[Marxism] NY Times still not convinced of US-Iran "common interests" in "Quisling regime" in Iraq

[Louis Proyect]

Fred Feldman wrote:
> July 2, 2007
> U.S. Ties Iran to Deadly Iraq Attack 
> By MICHAEL R. GORDON
> BAGHDAD, July 2 - Iranian operatives helped plan a January raid in Karbala
> in which five American soldiers were killed, an American military spokesman
> in Iraq said today.

Well, Iraq does not present the kind of clear-cut class distinctions 
that the war in Vietnam did. It is filled with what crime novelists call 
paradoxes and Marxists call contradictions.

Turkey, the US's main ally in the region, is threatening to invade Iraq 
to smash the Kurds, the other main ally.

The US brandishes the saber against Iran while counting on the support 
of Shia death squads that are directed by SCIRI, a party whose leaders 
are in close contact with Iran.

The US claims that the Sunni insurgents are a curse but tries to make an 
alliance with them against foreign Jihadists.

I simply can't get on board with these Marcyite-type Manichean divisions 
of world politics between white hats and black hats. Meanwhile, here's 
another interesting article from Robert Dreyfuss whose Huffington Post 
article nobody has bothered to comment on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-dreyfuss/the-shiite-paradox_b_3951.html
The Shiite Paradox
Posted July 10, 2005 | 05:05 PM (EST)

Recent news from Iraq has engendered an inescapable, and exquisite, 
paradox for the neoconservative backers of the war in Iraq. Happily I 
want to draw it out.

Astonishingly, the very Iraqi government whose supposed legitimacy the 
neocons want Americans to support has now made a deal with the 
neoconservatives’ worst devil, the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran. 
Specifically, the Iraqi defense minister made a high profile visit to 
Teheran last week, during which he concluded a deal with the mullahs. 
According to the terms of that deal, Iran will now begin training Iraq’s 
very own supposedly pro-American armed forces.

Let’s be clear, so we can enjoy the irony. On one hand the neocons are 
burbling about regime change in Iran, about bombing its nuclear 
facilities, even about invading Iran. Their leading Iran specialists, 
such as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, consider 
Iran the heart of the so-called “terror masters,” allegedly allies to Al 
Qaeda. On the other hand, the neoconservatives want us to continue to 
throw our boys’ lives and billions of U.S. dollars for years to come 
behind supporting the Shiite-run Iraqi regime that is now formally 
allied to Iran. What gives?

The problem in Iraq, and the centerpiece of the quagmire there, is that 
the United States is stuck deep in the quicksand of Iraq’s theocratic 
regime run by two Shiite fundamentalist parties, Al Dawa (whose leader 
is now Iraq’s prime minister) and the Supreme Council for the Islamic 
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Both have been strongly supported by Iran 
since the 1980s, and still have close links to Iran’s clergy. Iran 
created and trained SCIRI’s paramilitary force, the 20,000-strong Badr 
Brigade, which is fast becoming the core of Iraq’s fledgling armed 
forces. So the new agreement between Iran and Iraq just formalizes a 
long-standing alliance between Teheran and Iraq’s Shiite paramilitaries. 
It guarantees that Iran will maintain and expand its worrisome role in 
Iraq for years to come.

Common sense, it seems, would indicate that the United States ought to 
start worrying more about the threat to U.S. interests from the Shiite 
fundamentalists like SCIRI and Dawa, especially as their alliance with 
Iran comes more clearly into focus. Instead of locking ourselves into 
support for the illegitimate (and U.S.-installed) government of Iraq, we 
ought to be seeking a deal with the largely Sunni resistance in Iraq. 
Many Sunnis, including moderate, secular nationalist ones who are the 
core of resistance in Iraq, consider SCIRI and Dawa to be cats’-paws for 
Iran -- and they’re mostly right.

Quietly, SCIRI, Dawa, and the even more fanatical -- and Iran-linked -- 
forces of junior Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr are busily transforming 
Iraqi society in areas they control into Iran-like theocracies. A 
terrifying report in the New York Times, from a correspondent in Basra, 
described in great detail how thuggish Shiite gangs are imposing 
extreme-right, religious orthodoxy on Iraq’s second-largest city. The 
fanatics are attacking liquor stores, movie houses, video stores, and 
barber shops (because barber shops shave beards). Worse, they are 
assassinating secular political leaders and Sunnis. Where is the 
neoconservative and Bush administration criticism of such terrorism?

President Bush -- and his neoconservative allies -- insist that America 
will persevere in supporting Iraq’s regime and in combating the 
insurgency. By so doing, they are creating space every day for Shiite 
fanatics to consolidate their grasp on southern Iraq and parts of 
Baghdad. Only too late, it seems, will they realize that they are 
creating a monster there. The only reason that these fanatics, led by 
SCIRI and Dawa, don’t openly turn against the United States is that if 
they did, their ersatz regime in Baghdad would collapse overnight. Only 
the power of 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq allows the Shiite regime to 
maintain its grip on power. Whenever SCIRI and Dawa feel that they can 
stand on their own two feet in a looming, tri-cornered civil war pitting 
Shiites against Sunnis against Kurds, they will boot the U.S. out, and 
the real civil war in Iraq will begin.

Ironically, most Iraqi Shiites are not fanatics. They don’t support the 
fundamentalist Shiite parties. For generations, they’ve been 
secularized, and many Iraqi Shiites consign religion to a modest place, 
acknowledging the separation of mosque and state. During the Iran-Iraq 
war in the 1980s, the Shiites fought bravely on Iraq’s side, while SCIRI 
and Al Dawa fought for Iran. With every passing day, however, the Shiite 
fundamentalists are gaining in Iraq. There is a slim chance that secular 
Iraqi Shiites could establish a working arrangement with like-minded 
secular Sunnis, including former Baathists, and with the Kurds, who have 
no use for the Shiite fundamentalists. Unfortunately, it is getting 
late. And the ultimate irony is that the United States is supporting a 
regime in Baghdad that is drawing strength from a regime next door in 
Iran that calls America the Great Satan. The silence from the 
neoconservatives on this paradox is deafening.