[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[Rasker]

USADI Weekly Commentary

May 19, 2005



Checking Iran’s Growing Influence in Iraq


Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi began his three day visit to Iraq on Tuesday shortly after the United States’ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit there.

During her visit, Rice warned Iran to stop its destabilization campaign in Iraq. In response to a question from CNN’s correspondent in Iraq, Dr. Rice said that Iran “need[s] to be transparent, [have] neighborly relations, not relations that try somehow to have undue influence in the country through means that are not transparent...”

She later told Al Arabiya television that “Iran should be a transparent neighbor, that it should be involved in Iraqi affairs as a good neighbor would be involved, not in some surreptitious way,".

The following day in Washington, State Department’s spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that "Iran's relations with people inside Iraq are not transparent” and that it must “stay out of its neighbor's politics.”

"They need to be normal relations, friendly relations, between neighbors, but they shouldn't be in the nature of political influence," he warned Tehran.

Foreign Minister Kharrazi’s trip to Iraq, just 48 hours after Secretary Rice’s visit there, was not by chance. It was Iran’s way of reacting to strong warnings coming from the Bush administration. It was an attempt to show Tehran was bent on continuing its underhanded and sinister campaign in Iraq.

In response to press questions, Kharrazi stressed Iran’s intention to continue to wield influence in Iraq whose new government’s cabinet is made up of officials with close personal, religious and political ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs.

Tehran’s designs for Iraq extend beyond a mere geo-political rivalry with the United States. Ayatollah Khomeini published a book entitled Velayat-e-faqih while exiled in Najaf seminaries in Iraq. Once in power in 1979, he put in practice the book as a blueprint for new regime. "There are no real boundaries between Islamic countries," Khomeini stressed in his book.

Given its large Shia population and its geo-strategic location, Iraq has always been viewed as fertile ground for Tehran to exercise its expansionist foreign policy rooted in Islamic fundamentalism.

Having a regime in Iraq heavily influenced by Tehran would immensely enhance Iran’s regional dominance and its ability to project power in the region. And the way Khomeini’s mullahs see it, “Iraq would be a ripe apple which would be plucked up sooner or later.”

The Washington Times reported last week that Dr. Abdullah Rasheed al-Jabouri, former governor of Iraq's Diyala province told Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus in the US House of Representatives “about the threat facing Iraq from its old enemy, Iran.”

He told the Caucus hearing that "We managed to capture many Iranian agents or Iraqi and foreign nationals who were on Iran's payroll and had received training in terrorist activities."

Dr. al-Jabouri also said that the “United States made a mistake in 2003 when U.S. forces bombed the camps of the military wing of the resistance, the People's Mojahedin, which had operated from Diyala since 1986. He said the MEK provided essential security against Iranian infiltration.”

"I believe the bombing of the Mojahedin camps at the outset of the war was a major blunder, even more so was the U.S. decision to disarm them," he said. "This left the entire province wide open to Iranian meddling and interference."

An Iraqi government, compromised by Iran’s ruling theocracy would pose a significant threat to the regional stability. The ensuing power realignment in the region will have huge global reverberations.

Given the realities on the ground in Iraq, there can be no doubt that the clerical regime in Iran, with its abysmal human rights record, nuclear weapons drive and continued destabilizing campaign in Iraq, is a clear and present danger to its own citizens and the rest of the world.

Renowned historian Bernard Lewis, recently wrote in the Foreign Affairs that the main threat “to the development of democracy in Iraq and ultimately in other Arab and Muslim countries lies not in any inherent social quality or characteristic, but in very determined efforts that are being made to ensure democracy's failure."

Lewis’s comments apply to Iran and illustrate that a coordinated transformation from theocracy to secular democracy is the only way to guarantee an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.

Iran is leading “determined efforts” to undermine Iraq’s nascent democracy with the aim of consolidating and concentrating its influence there.

It must be stopped, whatever it takes. (USADI)



The US Alliance for Democratic Iran (USADI), is a US-based, non-profit, independent organization, which promotes informed policy debate, exchange of ideas, analysis, research and education to advance a US policy on Iran which will benefit America’s interests, both at home and in the Middle East, through supporting Iranian people’s aspirations for a democratic, secular, and peaceful government, free of tyranny, fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.



USADI supports the Iranian peoples' aspirations for democracy, peace, human rights, women’s equality, freedom of expression, separation of church and state, self-determination, control of land and resources, cultural integrity, and the right to development and prosperity.
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