitution.
So it is no surprise that Ali Khamenei, the mullahs’ Supreme
Leader who determines Tehran’s strategic and macro policies,
saw the 2003 Iraqi invasion as a golden opportunity. In an
April 2003 issue, Newsweek reported that “U.S. intelligence
has tracked roughly a dozen Iranian agents directly from
Tehran to Al Kut in the last month … what really unsettles
U.S. officials is the dawning sense that the Iranians
planned in advance to move in as soon as Saddam’s men were
gone.”
With Saddam’s army out of Baghdad, the doors to Iraq were
wide open. This new access gave the Iranian regime an
unprecedented opportunity to work from the ground up to
build Tehran-friendly infrastructures to destabilize Iraq
from within. Its campaign included seven spheres of
influence: economic, political, religious, social,
propagandist, intelligence-gathering, and terrorist. Tehran
pretty much followed the model it was using in Lebanon with
the Hezbollah, i.e. “to send in people who are effectively
guerrillas and have them get in the country and try to set
up social services and decide that these social services are
their ticket to popularity,” as Paul Bremer, the top US
civilian administrator of Iraq, said in May 2003.
Influencing Iraq’s political process and security situation
were and are perhaps the most important facets of Tehran’s
plan. Politically, this included hijacking and rigging of
the electoral process, and using Iraqi surrogate Shiite
groups, groomed for many years by the Ministry of
Intelligence and the IRGC’s Qods Force, as its Trojan
horses.
Tehran also pursued the purge of Iraqi officers with long
experience in thwarting the plots hatched by Iran’s Ministry
of Intelligence. At the same time, it planted its own
surrogates in both leadership and rank-and-file positions
within the security and intelligence apparatus of the new
Iraqi government. Before long, these agencies became
Tehran’s primary instrument in eliminating nationalist Iraqi
politicians who opposed Iran’s undeclared occupation of
their country. The same agencies became the
behind-the-scenes masterminds and operatives of the
sectarian conflict.
Economically, Iran conspired to keep Iraq weak, unstable and
dependent on Tehran by systematically destroying Iraq’s
infrastructure while negotiating lucrative contracts for the
very same projects those surrogates had destroyed. The
bombing of power and water plants to blowing up factories
and pipelines, are just a few examples.
Unfortunately, U.S. policy has unintentionally yet
effectively benefited the Iranian regime. In 2003, when
Iraq’s government collapsed, the U.S. made a flawed
assessment of who its foes and friends were in Iraq, and
threw open its doors to Tehran’s Trojan horses. It
compounded the mistake by bombing the bases of the staunchly
anti-fundamentalist Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) (even
though before the war the group had publicly declared its
non-belligerence) in exchange for Tehran’s promise of non
interference in Iraq. MEK forces later voluntarily handed
over all their heavy weapons and small arms to the coalition
forces as part of a consolidation of their forces in their
main headquarters in Ashraf City, Iraq. Ashraf residents
were later recognized as “protected persons" under the Forth
Geneva Convention.
Five years on, we can look back and clearly see that the
strategic enemy in Iraq is the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran.
As long as the mullahs rule Iran, Iraq will never be fully
secure or truly democratic. Such an Iraq will sooner or
later, likely turn into a client state of Iran, ensuring
decades of bloodshed and chaos in the region and beyond.
Five years on, we can also look back and see that brave,
nationalist Iraqis of all religious and ethnic backgrounds
are rising to make a stand against the ayatollahs and their
proxies. In their struggle to evict Tehran from their
country, these Iraqi leaders have naturally and logically
come to the realization that such an effort cannot succeed
without forging a strategic alliance with the ayatollahs’
enemies from within.
In June 2006, senior Iraqi political figures released a
declaration signed by an impressive 5.2 million Iraqis, who
emphasized that the MEK was “the counterbalance to the
Iranian regime's intervention.” A year later, Tehran’s
failure to gain grassroots support among Shiites was exposed
when more than 300,000 Shiites in southern Iraq called for
an end to "Iranian terrorist interferences," and supported
the continued presence of the Iranian opposition in Ashraf
City, Iraq, as a guarantee for Iraq's independence from the
Iranian regime's ominous domination.
Five years after its initial assessment of the internal and
external forces influencing the situation in Iraq,
Washington should have a true, battle-tested understanding
of who its foes and friends are, and adjust its strategy and
tactics accordingly. That requires evicting Tehran and its
surrogates from Iraq, empowering the anti-extremist voices
of Iraqis, as well as reaching out to those Iranians who are
committed to establishing a free and democratic Iran. Time
is fast running out.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
