Iran’s fortunes in post-US Iraq clouded

Associated Press

CAIRO

The U.S. military’s departure from Iraq opens the door to expanded Iranian influence in the Middle East, though that door could close fast if Iran’s closest Arab ally, Bashar Assad, falls from power in Syria.

That’s among the uncertainties looming over the Middle East in the wake of President Barack Obama’s decision to remove all U.S. troops by the end of this month, fulfilling a campaign promise to end the unpopular war and abandoning efforts to negotiate an extension of the year-end deadline agreed to by the Bush administration in 2008.

At first glance, that would make Iran the big winner, especially if the U.S. move heralds a tectonic shift of power in the strategic Persian Gulf region as the United States shifts its military focus to East Asia and the Pacific. But the tumult from the Arab Spring, on top of the end of the nearly nine-year Iraq War, has made the rivalry between Iran and the U.S.’s Arab allies even trickier and predictions more cloudy.

No longer will tens of thousands of American troops be stationed along Iran’s western border. They are leaving behind an Iraqi government dominated by Shiite Muslim parties beholden to the Iranians, who sheltered them for years when Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated Baath regime were in power.

With the American military presence reduced to a few hundred members of an embassy-based liaison mission, Iran likely is to step up infiltration of Iraq’s intelligence services — the key to manipulating Iraq’s internal politics — and expand its links to both Shiite and Kurdish politicians, to the alarm of the country’s Sunni minority.

As the second most-populous country in the Gulf, with some of the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves, an avowedly pro-Iranian Iraq would be a game changer in the power struggle between Iran and the U.S.-backed, conservative Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia.

Iran already wielded considerable influence in Iraq even when U.S. troop strength approached 170,000. The U.S.-led invasion of 2003 produced a strange alliance between the Americans and religiously based Shiite parties tied simultaneously to both Washington and Tehran. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite who had been cool toward Iran, has moved closer to the pro-Iranian groups since a political crisis in 2010 nearly cost him his job.

With the American military gone, Tehran’s prospects for bolstering those ties in Iraq look bright.

At closer examination, however, the future appears less certain. Much will depend on how the key players — including the United States — maneuver diplomatically through the new environment created by the end of the Iraq War.

“The United States must succeed in limiting and countering Iranian influence in Iraq and in creating Iraqi forces that can defend the country,” wrote analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. “The United States must also restructure a mix of forward-deployed U.S. forces and ties to regional powers that can contain every aspect of Iran’s military forces and political ambitions.”

Iran’s ability to manipulate a post-America Iraq is by no means unlimited, in part due to a flowering of Iraqi nationalism, which survived the horrific bloodshed of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war.

Many ordinary Iraqi Shiites harbor bitter memories of the 1980-88 war with Iran, when young Shiite soldiers bore the brunt of the casualties. Among the Sunni minority, hostility to Iran runs even deeper, and much of the talk of Iranian domination stems from overblown comments by Sunni politicians seeking to discredit their Shiite political rivals.