Is Iraq Shifting to Iran?

Newscom In removing the Taliban and Saddam, the Bush administration effectively elevated Iran to regional superpower—and left Sunnis worried that Iraq would become an Iranian colony. But Gary Sick sees a different shift in the region.

Are we witnessing a historic shift in the balance of power in the Persian Gulf, with Iran assuming dominance over Iraq? A recent fact-finding trip to Baghdad and Najaf suggests that such fears are exaggerated.

In 2003, the United States overturned the secular but predominantly Sunni Arab regime of Saddam Hussein and then presided over the installation of a more representative Shiite government in Baghdad. This was a huge gift to Iran—itself a Shiite state—and represented a historic shift. Although Iraq is a majority Shiite state, never in more than a thousand years had a predominantly Shiite government ruled there.

The Iraqi political experiment, messy as it may be, is showing signs of genuine representative government at a time when Iran seems to be sliding into a corporatist military dictatorship with an Islamic veneer.

The U.S. invasion removed an implacably hostile enemy of Iran that had invaded it in 1980, fought a brutal eight-year war against it in the southern marshes, and created a Sunni Arab coalition with the intent of overturning the Iranian revolution. In an apparent fit of absentmindedness, the G.W. Bush administration succeeded in removing both of Iran’s key rivals—the Taliban was similarly routed in Afghanistan—effectively elevating Iran to the position of a regional superpower.

This, in turn, gave rise to cries of alarm that Iran would parlay this double-barreled and unparalleled act of strategic generosity into a “Shiite crescent” that would threaten the entire Middle East from the Levant to Afghanistan. Many of these voices of apprehension and disdain belong to the tier of old Sunni states in the Middle East—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia—that regard themselves as the legitimate arbiters of regional power and policies but which are finding themselves rendered increasingly impotent by the rise of Israel and Iran as the two leading “regional influentials.”

Perhaps the shrillest voices are the Sunnis in Iraq who recognize that they will no longer be able to dominate the policy-making process in the post-Saddam era. A disgruntled former Iraqi (Sunni) official, when pressed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius about what his country would look like in five years in the absence of American help, answered bluntly: “Iraq will be a colony of Iran.”

Much of this pointing with alarm can be written off as status envy or political sour grapes or even uneasiness that Iraq, unlike nearly all its neighbors in the Middle East, holds elections that are not rigged in favor of the current rulers. But underlying the grumbling is a deep and abiding opposition to the emergence of the Shiites as a political force in the region. Traditionally, except in Iran, the Shiites have been relegated to the status of second-class citizens, and their new prominence in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon (through Hezbollah) is regarded by many Sunni Arabs as intolerable.

There are also whispered concerns that the United States, in granting Iran such political influence in the region, had ulterior motives. Memories are long in the Middle East, and no one has forgotten the special relationship between the United States and the Iran of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. If the United States endowed Iran with its new political clout, the conspiracy theory goes, can a special deal between the Americans and Iranians, at the expense of America’s traditional Sunni—or Israeli—allies, be far behind?

Finally, there is an underlying fear of the Iranian revolution and its establishment of a Shiite Islamist clerical state. Is that to be the future of the new Middle East?