[R-G] Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oi

Mon Apr 7 10:35:45 MDT 2008

  Apr 3, 2008
Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil
By M K Bhadrakumar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD03Ak02.html

In the highly competitive world of international politics, nation  
states very rarely miss an opportunity to crow about success stories.  
The opportunity comes rare, mostly by default, and seldom enduring. By  
any standards of showmanship, therefore, Tehran has set a new  
benchmark of reticence.

By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the  
peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human  
killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy,  
however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps  
silent about its role.

The deal was brokered after negotiations in the holy city of Qom in  
Iran involving the two Shi'ite factions - the Da'wa Party and the  
Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) - which have been locked in  
conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in southern Iraq. It  
appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security  
establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force  
of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally mediated in  
the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations. Suleimani is in charge of the  
IRGC's operations abroad.

US military commanders routinely blame the Quds for all their woes in  
Iraq. The fact that the representatives of Da'wa and SIIC secretly  
traveled to Qom under the very nose of American and British  
intelligence and sought Quds mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge  
political message. Iran signals that security considerations rather  
than politics or religion prevailed.

But the politics of the deal are all too apparent. Iraqi Prime  
Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally  
supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army, was not in the loop  
about the goings-on. As for US President George W Bush, he had just  
spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle  
against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the  
history of a "free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very foolish.

But why isn't Tehran in any hurry to claim victory? After all,  
rubbishing the Bush presidency has been the stuff of Iranian rhetoric.  
Perhaps, Iranians had shut down over Nauroz new year festivities. They  
do take the joyful advent of spring very seriously. Or maybe,  
Suleimani's involvement makes the subject a no-go area for public  
discussion. Third, Iranians should know better than anyone that the  
intra-Shi'ite rivalries are far too deep-rooted to lend themselves to  
an amicable settlement in a day's negotiations.

The turf war in the Iraqi Shi'ite regions has several templates.  
Iraq's future as a unitary state; the parameters of acceptable  
federalism, if any; attitude towards the US; control of oil wealth;  
overvaulting political ambitions - all these are intertwined features  
of a complex matrix. Therefore, the fragility of the newfound peace is  
all too apparent. Tehran will be justified in estimating that it is  
prudent to wait and watch whether peace gains traction in the critical  
weeks ahead.

But the most important Iranian calculation would be not to provoke the  
Americans unnecessarily by rubbing in the true import of what  
happened. Tehran would be gratified that in any case it has made the  
point that it possesses awesome influence within Iraq. Anyone who  
knows today's anarchic Iraq would realize that triggering a new spiral  
of violence in that country may not require much ingenuity, muscle  
power or political clout.

But to be able to summarily cry halt to cascading violence, and to  
achieve that precisely in about 48 hours, well, that's an altogether  
impressive capability in political terms. In this case, the Iranians  
have managed it with felicitous ease, as if they were just turning off  
a well-lubricated tap. That requires great command over the killing  
fields of Iraq, the native warriors, and the sheer ability to  
calibrate the flow of events and micromanage attitudes.

Conceivably, Tehran would have decided with its accumulated centuries- 
old Persian wisdom that certain things in life are always best left  
unspoken, especially stunning successes. Besides, it is far more  
productive to leave Washington to contemplate over happenings and draw  
the unavoidable conclusion that if it musters the courage to make that  
existential choice, Iran can be an immensely valuable factor of  
stability for Iraq.

But it wasn't a matter of political symbolism, either. Tangible issues  
are involved. Questions of vital national interests. Clearly, Tehran  
had genuine concerns over the developing situation in southern Iraq  
close to its border. Tehran viewed the flare-up involving the Shi'ite  
factions with great disquiet. This was apparent from the speech by  
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who led the prayer sermon in Tehran on  
Friday. He bemoaned, "Iraq is currently entangled in many problems."  
But Jannati explicitly didn't take sides between the warring factions.

On the one hand, he advised the Mahdi Army ("Iraqi popular armed  
forces") and Maliki ("Iraqi popular government") to hold talks. But he  
also advised the "popular armed forces present in Basra" (read Badr  
Organization, Da'wa, the smaller Fadhila party, etc.) to intervene  
with the "Iraqi popular government". Third, Jannati also called on  
Maliki to "heed the [popular] forces' views and solve problems  
eventually in a way that would be to the interest of all."

Curiously, he criticized the silence on the part of the Muslim world -  
"especially the Organization of the Islamic Conference" (OIC) - over  
the "enormous brutality and oppression in Iraq". He said, "It is not  
clear why Muslim states, especially the OIC, do not show any reaction  
against so much injustice and oppression in Iraq, while such measures  
could be easily prevented through unity and solidarity." The remark  
contained a barely disguised barb aimed at Saudi Arabia for hobnobbing  
with the US. (US Vice President Dick Cheney had visited Riyadh and  
Baghdad barely one week before Maliki launched the offensive in Basra.)

Yet, all in all, Jannati politely refrained from expressing Iran's  
complete disapproval of the conduct of Maliki in carrying out the  
offensive as part of the US game plan to establish control of Basra,  
which is the principal artery for American oil majors to evacuate  
Iraqi oil. The Sadrists oppose the current plans for opening up the  
nationalized Iraqi oil industry to foreign exploitation.

However, the day after Jannati spoke, Iranian Foreign Ministry  
spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini came down hard on the Maliki  
government. He deplored the use of American and British air power  
against the Sadrist militia - "waves of US-UK air raids on civilians".  
He called on the Shi'ite factions to end the fighting as "continued  
fighting only serves the interests of the occupiers ... and give  
pretexts to occupiers to continue their illegitimate presence" in Iraq.

Most important, he called for negotiations - which had already  
commenced in Qom by that time - "in a friendly and goodwill  
atmosphere". As for the Maliki government, Hosseini expressed the hope  
it would "exercise wisdom, cooperation, mutual understanding,  
patience, calm and contacts with Iraqi political leaders to overcome  
the current crisis period". Plainly put, Hosseini asked Maliki not to  
be dumb enough to sub-serve US interests and to realize where his own  
political interests lay. He pointedly drew a line of distinction  
between Maliki and the powerful Iraqi Shi'ite leadership.

The Iranian accounts of the fighting have shown a distinct sympathy  
for the Sadrist militia, highlighting that the Mahdi Army was being  
"unfairly singled out" for attack by government forces; that the  
Sadrists' quarrel with Maliki was that he "refused to set a deadline  
for US and coalition troops to leave"; that US troops were providing  
the government forces with "intelligence, surveillance and occasional  
air strikes and raids"; and that Iraqi troops were refusing to obey  
orders to fight the Sadrist militia. The Iranian official news agency  
quoted Muqtada as comparing Maliki to Saddam Hussein. "Under Saddam's  
rule, we complained about how the government distanced itself from the  
people and operated under dictatorial terms. Now the government is  
also dealing with people on such terms," he was quoted as saying.

Out of the dramatic developments of the past week, several questions  
arise, the principal being that the Bush administration's triumphalism  
over the so-called Iraq "surge" strategy has become irredeemably  
farcical, and, two, US doublespeak has become badly exposed. What  
stands out is that Washington promoted the latest round of violence in  
Basra, whereas Iran cried halt to it. The awesome influence of Tehran  
has become all too apparent. How does Bush come to terms with it?

What has happened is essentially that Iran has frustrated the joint US- 
British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which the  
strategy of establishing control over the fabulous oil fields of  
southern Iraq will not work. Control of Basra is a pre-requisite  
before American oil majors make their multi-billion investments to  
kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq. Iraq's Southern Oil  
Company is headquartered in Basra. Highly strategic installations are  
concentrated in the region, such as pipeline networks, pumping  
stations, refineries and loading terminals. The American oil majors  
will insist on fastening these installations.

The game plan for control of Basra now needs to be reworked. The idea  
was to take Basra in hand now so that the Sadrists would be thwarted  
from taking over the local administration in elections in October - in  
other words, to ensure the political underpinning for Basra. All  
indications are that the Sadrists are riding a huge wave of popular  
support. They have caught the imagination of the poor, downtrodden,  
dispossessed masses in the majority Shi'ite community. They are hard  
to replace in democratic elections. The sense of frustration in  
Washington and London must be very deep that Basra is not yet  
fastened. Time is running out for Bush to make sure that his successor  
in the White House inherits an irreversible process in the US's Iraq  
policy.

Indeed, in his first comments, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown  
initially refused to say on Tuesday whether the government's plans to  
cut the number of troops in Iraq to 2,500 from 4,000 were on course.  
He simply said British troops were facing "difficulties" in Basra.  
This was followed by Defense Secretary Des Browne saying that return  
of 2,500 troops from southern Iraq this spring had been placed on hold  
indefinitely.

Bush hasn't yet spoken. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put on a  
brave face, saying first-hand information was limited, but based on  
that, "they [Iraqi troops] seem to have done a pretty good job". To be  
sure, Cheney must be furious that Tehran torpedoed the entire US  
strategy for Big Oil. He has had a hard time shepherding the pro-West  
Arab regimes in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, up to this point.

Besides, nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are  
hit. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran  
standoff may have just begun. Last week, five former US secretaries of  
state who served in Democratic and Republican administrations - Henry  
Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright and  
Colin Powell - sat at a round-table discussion in Athens and reached a  
consensus to urge the next US administration to open a line of  
dialogue with Iran.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign  
Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador  
to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).