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Sami Ramadani, a professor at London Metropolitan University who fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, writes that Iranian influence in Iraq is ‘highly exaggerated’. These overstated allegations, he implies, are especially rich coming from the United States, which Ramadani calls “the foremost foreign influence” in Iraq.

Ramadani, in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section, takes a crack at some of the motivations for overstating Iranian influence. The historical allusions are worth noting. He writes:

The reality is that though Iran does have influence there – born of US failure to subdue Iraq – the extent and potency of that influence is nowhere near that which is being claimed.

Iranian influence is highly exaggerated for a number of distinct but convergent reasons. First, the US is still considering a military strike against Iran in order to cripple its economic and military infrastructure. A glance at a political map of the Middle East shows that Iran is the only major power that actively opposes US and Israeli policies in the region. But the map also shows that the US has Iran encircled with formidable firepower, including nuclear missiles aboard the US fleets roaming the seas near Iran. Indeed, the Bush administration was only discouraged from attacking Iran after the mission in Iraq was sucked into the quicksands of resistance.

The truth is that, 31 years after the overthrow of one of its closest allies and the rise of a new political order in Iran, successive US administrations have been at a loss as to how to regain a foothold there. They backed Saddam’s war against Iran in 1980 and are still hoping to use Iraq as a military and political base to destabilise or attack Iran. There are credible reports that Iraq’s long borders with Iran are being used to smuggle in arms and spies. Most Iraqis are opposed to Iran’s manoeuvrings with corrupt Iraqi politicians, but a close examination of Iranian policies reveals that they are guided by an intense fear of being crippled by a US or Israeli attack.

Second, there are other players, Iraqi and regional, who are keen on exaggerating Iran’s influence in Iraq. Saddam loyalists, for example, who insist that Iran is a greater danger to Iraq than American occupation. Or the myriad Iraqi politicians who believe that hostility to Iran is their ticket to gaining US backing. Even the Islamic Supreme Council, a sectarian party led by the Shia cleric Ammar al-Hakim – whose forces were stationed in Iran before 2003 – have been drawn into the realities of US domination and been distancing themselves from the more anti-US Iranians, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The 1953  Iranian coup, which overthrew the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq and replaced him with the Shah, still stands out as one of the oft repeated tales of CIA swashbuckling  in exotic lands during the early years of the Cold War. But James North is attempting to set the record straight with his Mondoweiss post, “One good reason Iranians might hate us,” which puts the current animus between Iran and the U.S. in a historical context back further than 1979, which is when many Iran-hawks choose to start their narratives of Iranian “anti-Americanism.”

Countering the narrative that CIA super spies undermined Mossadeq, North writes:

Mossadeq’s government fell mainly because the British had imposed a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil starting back in 1951, and British warships blocked exports. Most of the third world was still under formal colonial rule then, so Iran had to stand alone. Economic warfare, not the cunning Kermit Roosevelt outfoxing flustered and foolish Iranians, was decisive.

Ironically, the true story of events undermines both the CIA’s narrative of calculated espionage and pokes sizable holes in the conspiracy theory, omnipresent in the Middle East and elsewhere, that places responsibility for the 1953 overthrow on an omnipresent CIA.

North writes:

There was unquestionably a Western conspiracy against the Iranian people and their right to control their own national resources, but it mainly took the less dramatic but more effective guise of economic strangulation.

News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for October 25, 2010:

• Commentary: Max Boot blogs that, in light of Hamid Karzai’s acknowledgment that he receives $2 million a year from Iran, “the Iranians have attempted similar dollar diplomacy in Iraq, Lebanon, and lots of other countries. No surprise that they should try the same thing with another neighbor.” Boot says Iran’s policy is to give money to both the Afghan government and, allegedly, the Taliban, and its tendency to make contributions in cash is cynical and “seedy.” But the strategy is “not that far removed from conventional foreign aid programs run by the U.S., Britain and other powers.” Karzai’s decision to take Iranian money doesn’t make him a “dupe of Iran,” and he gets far more money from the U.S., says Boot. Instead, Boot takes the lesson that the revelations should be a warning that if the U.S. leaves, “Afghanistan will once again be the scene of a massive civil war, with neighboring states, and in particular Pakistan and Iran, doing their utmost to exert their influence to the detriment of our long-term interests.”

• Pajamas Media: Michael Ledeen writes that the Wikileaks release shows that Iran is engaging in the “murder of Americans.” Ledeen says the documents show proof that he’s “been pretty much on-target all along” and that his critics owe him an apology. “But the really big apologies are due from our political leaders, who… have failed to respond, either politically (as I have proposed) or militarily,” he writes. He names many officials from the Clinton, Bush and Obama White Houses and says they are “all accomplices to the great evil that is the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and calls for overt support of Iranian opposition movements.

• The Washington Post: Thomas J. Raleigh, a strategic planner at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad since August 2008, opines that while Iraq is building a stable and prosperous economy, “Iran will be feeling increasingly isolated.” Iranian visitors to Iraq will see the benefits of free trade and democracy and will come back to Iran wanting a similar standard of living. “As the Iraqi standard of living rises, Iranian leaders will eventually find themselves confronting an economic ‘comparative crisis’ much like that East German leaders confronted in the 1980s as their people looked enviously ‘over the wall’,” writes Raleigh.

• The Washington Post: Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl writes that supporting free access to the internet should be better funded by the State Department and describes the success of such firewall breaching firms as UltraReach,  a company which allows internet users to circumvent national firewalls. Diehl writes that the companies’ founders say that with $30 million in funding they could “effectively destroy the Internet controls of Iran and most other dictatorships.” Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner has said that defeating internet censorship would be a “game changer” in countries like Iran. Diehl writes that the holdup in funding such projects is rooted in a fear of offending the Chinese government. “State is polishing its policy and preparing yet more training programs, Iranians and people from dozens of other countries are trying to get free access to the Internet,” concludes Diehl.

We’ve written about the hypothesis that all the fuss about Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program is a means to encourage the United States to undertake such an attack in Israel’s stead.

Jennifer Rubin of Commentary has implicitly made this argument, noting that, faced with a U.S. or Israeli attack or an Iranian bomb, a U.S. attack on Iran is the “best of the disagreeable options.” Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal, has made it explicitly.

Former U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman also mentioned this tactic in his latest speech at the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations:

[Neocons] insist that the U.S. must risk regional or even global catastrophe by launching our own war with Iran. Otherwise, Israel will drag us into an even more catastrophic one.

Israeli blogger Noam Sheizaf, reflecting on Jeffery Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the likelihood of an Israeli attack, has even pointed out that the idea of attacking Iran is not a hotly debated topic in Israel itself. The upshot is that Goldberg cherry-picked the people he spoke to in order to convey the idea to the U.S. that Israel is serious about attacking.

Eli addressed this issue in his own initial reaction to Goldberg’s Atlantic story:

Of course to make this threat work, hawks need to convince the White House and the U.S. public that the Israelis just might be foolhardy enough to attack unilaterally.

And, indeed, far-right Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is doing a lot of convincing these days. Haaretz has picked up a Reuters report about how Lieberman has initiated the creation of a ‘day after’ contingency plan that, from Reuters’s description, could prescribe how to either deal with a nuclear Iran or how to deal with the fallout from an Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear installations.

Haaretz (with my emphasis):

In a sign the government is examining a full range of options, Lieberman, the most hawkish member of Netanyahu’s coalition, has ordered ministry strategists to draft a paper on “what to do if we wake up and discover the Iranians have a nuclear weapon”, said the senior Israeli political source, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. [...]

Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal. Its aircraft bombed Iraq’s atomic reactor in 1981 and launched a similar sortie against Syria in 2007.

But many independent experts believe Israeli forces could not take on Iran alone. The Iranians have dug in, dispersed and prepared to defend many of their nuclear facilities.

Even were its warplanes to manage a successful sneak attack, Israel would almost certainly suffer retaliatory Iranian missile salvoes worse than the short-range rocket attacks of Lebanese and Palestinian guerrillas in the 2006 and 2009 border wars.

There would be a wider diplomatic reckoning: World powers are in no rush to see another regional conflagration, especially while sanctions are still being pursued against an Iranian nuclear programme which Tehran says is peaceful.

The planning department of Israel’s Foreign Ministry is one of several units guiding government strategy. Chief among these are the National Security Council and an inner cabinet made up of Netanyahu and six other top ministers, including Lieberman. Netanyahu’s office declined comment on the Lieberman initiative. A senior Israeli official said: “The government’s position is that all attempts have to be made to prevent Iran from going nuclear.”

Israel’s government has voiced cautious confidence in sanctions. But it also believes Tehran could have a nuclear warhead as soon as 2012-2014, an assessment shared by some in the West.

Israeli defence officials have placed a priority on improving the national missile shield and bolstering a network of civilian bomb shelters – a posture that may herald resilience in the face of an eventual nuclear-armed Iran or a bracing for reprisals should Israel strike Iran first.

Retired diplomat Chas Freeman, speaking about the failures of U.S. intervention in the Middle East, raises important points about the neoconservative push for ever more aggressive moves against Iran.

He writes that the U.S. is “at an unsustainable dead end with Iran.”

Freeman, who has a book of collected writings and speeches that was just published by Just World Books (Helena Cobban’s new project), talks about the failures of the past decades, then goes into an illuminating passage on Iran, where there is plenty of blame to apportion on all sides of the impasse. Here’s the excerpt, with the full speech here (my emphasis below):

As if this were not enough, the very same people who neo-conned us into war with Iraq seven years ago are working hard to get the United States into yet another war — this one with Iran. Their reasoning mixes bluff with blackmail. They insist that the U.S. must risk regional or even global catastrophe by launching our own war with Iran. Otherwise, Israel will drag us into an even more catastrophic one. For their part, Israel’s military planners quite rationally worry about the limits the loss of their nuclear monopoly would place on their freedom of action against Arab neighbors like Lebanon and Syria. But they know there is nothing much they can do to prevent this. Military frustration plus popular hysteria about Iran in Israel produces repeated threats by Israeli politicians to bomb Iran. Their supporters here faithfully echo these threats. This, of course, increases Iran’s perceived need to develop a nuclear deterrent to such attack. And so it goes.

Ironically, the primary strategic effect of the policies these neo-conservative warmongers advocated in the past was to eliminate Iran’s enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while greatly enhancing Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine and cementing Iran’s alliance with Syria. As a result, while the United States remains focused on Iran’s nuclear program, it is becoming apparent to countries in the region that Iranian cooperation or acquiescence is essential to address a lengthening list of problems of concern to them. These include issues relating to Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as Palestine.

The self-defeating actions and statements of both sides over the course of the 30-year impasse in Iranian-American relations prove many basic rules of diplomacy. Unilateral suspensions of international law and comity (whether through hostage-taking or demands that rights conferred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime be set aside) are quite naturally resented as inherently illegitimate by the affected side. Neither humiliation nor invective induce reflection; both inspire brooding about how to show unyielding determination, indirectly hurt the other side, or retaliate directly against it. Sanctions that are not in support of a negotiating process constitute mindless pressure rather than leverage and invite defiance rather than compromise. Offers of talks premised on the need to check the diplomatic box before proceeding to coercive measures understandably meet with rebuff. (As a case in point: why should Iran cooperate in legitimizing the use of force against it on the spurious grounds that measures short of war have been exhausted?) And so forth. (I’m tempted to go on, but this is not the occasion for a lecture on strategic self-frustration through diplomatic mis-maneuver.)

In sum, our military interventions in the greater Middle East have been both unproductive and counterproductive. And we have hardly tried diplomacy.

On Sunday, the Tennessean published an expose on the Investigative Project for Terrorism, the “anti-jihad” organization run by Steve Emerson. According to the paper’s investigation, Emerson’s group has received funding from various charitable foundations on the pretense that it is a nonprofit — while passing funds to another of Emerson’s groups, the for-profit SAE Productions. In 2008 alone, SAE Productions — whose only listed staff is Emerson himself — received $3.39 million from the nonprofit parent company. It is not yet clear what legal ramifications might follow from these revelations.

Emerson’s investigations into Muslim radicalism in the U.S. have made him a darling of hardline critics of Islam like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Andy McCarthy, despite critics’ charges that he peddles an overly alarmist line that verges on Islamophobia. (Emerson achieved some notoriety in 1995 for suggesting, in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, that the attack was the work of Muslim radicals.) It will be interesting to see whether these apparent improprieties cause Emerson’s admirers to back away from him.

Fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have been some of the most outspoken, and most published, voices on how the United States can most forcefully impose sanctions on Iran. Suggestions from FDD have included: recalling Switzerland as the representative of U.S. diplomatic interests in Iran to punish them for allowing a Swiss energy company to violate sanctions; sanctioning Chinese and Russian companies who dare to do business with Iran; and, in the same breath, calling for the West to “lay the foundation for military strikes.” But FDD’s Emanuele Ottolenghi, writing in Foreign Affairs, says that it is time for U.S. and European governments to dramatically expand the number of Iranian companies named as Iranian Republican Guard Corp (IRGC) shells.

Ottolenghi writes:

If a business thought to be IRGC-related is publicly identified, government agencies can better investigate its identity and operations. This may then lead to a designation by one or more Western governments. Even if a business is not designated as IRGC-affiliated, however, the mere act of identification is useful.

His proposal sounds decidedly biased against Iranian companies and Western companies which do business in Iran. But as Ottolenghi makes abundantly clear, this is of little concern:

If some governments prove reluctant to designate a firm even after its exposure, designation by one government alone could raise the reputational and monetary risk faced by Western companies for associating with IRGC shells.

Ottolenghi outlines how, ideally, his guilty-until-proven-innocent system would work [my emphasis]:

But identifying Iranian entities linked to the IRGC is not easy. Take the Ghomroud water conveyance system, a network of tunnels built earlier in the last decade in the Isfahan mountains to improve nearby water supply. Two European companies — Germany’s Wirth and Italy’s Seli — supplied tunnel-drilling machinery and ventilation equipment. On the surface, the project appeared legitimate. But according to documents that were, until recently, available on Wirth’s Web site, the Iranian building contractor for the project was Gharargahe Sazandegi Ghaem, a subsidiary of Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC’s largest company. This means that the Iranians could have later used the technology provided by European companies to construct nuclear and ballistic missile facilities, which are often located underground. Given that prospect, Western governments and companies should err on the side of caution in doing business with IRGC-related firms, avoiding contact entirely rather than unwittingly aiding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Continue Reading »

On the Institute for Policy Studies’ Foreign Policy in Focus website, Rob Grace offers a nice primer on U.S. covert activity history in Iran, bringing us right up into the murky present: with the U.S. widely believed to be undertaking covert efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

The problem is that this history and these covert current activities make it more difficult to broker agreements that will resolve the West’s nuclear standoff with Iran.The accusations by Iran’s leadership that those involved in anti-government protests after the 2009 election were agents of foreign governments only fed Iranian paranoia on these issues.

“Although sabotage may prove successful in slowing Iranian nuclear progress in the short term, it actually stands as a barrier to a long-term resolution,” writes Grace, who also blogs for the Foreign Policy Association.

The whole article is worth reading for the historical perspective alone (links abound), but here’s part of his conclusion:

The sabotage effort has seemingly been successful in delaying Iranian progress on uranium enrichment.  But sabotage also disrupts diplomatic progress.

The Obama administration has presented Iran with a “stark choice” – accede to Western demands and join the “community of nations” or “face even more pressure and isolation.” Iran scoffs at both options.

[...]

Still, there are signs that Iran and the West can reach an agreement.  Both Iran and the United States have said they are open to more talks.  And though the United States would like Iran to halt enrichment entirely, a feasible middle ground exists.  As Colin Powell stated recently on Meet The Press:

• … I think if you take them at their word, “trust, but verify,” Reagan’s old line… then put in place a set of sanctions that would be devastating to them if they violate that agreement, and then put in place an IAEA inspection regime… you might be able to live with an Iran that has a nuclear power capability…

Covert activities risk undermining this possibility.  The United States needs to show Iran that a genuine settlement is possible.  If Iran fears that U.S. covert intervention will continue, Iran is unlikely to sign on to an agreement of the sort Powell described.  As in 1953, by pursuing the sabotage option, the United States is sacrificing its long-term interests for short-term gains.

Laura Rozen, on her excellent Politico foreign policy blog, writes that top European diplomat Catherine Ashton has again sent a letter to the Iranians because, despite making approving statements in the press, the Islamic Republic has not officially agreed to the proposed mid-November talks.

Rozen reports:

Ashton’s office sent another letter Friday to Iran’s Ambassador to the EU Ali Ashgar Khaji, asking for an RSVP.

“Given the proximity of the suggested dates and the diary constraints of the parties involved, I do hope for your early and positive response,” Ashton’s head of cabinet James Morrison wrote to Amb. Khaji, in a letter seen by POLITICO.

“While Iran has indicated through the media that they welcome the offer made by HR Ashton, she is still awaiting a formal response,” Ashton’s spokesperson Darren Ennis told POLITICO Friday.

“To this end HR Ashton has reaffirmed her commitment to restarting talks with Iran as soon as possible by writing to the Iranian authorities this morning (Friday), reinforcing her wish to meet on November 15 for three days,” Ennis continued. “She is looking forward to Iran formally responding positively to her proposal in the next few days to make this happen.”

Reuters also reports that Russia is putting pressure on Iran to RSVP and attend the planned meeting between the P5+1 and Iran. Reuters:

[Russian] Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called on Tehran to agree to negotiations chaired by Ashton.

“We urge our Iranian friends and colleagues to officially respond in a positive manner to the invitation,” Interfax quoted Ryabkov, Russia’s representative to negotiations between Iran and the six powers, as saying in an interview in Brussels.

[...] Russia has expressed increasing frustration with Iran’s refusal to suspend enrichment in exchange for trade and diplomatic incentives on offer from the six powers since 2006.

Moscow, which long sought to temper Western efforts to isolate Iran, endorsed harsher U.N. sanctions against Tehran in June and later announced it would not fulfill a contract to sell S-300 air defense missile systems to the Islamic Republic.

News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for October 22, 2010:

• Jerusalem Post: Israeli President Shimon Peres endorsed linkage—the concept accepted by many in the Obama administration and military leadership that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help the U.S. pursue its longterm strategic objectives in the Middle East—at a conference of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute on Thursday. According to the Jerusalem Post, “Peres said that, “for our existence, we need the friendship of the United States of America,” and “…the president said Israel could be of help to the US by enabling an ‘anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East, and the contribution will not be by declaration, but if we stop the secondary conflict between us and the Palestinians,’ in order to allow the US to focus on the Iranian threat.”

• The Race For Iran: Peter Jenkins endorses Gareth Evans post which lays out why Iran’s leaders will not pursue nuclear weapons, but adds that while pressure and persuasion may help deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it may also have the opposite effect. Jenkins suggests that Western powers start focusing on addressing broader regional concerns about a nuclear weapons possession and the impact on the regional balance of power. “Now that most of the evidence points to Iran having opted for self-denial, a new policy is needed, a policy that gives priority to allaying Israeli and Arab fears that a threshold capability will enhance Iran’s regional status and self-confidence,” he concludes.