Unintended Consequence?

The anti-Iran Perception Management campaign is working wonders -- if nowhere else -- in the battlespace of U.S. domestic politics.

As US and Iranian diplomats met in Baghdad on Tuesday for a second round of talks on Iraq, the domestic US political climate appeared decidedly more supportive of an aggressive US posture toward Iran than existed just a few months ago, reflecting the apparent triumph of the Bush administration's narrative on Iran's role in Iraq.

That new narrative threatens to obscure the bigger picture of Iranian policy toward Iraq, widely recognized by regional specialists. Iran's strategic interests in Iraq are far more compatible with those of the United States than those of the Sunni regimes in the region with which the US has aligned itself.

Contrary to the official narrative, Iranian support for Shi'ites is not aimed at destabilizing the country but does serve a rational Iranian desire to maximize its alliances with Iraqi Shi'ite factions, in the view of specialists on Iranian policy and on the security of the Persian Gulf region.

Symptomatic of the toughening attitude in the US Congress toward Iran was the 97-0 vote in the Senate last week for a resolution drafted by its leading proponent of war against Iran, Senator Joe Lieberman, stating, "The murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States." The resolution demanded that the government of Iran "take immediate action" to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.

That vote followed several months of intensive Bush administration propaganda charging that Iran is arming Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and characterizing Iranian financial support and training for Shi'ite militias as an aggressive effort to target US troops and to destabilize Iraq.

But this administration line ignores the fact that Iran's primary ties in Iraq have always been with those groups who have supported the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, including the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Da'wa Party and their paramilitary arm, the Badr Corps, rather than with anti-government militias. That indicates that Iran's fundamental interest is to see the government stabilize the situation in the country, according to Professor Mohsen Milani of Florida International University, a specialist on Iran's national-security policies.

Milani argues that Iran's interests are more closely aligned with those of the US than any other state in the region. "I can't think of two other countries in the region who want the Iraqi government to succeed," said Milani.

He believes the Iranians are so upset with the efforts by the Saudis to undermine the Shi'ite-dominated government that they may try to use the talks with the US on the security of Iraq to introduce intelligence they have gathered on Saudi support for al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.

Trita Parsi, author of a new book on Iranian-Israeli security relations, agrees that Iran's support for the Maliki government stands in contrast to the attitude of the leading US Sunni ally in Middle East, Saudi Arabia. "Look at what the Saudis are calling the Maliki government - a puppet government," he observed. "You're not hearing that from Iran."

James A Russell, a lecturer in national-security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a specialist on security affairs in the Gulf region, agrees that Iran and the US do indeed share common strategic interests in Iraq, at least in terms of rational, realist definitions of strategic interest.

The problem, Russell said, is that the history of the relationship and domestic political constituencies pose serious obstacles to realizing those common interests. Two such obstacles are "the very powerful political constituency for attacking Iran" and support for Israel, said Russell.

James Dobbins, former US ambassador to Afghanistan and director of the Rand Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center, agrees that Iran is not trying to destabilize Iraq. "They have been supportive of the government and hope it prevails," he said. As for the chief source of instability in Iraq, the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, Dobbins noted that "Iranians don't see anything to be gained by Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Iraq".