UK, Saudi Arabia Worry about Iranian Influence in Iraq

A British official, speaking anonymously to the BBC, said early today that the eight British troops killed in Iraq this year died thanks to Iranian interference in Iraq. At the same time, the Saudi Arabian government has voiced its concern about Iranian influence in Iraq. This caused the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, to drop his plans for a visit to Riyadh. And it led Iraq’s Shi’ite interior minister Bayan Jabr say he didn’t want to be lectured by “some Bedouin riding a camel.” Nationalist bigotry aside, Iranian influence over Iraq was inevitable once the Americans bumbled their way into Baghdad promising democracy.

When the Iranian Revolution was a new and fresh problem facing the world, now Secretary of Defense Field Marshall Donald von Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein to ensure that the Baghdad attack on the revolutionary republic to the east didn’t stall for lack of weapons. President Reagan even restored diplomatic relations with the Saddamite regime in 1984. Saddam Hussein had been abandoned by his Soviet arms providers early in his aggression, and the US decided to use the Iraqi nation as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism.

But the underlying fact is that 60% of the Iraqi nation is of the Shi’ite variety of Islam. The overwhelming majority of Iranians share that version of the faith. Add to that the Saddamite oppression of the Shi’ite community and a liberation theology Muslim-style, and it was inevitable that the fall of the Saddamites would mean a rise in Iranian influence.

What has exacerbated this situation is the American insistence on letting the Iraqi people pick their own government. Naturally, it would be un-American for the liberating Yanks to pick a government for the Iraqi people and force them to live with it, but at the same time, giving the vote to a people militantly opposed to American policy is not a recipe for smooth foreign policy sailing. Throughout, Ayatollah Sistani and to a lesser extend Moqtada al Sadr have been quite clear that the Americans are not welcome, but are tolerated for as long as it takes to set up a Shi’ite ascendancy in Iraq. These men are genuinely respected and their opinions valued within Shi’ite Iraq, and that means that they command 60% of the votes in Iraq.

The Bush administration and its Blairite allies in Britain have said that the war was intended to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to fight a war on global [Fascislamic] terrorism, and to provide democracy in Iraq. The pro-war crowd has wrapped itself in various patterns or red, white and blue to make their case. However, it is just as true to say the war has delivered Iraq into the hands of the mullahs of Tehran, that such was inevitable, and that such was foreseeable. No one in America, Britain or any other western country would fight a war to achieve that. The law of unintended consequences applies more frequently to those who act before they think. And worst of all, this can't be undone.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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