Why should Iran talk on Iraq? [Link to TBO ]

As admissions of defeat go, Tony Blair’s speech at London’s Guildhall this week takes some beating. But he was only echoing the leaks from James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, which has become the new Iraqi “get-out-of-jail” card for everybody in Washington – even the victorious Democrats. In a sense, the British Prime Minister is ahead of the Americans: he has always harboured a belief, unsupported by any substantiating evidence, that Syria and Iran could be enticed into the reconstruction of Iraq. That is now the new, bipartisan consensus in Washington, an indication of just how desperate the Anglo-American coalition’s plight in Iraq has become.

The democrats who run London and Washington must think the dictators who run Tehran and Damascus are as stupid as they are when it comes to Iraq. Since all the mood music coming out of Washington after the Republicans’ defeat in the mid-term elections is that America is getting out of Iraq as soon as it can find a fig leaf big enough to cover its retreat, nobody has yet explained why Syria and Iran should lift a finger to help. Surely it would be more in character for the two rogue regimes to watch America’s discomfort from the sidelines, making the retreat even more humiliating and embarrassing wherever it can.

If the United States was making it clear that it was in Iraq for as long as it takes to complete the original mission – prepared even to put in more troops to do the job properly – then Iran and Syria might indeed have an incentive to help get America out of its backyard as soon as possible. But nobody in Washington, bar Senator John McCain, is saying that and he might not be saying it for long if he wants to be the next US president; nor is anybody in London, where what support remains for a British presence in Iraq will disappear with Prime Minister Blair’s imminent departure. The United States and Great Britain are led by lame ducks whose lamest policy of all has been Iraq. President Bush is responsible for the worst foreign policy disaster in American history and his name will forever go down in infamy as a result; Prime Minister Blair has been complicit and his place in history will also be irredeemably blackened by Iraq. Hence their joint scramble, in their dying days, to rescue what they can for their reputations.

Until now, the Bush White House had put the kybosh on talks with Iran. No longer. President Bush is replacing Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon with a staunch advocate of negotiating with Tehran. Robert Gates is even a member of the Baker Group, which is set to support Blair’s position that regional talks are the way forward in Iraq. Baker has already broken bread with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. There could be no more telling evidence that, in the current Iraq quagmire, London and Washington have no Plan B; instead, they are reduced to contemplating talks with regimes which have a vested interest in the total failure of their Iraqi venture.

There was a poignant reminder of just how desperate and pathetic London and Washington have become on Sunday when, on the very morning Britain was commemorating its dead of wars past, came news of four more British soldiers killed in Iraq by Shia militia, almost certainly trained and armed by Tehran. It is to such people that Britain and America now look for salvation in Iraq.

Nobody can miss the irony: a mission to create a functioning democracy in the Middle East where before there was only dictatorship is turning for help to two of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world. To be fair to Mr Blair, his Mansion House speech did not call for unconditional Iranian involvement. He wanted the Iranians to “help the Middle East Peace Process, not hinder it; [to] stop supporting terrorism in Lebanon or Iraq; and [to] abide by, not flout, their international obligations”. Just why Tehran would want to do any of the above was not explained. After all, with the main bulwark to its influence and expansion – that would be Iraq – in ruins and chaos, its regional influence has never been greater since the 1979 revolution. There is far more mileage for Tehran in building up the Shia militias in Southern Iraq as a prelude to that oil-rich area’s de facto annexation by Iran once the British leave. Yet for some baffling reason the British commentariat has labelled the Blair position as “realist”.

Policy-makers and commentators in London and Washington do not seem to realise that Iran is playing a long game for leadership of Political Islam in the Middle East. For a Shia, non-Arab nation in a Sunni, Arab region, it is a strategy which requires patience. Hence the extremist rhetoric and threats against Israel, the support for Hezbollah against the “Zionist entity”, the development of a nuclear arsenal, the help for Hamas when Western funds to Gaza were curtailed and the charm offensive in Damascus. All are designed to show that Iran is the power that matters in the Middle East, the only country capable of standing up to Israel and the Anglo-American “crusaders”. That is its manifesto for the leadership of Political Islam, which in turn will make Iran the uncontested regional superpower; Tehran is hardly likely to throw it all away by bailing the Americans out of Iraq – and Syria is now sufficiently under the Iranian sphere of influence to do nothing that does not have Iran’s support.

Some realists in London and Washington argue, sotto voce, that Britain and America should join with Iran in the partition of Iraq, which would be much to Iran’s advantage, and get the Anglo-American coalition out of a hole. The partition of Iraq, albeit with the sweeter sounding name of “federalisation”, is now regarded by some as the least bad solution. The incoming Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, supports the idea of three ethnically-determined, federal regions. British ministers privately mumble that the Iraqis would go along with this and point to the fact that Iraq is, after all, an artificial, colonial creation (they should know, it was created by a previous British government). The horrendous and growing murder and mayhem would seem to demonstrate that the violence won’t stop until each ethnic group is given its own patch.

In fact, the situation in Iraq is far worse than an incipient civil war that could be ended by giving each side their own territory. Iraq now resembles the warring factions of 1980s Lebanon rather than the civil war of 1860s America, with Sunnis killing Sunnis and Shias settling scores with Shias, even as the Sunni-Shia struggle rages on. Think of a country torn apart by 50 Wally Jumblatts and their heavily-armed militias and you have a better understanding of the current state of Iraq than the civil war analogy. Partition would lead to the massive carnage which followed the partition of India. It would drive the provinces of the Shiite south, bordered to the east by their historic Sunni oppressors, into the willing embrace of the Iranians. Meanwhile, the Sunni provinces would likely tolerate the presence of foreign jihadis, if only as a defence mechanism against the more numerous Shiites but also as a base from which to strike at the West. Iraq’s other neighbours would soon be drawn into the struggle.

The Turks would use the pretext of Kurdish terrorism to enter an independent Kurdish region before you could say “Kurdish autonomous zone.” Sunni Saudi Arabia would not look kindly on sharing a 500-mile border with an Iranian protectorate, especially one backed by nuclear weapons. It is no coincidence that the Saudis, with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, have already informed the International Atomic Ene­rgy Agency of their desire to pursue a nuclear programme, in yet another disastrous escalation of the crisis in the Middle East; The Business understands that secret talks with Pakistan to buy nuclear technology have already taken place between Riyadh and Islamabad.

Israel sees most clearly what is happening, because it is happening in its own backyard and threatens its very existence. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been in Washington warning that the point of no return is looming in Iran, a rather different perspective from the new Bush-Blair one. It is inconceivable that the Israelis will allow a nation that wants to wipe it out to go nuclear; eventually, if diplomacy fails and nobody else acts, Israel will launch in extremis a military attack. But the Iranians have learnt from Saddam and spread their nuclear facilities across the country. There can be no clean and swift Osirak-style strike against them. The only way their programme could be seriously retarded is through a sustained bombing campaign; but any Israeli (or American) attack would inflame the Islamic world and trigger massive war and disruption.