In this assessment of the regional impact of the U.S. invasion, leaders in Iran and Israel—who thought they had the most to gain from Hussein’s ouster—are found holding a mixed bag. Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report , challenges widely held assumptions about whether and how Israel or Iran have benefited from the war.
Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project.
On a parade ground in central Baghdad sit two gargantuan “victory arches,” fashioned of melted guns and helmets. Built in 1989 to mark the first anniversary of the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the arches are composed of two curved swords that cross at the top. According to the architect, Khalid al-Rahhal, one sword points east toward Iran and the other points west toward Israel.
Hundreds of thousands died during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and the ensuing eight years of brutal war—which gained not an inch of territory for either side. Vainglorious and ugly, the arches are a monumentally fitting reminder of a regime that could boast of such a “victory.” But the crossed swords also point toward the two Middle Eastern states that thought they had most to gain from the Hussein regime’s forcible removal. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has indeed given strategic planners in Tehran and Tel Aviv cause for good cheer—but also reason for deep worry.
Iran’s strategic interests have diverged from those of its western neighbor since 1958, when leaders of an anti-monarchist coup withdrew Iraq from the Baghdad Pact concluded three years earlier. The Baghdad Pact—sponsored by Britain and the United States—placed Iraq and Iran between Turkey and Pakistan in a “northern tier” of Western client states protecting the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf from Soviet influence. While the Shah of Iran remained an American favorite until his overthrow in 1979, successive regimes in Baghdad sought leadership of the Arab nationalist struggle with Israel—frequently putting them at odds with the West. Nervous about Baghdad’s “socialist” rhetoric, the Shah armed Iraqi Kurdish guerillas.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution sent shockwaves through the Iraqi regime, which worried that revolutionary fervor might spread to Iraq’s long-suffering Shiite majority. To inoculate the Shiites, the regime stepped up press campaigns implying that Persians were simultaneously inferior to Arabs and a prime threat to Arab unity. The regime dubbed its 1980 invasion 'Saddam’s Qadisiyya'—a reference to the original Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, when Persians were non-Muslim. Ayatollah Khomeini responded that Iranians were defending Islam itself from the infidel Baathists. This all-or-nothing rhetoric fueled the nothing-for-all combat, in which Iraq deployed banned chemical weapons numerous times to repel the Iranian “human wave” assaults.
The scars of this history run deep. Iraqi chemical weapons use—and the international silence that followed—are surely one major motivation for the program Iran probably has to build an atomic bomb. The interim Iraqi defense minister, Hazim Shaalan, has been far more insistent than any U.S. official that Iran is behind the current Iraqi insurgency.
Regime change in Baghdad has left Tehran with a mixed bag of results. The high oil prices that have floated the flailing Iranian economy since 1997 are partly the result of the absence of Iraqi oil from the market. Iraqi oil production has not yet exceeded its artificially depressed pre-war levels; when it does, prices could fall. Some experts think the virtually untapped Majnoon oil field in far eastern Iraq runs underneath the border to merge with a freshly developed Iranian field. If so, there is potential for another border dispute with a war-ravaged Iraq that will be anxious to sell all the crude it can. The only Iraqi militia to fight for Iran in the 1980s—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)—now holds several seats in Iraq’s transitional national assembly and will probably get a few ministerial posts. But an Iranian militia that fought for Iraq—the cultish Mojahedin-e Khalq—has not been dislodged from its base on Iraqi soil and figures in the dreams of some Washington hawks for another regime-changing war. Though Shiite religious parties did well in the January 30 elections, the new Iraqi government will not assume the Khomeini mold because the religious parties must govern in coalition with the secular Kurdish parties or secular, liberal Shiites. Close association with Tehran is not a blessing for Iraqi politicians—in Basra’s local elections, the SCIRI list lost badly. Iraqi Arabs of all sects remain strongly nationalist and suspicious of Iranian meddling in their affairs. The commanders of the 140,000 U.S. troops occupying their country share the latter sentiment in spades.
Does Iran want the Iraqi insurgency to drive out the United States? Then Baathist and Sunni Islamist insurgents might overwhelm the nascent Iraqi National Guard and SCIRI’s Badr Brigade (though maybe not the Kurds), leaving Iran back where it started. Does Iran want the United States to defeat the rebels? Then Washington hawks would have one less restraint on their ideological zeal. The status quo—neither U.S. victory nor U.S. defeat—suits Tehran hardliners best. With the United States bogged down and Iraq’s political future uncertain, the conservative clerics buy themselves time either to achieve a strategic rapprochement with the Great Satan or to acquire a strategic deterrent in the form of the bomb.
Iran’s apparent strategic gains are also its Achilles’ heel. The United States did not topple one aspiring hegemon in the Persian Gulf only to see its rival able to dominate a weak, decentralized Iraq—and, hence, the petroleum patch. The same interest that led Washington to “tilt” toward Iraq in the war of the 1980s is pushing the White House toward confrontation with Iran today. The United States and Israel, moreover, both vow not to “tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran.
Israel was the only Middle Eastern state to applaud the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s dilapidated forces posed no threat to Israel whatsoever, but whenever Washington is preoccupied with the Gulf, it has even less inclination than usual to foster a “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli premier Ariel Sharon has used the time afforded by the Iraq war to build a wall that can be used to annex illegal West Bank settlements to Israel. His unilateral “disengagement” plan, meanwhile, has taken the notion of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians off the table. In the important court of American public opinion, these developments are overshadowed by the war, the Iraqi elections and, now, intensified animosity toward Iran and Syria. Cowed by Bush administration rhetoric, Egypt is cooperating with Gaza disengagement and has signed a U.S. free trade agreement that strengthens Egyptian-Israeli economic ties.
But the Iraq war could have negative consequences for Israel if not for Sharon’s right-wing strategic vision. Certainly, the neoconservative true believers who thought the successor government in Baghdad would sign a peace treaty with Israel were wrong. Ministers in the Iraqi interim government competed to denounce Iraqi National Congress envoy Mithal Al Alusi after he visited Tel Aviv. Later, gunmen trying to assassinate Alusi killed his two sons. The more worrisome trend for the Israeli security establishment is the consolidation of the Iranian hardliners’ power and their reprieve from Washington’s full wrath as the Iraq plot thickens. Most of all, the chaos in Iraq and Israel’s continued settlement expansion have sown fury and humiliation in a generation of Arabs and Muslims. The threat of terrorism is undiminished, and the prospect of genuine regional peace is dim. One fears, in any case, that such a peace is not a goal to which the Hobbesians in Tehran, Tel Aviv and Washington aspire.
