Friend or Foe? (Iran in Iraq)

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International Herald Tribune -- Ray Takeyh, Council on Foreign Relations

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/15/opinion/edtakeyh.php

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In the past week, a parade of Bush administration officials have offered a new threat and new justification for prolonging America's errant war in Iraq: containing Iran.

The ironic aspect of this is that Iran not only enjoys intimate relations with the Shiite government in Baghdad, but that its objectives in Iraq largely coincide with those of the United States.

President George W. Bush took the lead in the week's hyperbolic assertions by claiming, "Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this century: Al Qaeda and Iran." Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned against Iran's "malign influence," while General David Petraeus stressed that "Iran has fueled violence in a particularly damaging way through its lethal support for special groups."

.......

Contrary to Washington's presumptions, Iran's achievement of its objectives is not predicated on violence or the insurgency, but on the unfolding democratic process. The overarching Iranian aim is to prevent Iraq from once more emerging as a military or ideological threat.

Over the past two decades, an uneasy consensus has evolved within Iran that the cause of Iraq's aggressions was the Sunni domination of its politics.....

............

Yet another important Iranian objective is to prevent Iran from fragmenting into three unstable entities. Iran is an intact and ancient nation whose boundaries do not suffer the artificiality of its Arab neighbors. Even so, Iran does possess a restless Kurdish population concentrated in the Azerbaijan province that could make a common cause with a Iraqi Kurdish state and agitate for autonomy.......