Obama’s Persian Option

The chaotic flight of Iraqi security forces from Mosul and other cities is raising the specter that a national implosion is inevitable. Never before has the post-Saddam Hussein 2003 prediction that Iraq would be torn into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sectors seemed as probable as it does now. But it’s not likely to stay that way for long.

The victorious Sunni hardliners and their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, don’t call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, arbitrarily. They have a regional — pan-Arab, if you will — claim, if for no other reason than their mentors and financiers in Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Persian Gulf dynasties support their attempts to weaken those countries controlled by the Shiite portion of the Arabic world closely allied with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria.

That results in a surprising but logical conclusion. Suddenly Tehran stands allied with the United States in opposition to a common enemy. Must the history of the war on terror be rewritten?

Rouhani’s Proposal

Barack Obama wants to think, take his time and keep all “options” open, except for putting boots on the ground in Iraq. Whichever decision he makes, Tehran will be strengthened. If the Americans stay out of it, Iran could present itself as the only reliable protector of the Shiite community, which would enhance its own regional power ambitions. If the United States joins the fray by sending air force or other military elements to support Premier Maliki, the relationship between Washington and Tehran could not stay as it is; nor could Washington’s relationship with Syria and its president, Bashar al-Assad, remain unchanged.

President Rouhani of Iran has already offered to help the U.S. government in the fight against ISIS and presented his own pragmatic option that Obama will find difficult to ignore should he not want to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush. When he declared in his West Point address that he no longer wanted to send American troops into the battlefields of the Middle and Near East, he received enthusiastic applause in Tehran.

Obama’s “options” lead to “constellations” that, from the American point of view, must first be dealt with. From 2003 to 2011, the U.S. tried to disrupt Iran with a 100,000-strong occupation army in Iraq and create a unified pro-Western nation in the Middle East. Iraq was to be pitted against a theocratic Iran as a “democratic model.” In June 2014, this project resulted only in producing a failed state à la Libya, where the Shiite government is obliged to cling to Tehran in order to avoid losing Baghdad. Not really the sort of resounding success they would like to put on display.

Obama now really needs to ask himself in all seriousness why Premier Maliki should be rescued. In the final analysis, it was his politics of polarization that resulted in the ability of ISIS to gain so much traction. When at the end of 2012 peaceful demonstrations began in Iraq in the wake of the Sunni rebellion in Syria, the Maliki government showed a marked unwillingness for concessions of any kind. Maliki was convinced the demonstrations heralded a coming revolution designed to restore the Sunni community and its clans to power.

Believing that, he responded with army, police and secret agents. According to the U.N., the action resulted in nearly 9,000 deaths. Following that, 6 million Iraqi Sunnis turned away from Baghdad, with them moderate Sunni tribal leaders who had supported the U.S. “surge” in Anbar province in 2007. Now that they are leaning toward the ISIS Islamist hardliners, they will be difficult to recruit to the Western side. Credibility is a priceless asset in the Arab world.

That’s understandable if the White House is playing for time as it did in September 2013, when it first announced it would attack Syria but then failed to get congressional approval for the move. America was on its way to getting involved in the next Middle East war.

A Disaster

Subsequent to the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2012, Obama signed a number of security agreements — among them a strategic framework agreement — and provided massive economic aid to Iraq. Modern weapons systems such as Hellfire missiles, Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets were provided to Iraq. The rationale: An army ready to fight would be created, capable of resisting any opposition. If members of the Iraqi army are overrun or defect to the other side and American weaponry falls into Islamist hands, that would not only be a debacle for Obama and his administration; it would be a disaster. Not only would the Iraqi postwar strategy have failed, but the entire withdrawal from Afghanistan would be questioned as well.

Republicans would concede nothing to the White House and revel in quoting Obama’s past rhetoric surrounding the withdrawal from Iraq.

When Obama announced the total withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011 in his Sept. 1, 2010 State of the Nation address, it meant the Iraqis were to take control of their own destiny, after years of foreign rule and a civil war that may not have been fought solely because of the U.S. military presence, but which was always a factor in rekindling the fires. Thousands of Iraqis disappeared into prisons and torture chambers built with American help, many never to emerge alive again. After so much was said about “democracy” and so little about justice during the occupation years of the Bush regime, now suddenly the word from Obama is they should be careful with their inheritance. He concluded, “… So any action that we make take to provide assistance to Iraqi security forces has to be joined by a serious and sincere effort by Iraq’s leaders to set aside sectarian differences, to promote stability and account for the legitimate interests of all of Iraq’s communities, and to continue to build the capacity of an effective security force. We can’t do it for them. And in the absence of this type of political effort, short-term military action — including any assistance we might provide — won’t succeed.”

Is there no American responsibility in so drastically unhinging a nation that it may never recover? Whoever finds Obama’s evocation for Iraqi self-determination cynical and off the mark is right on target.