Richard Whalen

A Battlefield Observer's Insights

Much of what we know about Iranian military capabilities and performance remains highly classified within the military services and the Pentagon, as though Congress, the public and the media cannot be trusted with realistic information. The Israelis learned the hard way about Iran's capabilities from the Iranian-trained Hezbollah units they faced in Lebanon, who stood for 36 days and fought them to a standstill. With first-class Chinese and Russian weaponry, as well as their own impressive small arms arsenal, the Iranians are proving to be disciplined, effective fighters in Iraq and elsewhere.

Recently we have learned about Iran's military actions in Iraq because of the special enterprise shown by the respected Washington-based think-tank, the Jamestown Foundation. Jamestown has just published a first-hand account of Iran's role in Iraq, containing informed insights by an expert American military analyst, Mounir Elkhamri, newly returned from an 18-month tour in Iraq. Elkhamri is a Middle East specialist with native fluency in Arabic from the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He worked with a U.S. logistics brigade, a maneuver battalion and a Special Forces team, and he closely studied Iran's growing involvement in the Iraq conflict. (See the video of Mounir Elkhamris’ talk on Iranian involvement in Iraq)

Even before the U.S. invaded Iraq four years ago, Iran had sent hundreds and possibly thousands of operatives across the open Iraqi border and made secret preparations to influence events through tribes, ethnic groups and political parties, such as the Sadr Corps, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Da'wa Party. These Iranian agents infiltrated the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior and the Department of Immigration, enabling bureaucrats to move Iraqis living in Iran back to Iraq and use various Iraqi "front" companies to increase Iranian influence.

Since the U.S.’s Iraq War began in March 2003, Iran has concentrated its efforts in the heavily Shia populations in oil-rich southern Iraq around the city of Basra, occupied until recently by the British. They are also active in Baghdad and among receptive Kurdish leaders in the north. Iran has been intent on the great strategic prize in southern Iraq: an estimated one-fifth of the world's oil reserves are to be found there. Tehran's strategic rationale in Iraq is serious and substantive, consisting of oil, according to Elkhamri. Washington is caught up in promoting "democracy." Iraq's Shi'ites and Kurds naturally gravitate to the substantive strategic prize and real power, not abstract "democracy."

Tehran is pursuing the idea of restoring a Greater Iran, as set forth by Grand Ayatollah Khomeini during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khomeini's Greater Iran would encompass a "Shia Crescent" extending from Bahrain to the Arabian Peninsula and from Lebanon to Iraq. To expand Iranian power and influence, Tehran relies on friendly political parties and allied Shia-based groups in other Gulf countries -- for example, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and more importantly, the Da'wa party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). U.S. troops cannot politically defeat these Iranian-inspired parties. On the contrary, the heavily armed American "occupiers" on the streets of Baghdad incite Iraqi nationalist emotions and popular antagonism.

Elkhamri says that Iran has steadily increased its influence inside Iraq. The hasty, ill-conceived U.S. "de-Baathification" process in 2003-5, designed to remove Saddam's influence swiftly, sidelined all Sunnis from the Iraqi political process and allowed Iranian-backed politicians and groups to gain sensitive policymaking positions in the new Iraqi government.

Elkhamri describes how Iraqis living in Iran became citizens and Iranians living in Iraq became naturalized. The newly infiltrated Iraqi government agencies and departments gave permission for pro-Iranian agents and propagandists to distribute pro-Iranian material in sensitive regions of the country. For example, the northern Kurdish and southern Shia regions were flooded with propaganda that manipulated the outcome of the federalism election referendums by enabling some individuals to cast multiple votes in different cities, helping to elect pro-Iranian officials. He shows two maps of Kurdistan, one prior to the elections and the other current, depicting the greatly expanded size of Kurdish controlled areas, a key Iranian objective.

To the Tehran regime, a strong Kurdish region in northern Iraq -- much less an independent Kurdistan -- serves Iranian interests by assuring a friendly state on the border and by keeping Iraq weak and fragmented. The separatist tendency of southern Iraq's Shia region with its population of some 15 million, serves the same Iranian interests. Iran's ultimate goal is to ensure that post-Saddam Iraq is friendly to the Islamic Republic because of the sympathy of the Shia populations of the oil-rich south and around Baghdad, and because of the self-interest of the nationalist Kurdish leadership who have access to their own regional oilfields around  Mosul and Kirkuk.

Does the U.S. have an ultimate goal in Iraq? And would it be useful to talk privately with the warring parties of Iraqis and such interested neighbors as the Iranians, the Syrians and the Saudis? Former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, co-author of the Baker-Hamilton Report in 2006, think so, as their report emphasized. It may be the only practical way to discover possible alternatives to endless war. (Read the Iraq Study Group Report)

Iran, of course, can be expected to resist American influence within its sphere and to impose its own political blueprint. Iraqis who want self- determination and independent nationhood free of Iran’s oppressive presence, enough to risk their lives for it, deserve to be heard on how they would limit Iranian and other external influences under a democratic regime based on the rule of law.

I wonder how many Iraqis are waiting for democracy – or are they simply waiting to be free of American interference?

See CQ's Coverage of Sanctions Move