The Iraqi Election's Effects, from Washington to Tehran

Note: The Geopolitical Intelligence Report will resume Jan.
3.

By George Friedman

Let's begin with two facts.
First, the Iraqi elections were held Dec. 15. That is the important news:
They were held. The Sunni population, along with Shia and Kurds,
participated. Second, U.S. President George W. Bush did not break below 37
percent popularity. In fact, he bounced to about 47 percent.

The
first fact indicates that the Iraqi situation did not collapse into utter
chaos. The second fact indicates that the Bush presidency did not collapse
into impotence. These two facts are obviously connected. They do not end the
story by any means, but they do open a new chapter.

In September and
October, as Bush sank below 40 percent in the polls, we argued that he was
reaching a critical point: As presidents fall below about 35-37 percent,
they start losing their core constituency -- an event from which recovery is
extremely difficult. Bush's presidency was at its red line. We also argued
that the crisis' cause was not just Hurricane Katrina -- although it
certainly hurt -- but also that Bush couldn't seem to pull the situation
together in Iraq. But even though Bush's political base shuddered, it did
not break. And that bought him time to see Iraq develop a sense of order
with the Dec. 15 election.

Looked at in reverse, if Bush had been
flattened completely by plummeting popularity figures, pulling things
together Dec. 15 would have been impossible. The Sunnis were looking to
Washington to guarantee their interests as they entered the political
process. If Bush had collapsed completely, those guarantees would have been
of little value, and the Sunnis might well have pursued a different course.
However, Bush did not collapse, and the Sunnis entered the political
process. Thus the two political processes became intimately bound up
together.

The Baathist and traditional Sunni leadership's decision
to participate in the elections was conditioned by two considerations.
First, and most important, had they not participated they would have been
completely excluded from the regime the Shia and Kurds were crafting. The
Sunnis realized the insurrection was not spreading beyond their own region.
They could sustain their resistance, but the political process was under way
in the rest of Iraq -- the larger part of Iraq -- and they would be left with
chaos in their own region, isolation from the rest of the country and no
political power. Moreover, if they succeeded in driving out the Americans,
they would have been left to the tender mercies of their historical enemies.
So, if they failed to drive out the Americans, they would be in chaotic
isolation; if they did drive out the Americans, they would face much harsher
treatment at the hands of the Shia. The revelation of conditions in Shiite
prisons for Sunnis just before the elections helped drive that point home
neatly.

Secondly, the native Sunni leadership was not happy with
the inroads foreign jihadists were making into the Sunni community. The
Baathists are secular, and the rest of the Sunni community is far from
Wahhabi jihadists. That the jihadists were effective in fighting the
Americans did not necessarily thrill the Sunni leadership, who did not want
to see their sons come under the radicals' influence. Jihadist leader Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi -- useful while the Sunnis were trying to force a military
solution to their situation -- posed an increasing danger to the traditional
leadership. As foreigners and jihadists, al-Zarqawi and his followers in all
likelihood could not supplant the local leadership. Nevertheless, they posed
a challenge that would only increase as the insurrection continued. Also, the
Iraqi Sunnis were not exactly thrilled about Sunnis regularly dying at the
hands of jihadists -- whether as collateral damage or due to
"collaboration." In the Sunni mind there is a difference between killing
Americans (resistance) and killing Sunnis (terrorism). The jihadists were a
useful tool, but only when they could be controlled.

For the United
States, splitting the Sunnis between the jihadist and Baathist/traditional
faction had been a fundamental strategy. Following the miscalculations of
2003, the first U.S. strategy had been to play the Shia against the Sunnis
in order to contain the insurrection in the Sunni region. That having
succeeded, the United States now wanted to split the Sunnis among
themselves, and especially isolate the al-Zarqawi faction.

U.S.
efforts were much more sophisticated than just pitting Sunni nationalists
against jihadists. Washington also worked to exploit internal Sunni
nationalist differences between Baathists and Islamists, between different
tribes, within tribes and even within other groups such as the religious
scholarly body. In other words, it was the ability of the Bush
administration to take advantage of multiple fault lines that led to the
split within the Sunnis -- which, in turn, allowed the constitution to pass
in the Oct. 15 referendum and forced most Sunnis to take part in the Dec. 15
polls.

American thinking was that if the native Sunnis could be
brought (forced) into the political process, the foreign jihadists -- alien
to Iraq -- would have to either start a civil war among the Sunnis that they
couldn't win, or reduce the violence to a level which the Sunnis could
tolerate in their political mode. There was no expectation that the violence
would simply end -- only that in due course it would subside.

From
the Sunnis' standpoint, the election represented a turning point, but not an
irreversible one. Put differently, the Sunnis got to where they were by
waging an insurrection and appearing willing to wage it indefinitely. Hated
by the Shia and Kurds for their role in Saddam Hussein's regime, the Sunnis
understood that, other things being equal, it was their turn to be oppressed
and the United States wouldn't lift a finger to help them.


Therefore, launching an insurrection created a situation in which they
would be neither simply ignored nor reduced to victim status. The
insurrection was the Sunnis' bargaining chip. Indeed, the jihadists, with
their willingness to go to any length to fight the Americans -- and Shia --
were the Sunnis' ultimate weapon. No one could control them but the Sunnis
-- and that only delicately. Using the insurgency and the jihadists, the
Sunnis maneuvered the Americans into a position in which their relationship
with the Shia and Kurds would not provide a sufficient base for managing
Iraq. They created a situation in which the Americans needed the Sunnis in
order to pacify Iraq -- and therefore were willing to protect Sunni
interests against the Shia.

Truth be known, the Americans were not
all that unhappy being forced into this position. The Americans had
developed a complex dependency on the Shia in the fall of 2003 and urgently
wanted Shiite acquiescence. Had the Shia risen, the U.S. position would have
been untenable. Needing Shiite support, Washington had effectively guaranteed
the Shia control of Iraq -- a price it was not happy to pay. The American
concern was not the Shia per se, but their Iranian allies.


Washington's fear was that containment of the Sunni uprising would
create an Iranian satellite in Iraq. That would have had massive
repercussions throughout the region -- particularly for Saudi Arabia, which
fears growing Iranian power. Now, it should be remembered that the Iraqi
Arab Shia are not identical to Iranian Shia. There are serious tensions
between the two groups, which are ethnically, theologically, culturally and
linguistically distinct. So a Shiite government in Iraq is not simply an
Iranian satellite. However, it could well be an Iranian ally, and that was
not the outcome the United States wanted.

Of course, the United
States was also concerned about Shiite ambitions to transform Iraq from a
secular state to an Islamic one -- the last thing Washington needed was
another Iran. So the United States needed to almost double-cross the Shia
without actually doing so -- and cooperating with the Sunnis gave Washington
the opportunity to do just that.

Thus, as much as the United States
-- and the Bush presidency -- was hurt by the Sunni insurrection, the
insurgency carried with it a silver lining. The United States demonstrably
had to contain the Sunnis, and the only option it had was political:
championing Sunni interests against the Shia. The most glaring example of
this was Bush phoning the leader of Iraq's Islamist Shiite-dominated United
Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and urging him to make concessions to Sunni demands in
order to break the deadlock in the constitutional negotiations. Ali
al-Adeeb, a Shiite member of the constitutional committee, said Aug. 26 that
Bush asked Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, to accept compromises that deal with purging the Baath
party from public life. While the United States could not be accused of
simply double-crossing the Shia, it could use the Sunnis' demands as a
platform from which to try to reshape the new regime so that it had a
built-in degree of complexity that would prevent outright Shiite control.
That, in turn, would prevent outright Iranian domination.

The Sunnis
still see the insurgency as their only bargaining chip. They want to
demonstrate that they can moderate it, but they do not -- at this point --
want it to fade. The more al-Zarqawi does, the greater the U.S. dependency
on the Sunnis. They don't want al-Zarqawi to get out of control -- as
stated, he could threaten their own interests -- but they don't quite want
him to go away. The Sunnis will walk a fine line until they reach an
acceptable political settlement with the Shia that can be guaranteed in some
way.

So, the Shia become the dominant power in Iraqi politics. The
Kurdish position is protected. The Sunnis get their piece of the government,
and al-Zarqawi loses his base of operations as Sunni confidence rises. There
is, however one huge loser in this scenario: Iran. Iran should be going wild
over what is happening in Iraq, and indeed it is. We must never forget Iran's
war with Iraq and the trauma it created in Iran. Iran is obsessed with the
ideal of a neutral or pro-Iranian Iraq. The U.S. maneuverings with former
Baathists terrify the Iranians. They have minimal confidence in the
political cleverness of Iraqi Shia, given the historical record. A coalition
of Americans and Baathists is Tehran's worst nightmare. Depending on Iraqi
Shia to protect their interests in the face of this coalition -- interests
the Shia in Iraq don't always share -- is not something they can do.


It is therefore not an accident that, as their primary national security
interests have been torn to shreds, the Iranians have tried to raise the
ante. In ranting about the Jews and the Holocaust and moving Israel to
Alaska, the Iranians are trying to play the North Korea game. The North
Koreans maximize their leverage by appearing to be nearly a nuclear power
and more than a little nuts. This brings the U.S. -- and a bunch of other
nations -- to the table to negotiate with them and give them money or grain
or other little gifts.

The Iranians have deliberately made it clear
that they are going to get nuclear weapons and have hinted that they might
already have them. Then, Iran's president started playing the role of Kim
Jong Il, making it clear that he is crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.


One of the unremarkable constants in the Middle East of late is how
hands-off a position the Israelis have been taking on everything.
Threatening not-so-subtly to take action against Israel is old hat, but
doing so against the background of increasingly touchy nuclear negotiations
is another issue entirely. When the Iranian president began saying that
Israel should be wiped off the map -- or at least moved to Alaska -- the
Israelis obediently perked up and began dusting off battle plans to
neutralize (read: nuke) Iran, with March bandied about as a realistic
timeframe.

There are many things that could complicate U.S. goals in
the Middle East, but none would do so more efficiently than Israeli missiles
striking Iran. Since the last thing the United States needs is an Israeli
preemptive strike on Iran, and the second-to-last thing the United States
wants is a new war in Iran, the Iranians are betting that the Americans will
try to placate them as Washington does with North Korea.

What the
Iranians want, of course, are guarantees on future Iraqi policy. They also
want to make certain that their Baathist enemies are never again in a
position to return to power. And they are expecting the United States to
guarantee all these things. Of course the Sunnis are expecting the United
States to guarantee their interests. The Kurds have always relied on the
United States. And the Israelis want to make sure that the Iranian nuclear
threat is not left to them to handle. Each has its own threat. The Sunnis
can crank up the insurgency. The Shia can invite in more Iranians. The Kurds
can try to instigate an uprising in Turkey (or Iraq, Iran or Syria). The
Iranians can threaten Israel with nuclear weapons, and the Israelis can
threaten a preemptive strike.

Washington does not want any of these
things. That means the United States must juggle a series of nearly
incompatible interests to get a situation where it can draw down its troops.
On the other hand, the Shia need the Americans to protect them from the
Sunnis and the Iranians. The Sunnis need the Americans to protect them from
the Shia. The Kurds need the Americans to protect them from the Turks (and
the Sunnis). The Iranians need the Americans to protect them from the
Israelis. And the Israelis generally need the Americans.

So, there
is enough symmetry in the situation that the Bush administration might just
be able to pull it off. What "it" consists of is less clear and less
important than the balancing act that precedes it. It is in that balancing
act that the United States reduces its forces, pushes al-Zarqawi to the
wall, plays Iraqi and Iranian Shia against each other and gives the Iranians
enough to keep them from going nuclear before Washington is ready to deal
with the issue on its terms. It is dizzying, but that's what happens when
war plans don't work out on the field the way they did in the computer --
which is usually. The administration has actually crafted something
resembling a solution, or a solution has presented itself. Between that and
polls that are a bit above awful, there is a chance the situation could work
out in the administration's favor.

However, as all of this suggests, a
final agreement is not only nowhere in sight, but not even in mind.
Any conclusive agreement that would be acceptable to one group would be
unacceptable to at least one other. In fact, the only thing that all of the
domestic players agree on is that Washington has a role to play as the
ultimate guarantor of any new government. The United States has no problem
with this save one condition: that Washington is not responsible for
day-to-day security. That in turn requires one item: a functional, united
Iraqi army. That too has a precondition: a united army must include the
Sunnis. Again, there is a follow on: the only Sunnis with military expertise
are the Baathists.

Of all the possible Iraqi arrangements, the one
that terrifies Iran is the one that is actually happening: a political
agreement, with the support of all the local players, that involves a
united, functional military complete with unrepentant Baathist elements.
Memories of the 1980-1988 war are suddenly running a lot closer to the
surface. Iran's biggest problem in challenging this scenario is that it does
not have an effective lever. All of the Iraqi power brokers have signed on
for their own reasons, and no one -- even the Iraqi Shia leadership --
believes Tehran would offer a better deal.

Which means that the only
power Tehran can talk to is the one player that has no interest in talking to
it if Iraq is about to be settled: the United States.

Since
Washington is trying to avoid an Israeli preemptive strike against Tehran,
the United States suddenly has an interest in making Israel feel better. To
do that, it needs to get the Iranians under control. To do that, it needs to
talk to the Iranians. And now we have Iran with something the United States
wants (an Israel that is not about to go ballistic) and the United States
with something Iran wants (an Iraq that Iran can tolerate).

The
United States is not going to hand Iraq over to Iran, but should Tehran
choose to complicate matters, neither is the United States going to be able
to withdraw its forces.

Within that imbroglio there is room for
compromise: have the United States -- via a permanent occupation --
guarantee Iraqi neutrality. An Iraq with 165,000 U.S. troops is in neither
Iran's nor the United States' interest, but an Iraq with 40,000 troops at
bases in the western Iraqi desert is. It is enough of a force to prevent
unsavory governments from arising, but not enough to make Iran fear that
Tehran could be flying the Stars and Stripes after a hectic weekend.

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