Kevin Sullivan

And the Sky is Blue

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

I’m a little bit perplexed by the way war proponents and war critics are handling the Iranian level of influence in Iraq.  Regarding the Pentagon’s confusion, I think a lot of it stems from the Al Qaeda brand problem.  I blame the administration for this, mostly, but I also blame the “progressive internationalist” community for turning the war on terrorism into a 1930’s crime novel.  In this novel, there is a clear and obvious bad guy named Al Qaeda.  When you catch that bad guy, or bring them to justice, you’ll have vanquished the problem and made the world safer.  It’s just like jaywalkers and shoplifters, except these guys use bombs and RPG’s. 

The problem with this narrative, as I’ve mentioned before, is that it creates these cute little cubby holes for us to place the world’s bad guys in.  So Iran can’t be backing Muqtada al-Sadr, because they’re already tied in with the ISCI/Badr/Da’wa lot.  Let’s ignore the fact that Iran is clearly grooming al-Sadr in Qom for Mujtahid status, and on the fast-track, no less.  It requires both sides–both the Pentagon and the anti-war Left–to assume a monolithic Iranian policy on Iraqi interloping.  So we get stories such as these, where every single example of Iranian influence in the region becomes groundbreaking news, even though Iran has been woven into the nation’s Shi’a community for decades and decades.  Of course Iran has special operatives–similar to their own Basijis–placed strategically in Iraq.  The foundation was probably laid out during the Iran-Iraq War, so yeah, tell us something we didn’t know. 

The direction of the message and the tone coming from the Pentagon is wrongheaded, by my estimation.  Iraq and Iran share a border, they share a culture and they share mutual interests.  We will not sever those relations, nor should we hope to.  What we can do, however, is try to pressure Iran to cull this behavior, and pick a strategy that meets everyone’s security needs.  Call it a devil’s bargain, or whatever, but it could go a long way towards helping us stabilize the country.  Iran does pull Sadr’s strings, and his behavior will ebb and flow with their dictates.  If it doesn’t, well, let’s just say that we can speculate on what might happen to terrorist insurgents who go astray from the Islamic Republic’s leash.    

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