Introduction

On the surface, the US has been saying it wants Russia's cooperation on Iran's nuclear program in the Security Council this week. So praktike wonders what to make of the timing of Cheney's anti-Russia speech in Lithuania, in which he accused the Russia government of using oil and natural gas as "tools for intimidation and blackmail," "unfairly and improperly restrict[ing] the rights of her people," and taking "actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

After that bit of raw chutzpah, Cheney proceeded, in the words of the NYT, to wade into the energy battles in Kazakhstan while embracing Nazerbayev with smiling praise for Kazakhstan's "political development." Cheney finished his tour in Dubrovnik with the endorsement of NATO membership for an unlikely trio of candidates, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia.

Altogether, the trip was a tour de force -- a nicely judged combination of high-minded Cold War-style ideological conflict with cynical Great Game competition, carefully tailored at each stop to play to the specific anti-Russian (and pro-US) interests of key local players.

Strategic linkages

I don't think there can be any question that the Bush Admin has been making a number of anti-Russian moves in recent weeks and that Cheney's trip was deliberately designed to be provocative. It appears to me that the Russophobe hardliners within the Bush Admin, led by Cheney, have won the internal debates about how to deal with Russia leading up to next month's G-8 summit in St Petersburg.

As important, I also think the provocations directed toward Russia are part of a parallel program to delegitimize the UN process for dealing with Iran, where the US is transparently engaged in faux diplomacy.

In my view, recent moves by the Bush Admin are comprehensible only when they are seen as linked -- part of a broader "forward-leaning" effort to aggressively reassert US hegemony. My fear is that the tactics the US is using in playing the "diplomatic route" re Iran may not only be extremely dangerous as a way of dealing with Iran itself. Those tactics are likely to have far broader and more profound long-term effects on the structure of the international system.

Where are US foreign policy elites?

Why so little reaction to the Bush Admin's tougher line on Russia by American foreign policy elites ("realists" and "liberal internationalists") who aren't the natural allies ("neocons" and "national greatness" conservatives) of the Bush Admin? Perhaps it's because most foreign policy elites tend to be experts in one area or another with limited overlap -- e.g. nuclear proliferation, Middle East, former Soviet Union, China, Latin America, defense, etc. Or perhaps it's because they've lost the old Cold War habits of seeing linkages across diplomatic and security issues and across regions.

I also think, in part, it's because almost all "schools" of American foreign policy share unquestioningly the assumption that being the sole superpower is in the natural order of things. American hegemony is, at least in principle, assumed to be necessary and/or benign, and its maintenance and assertion is a good thing. What the various schools quarrel about is how best to maintain and assert American power (soft and hard) and "leadership." When liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry and Anne Marie Slaughter question whether maintenance of a unipolar system is actually in American interests, note how gingerly they approach the issue in order to avoid being treated as anti-American heretics.

"Realists" and "liberal internationalists" may tut at Cheney's confrontational style, and some may question his blatant hypocrisy on the subject of democracy. But I'm rarely seeing any challenge to the basic narrative that Russia deserves a smack-down from the US. First, it's become conventional wisdom (albeit of the ahistorical variety) that Russia is rolling back democracy and increasingly flirting with dictatorship at home [ed. - without really explaining why, it seems to be assumed that Putin's "soft authoritarianism" at home should automatically have a negative impact on US-Russia relations on everything from terrorism to trade]. Second, there's a general feeling that Russia has been getting a bit uppity abroad [ed. - Russia is seen as somehow "meddling" where it doesn't belong, even where some American elites actually agree more with Russia's position than that of the Bush Admin -- e.g. issues such as Iran or the Palestinians]

So maybe it's not surprising that it takes a rabid anti-imperialist who doesn't belong to any of the mainstream foreign policy schools, Justin Raimondo, to produce the first article I've read that condemns Cheney's anti-Russia attacks as something more than just undiplomatic and hypocritical. Even Raimondo, however, doesn't fully link Cheney's moves with the diplomatic games vis a vis Iran.

A five-pronged strategic offensive?

To see how recent Bush Admin policy moves are part of a broader strategy of reasserting hegemony, I find especially helpful the following observation by DrLeoStrauss (Stop the Spirit of Zossen).

The U.S. is currently conducting five separate strategic grand offensives:

(a) the roll back of the old Soviet imperial periphery across Eastern Europe, down through the Russian 'Near Abroad' of Ukraine and Georgia and Central Asia;

(b) the on again off again stuttering efforts to isolate China as the new 'Peer Competitor' across both the Asian Pacific rim and also in Central Asia [ed. - and in recent months, competition in Africa has been added to the list];

(c) conduct an international war on 'terrorism' (such as it is);

(d) lead new international cooperation regarding nuclear and WMD proliferation [ed. - "lead" is a charitably neutral way of describing the Bush Admin goals of (i) leaving to the US the determination of which countries are worthy of obtaining nuclear technology and weapons and (ii) ensuring that no unfriendly state can achieve deterrence against the US use of force]; and

(e) bootstrap the Middle East into modernity through unilateral American force of arms.

(Sprinkle 'democracy' on all of the above).

What's remarkable is that Iran intersects with all five "grand strategic offensives" plus "democracy." That helps explain how and why the Bush Admin has turned the nuclear dispute with Iran into a "crisis" (with considerable help from the Iranians themselves, of course). The Iranian situation offers the Bush Admin an opportunity to make "progress" on a number of its strategic offensives simultaneously -- not just with Iran or with the nuclear proliferation regime but with China and Russia as well.

The UN process is set up for "failure" in the sense that the Bush Admin is not going to obtain the sort of robust steps against Iran that it has sought. Either the Security Council negotiations will produce some sort of deadlock over the statement or, as Bolton has suggested this weekend, the US intends to proceed without Chinese and Russian support. Either outcome would give the US the excuse to ignore the Security Council going forward -- Rice has already been claiming that the Security Council would suffer a fatal "loss of credibility" if it fails to take action on Iran. Next stop, as again Rice has already suggested, is "coalitions of the wiling."

The Bush Admin will likely pin the blame for failure on the "ineffectiveness" of the UN (and international institutions), in general, and on China and Russia, in particular. We should expect the bill of particulars against China and Russia to be three-fold:

• they are authoritarian regimes that cozy up to tyrants for their own narrow economic and geopolitical purposes
• they threaten global energy security (in their roles as major consumer and major producer, respectively), and
• they are potential threats to their neighbors.

Marketing the program

This three-pronged attack draws on several different policy rationales or motives, each with a different way of defining "threats" to American interests:

• Cold War-style: ideologically-defined enemies, based on the "nature of the regime";
• Great Game-style: challenges to US influence/control of global energy;
• US "global leadership"-style: threats to US predominance in any region.

As DrLeoStrauss suggests, even if the Bush Admin's strategic goals were commendable (which I dispute), the simultaneous pursuit of such an ambitious collection of strategic objectives is likely to produce considerable incoherence in execution. Furthermore, as Cheney's trip illustrated, that incoherence will be compounded by relying on such a mix of "styles." It's difficult to reconcile the Cold War-style (e.g. Cheney's ideological assault on Putin's supposed lack of democracy) with the Great Game-style (e.g. fishing for gas deals with Nazerbayev while praising his fifteen-year contribution to Kazakhstan's "political development").

The advantage of this mixed bag of rationales, however, is the same the Bush Admin enjoyed in assembling support for the Iraq war: a bit of something for everyone -- liberal hawks, ideological warriors, "national greatness" conservatives, and old-fashioned military hawks. The fact that no one can explain the "real reason" the US went to war in Iraq isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Of course, such an ambitious program can't be left entirely to the Bush Admin. They need help from pundits and politicians to frame, legitimize and sell the program. Not surprisingly, we've already begun to hear from the usual suspects. A mere four days before Cheney's appearance in Lithuania, Robert Kagan warned in the op-ed pages of the WashPost of a global threat to liberalism potentially greater than Al Qaeda: a "League of Dictators" (read China and Russia) that will use their positions at the UN to undermine the promise of a new international order. Although Kagan's essay is primarily an example of the Cold War-style, he deftly weaves in the "energy security" card by showing how China's ideological and strategic interests (i.e., access to energy) are likely to coincide in places like Africa or Venezuela.

Max Boot has similarly been busy on the op-ed pages. The day before Cheney began his trip in Vilnius, Boot was lamenting the "dictatorship dividend" -- the windfall from rising oil prices enjoyed by "noxious dictators" like Putin and Chavez. Boot hit the trifecta -- the challenge to global "energy security," an ideological conflict, and the threat of "regional contagion."

Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

Since in this article Boot is concerned with nefarious energy suppliers, his list of villains doesn't include China, with which he is willing for the US to make common cause, at least as fellow energy consumers. In a longer piece, I'm confident he'd be able to find a way to lodge China in the enemy camp a la Kagan. As Matt Yglesias notes, Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the PNAC folks always need an enemy, and China was their pre-9/11 favorite. So they may just be reverting to form.

If John McCain's speech at the Brussels Forum on transatlantic relations a week ago is any indication, the "national greatness" conservatives are on the same page as the neocons and, according to Dan Drezner, the "muscular liberals" in the person of Richard Holbrooke are in full agreement with McCain. And of course the human rights folks and democracy true believers have long had China in their sights and are delighted to hear Cheney take on the Russians.

Reporting on his attendance at the Brussels Forum, Drezner notes:

The general tenor of the conference so far has been to focus less on transatlantic frictions and more on the geopolitical and geoeconomic difficulties that Russia and China are posing to the West as a whole. More later, but a question to readers -- will the realpolitik of a rising China and a renegade Russia... be the ultimate driver for a closer transatlantic partnership? And should that be the main driver?

Snark aside, Kagan and Boot give us a taste of the sort of arguments, from the same unholy alliance that brought us Iraq, that I expect to hear against Russia and China as the Bush Admin seeks to reassert American hegemony.

This post certainly requires quite a bit more fleshing out, so let's call it an "Intro." As and if I develop some of these thoughts further, I'll update with links to future posts.

cross-posted at American Footprints

About a month ago, on the occasion of a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld at a confab of defense minister types in Singapore, I wondered idly how one says "chutzpah" in Chinese.

We've just received the answer courtesy of Justin Logan in, of all places, Astana, Kazakhstan where, at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we also learned how it's said in Russian and a few other languages of the region. As Justin notes, the participants included as honored guests nearby countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran.

Given the recent reemergence of security challenges in Afghanistan, and the apparent scrambling to beef up security -- shifting UK forces from Iraq, a few Aussie SAS to join special ops, etc. -- perhaps there's a bit of reassessment going on right now in Washington? Is there time still before the current Quadrennial Defense Review is due to rethink some of those lily pads ?

The Tehran Times caption reads:

Chavez rushes to hug Khatami as he arrives in Caracas late on Thursday. Iran and Venezuela are set to sign twenty cooperation agreements worth around one billion dollars.

Hang on to your wallets.

Will we ever learn? via our brooding friend.

Please note: this is not an accusation. I am not asserting this story is "truth" or "fact." Rather, it is an important cautionary tale, which bears repeating each time our well-intentioned enthusiasms start to get out of hand. It is not an indictment of the enthusiasms but of the carelessness with which they are all too often exercised, or -- to my way of thinking even less forgivable -- of our woefully short attention span.

---

{update Feb 27 1:10PM EST} by nadezhda

As one of the prime (and grateful) beneficiaries of the recent "dominant link hierarchy" subversion initiatives, we have many new visitors today for whom this story may be new -- so here's some background.

For sometime we've been following Iran's ever-growing assault on the internet generally, and blogging in particular, as a mode of expression and connection. We have been especially concerned with the fate of Iranian bloggers, and we have tried to showcase efforts to support them.

We were outraged and saddened to learn of the extremely lengthy prison sentence just imposed on one of them, referred to in the story above. How horrid If the severity of the sentence did indeed have much to do with the public disclosure of his identity on the American-funded radio station! And now we learn via Reporters without Bordersthat another Iranian blogger has been convicted.

We've added a Committee to Protect Bloggers sidebar, designed and kindly contributed to the blogosphere by SarahAnne. as an ongoing reminder. The Committee is insisting that it is truly international and will focus on the human rights dimensions, not push the agendas of specific groups or countries. On the broader issues of the future direction of the global information society, this site sponsored by Reporters without Borders is beginning to focus on cyberdissidents and bloggers specifically.

Regardless of your position on "regime change" (how or whether), we ought to be able to join with the work of grassroots organizations like these -- they're trying to make a difference for the individuals who are caught up in the repression of speech and for the principles of open societies and freedom of association everywhere that the blogosphere symbolizes.

Personally, I think the broader issue of blogging as a new means of freedom of association and expression will be, in the long run, far more important as a global social and political trend in the 21st century than any "competition" between blogging and the commercial news media. Just my 2 cents.

Aziz and many others have posted about this story in which Scott Ritter is alleged to have alleged that the United States would attack Iran in June.

I don't buy it, particularly in light of signs that the Bush adminstration is tilting towards a more European approach. The Bush team has yet to develop a coherent policy on the nuclear question, though it seems to be gingerly moving ahead with plans to ask Congress to fund Iranian opposition groups (the House Bill--H.R. 282--still has only 75 cosponsors, however). And we continue to need high-level Iranian support for the nascent Iraqi government, even if there are some Iranian factions who are funding its opposition.

According to retired General Sam Gardiner's Power Point presentation (subscription, pdf) on Iran, which was used for the mock war gaming exercise in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly, this is what a strategic communications plan might look like:

• Methodology: Stay Ahead of the Story
  – Strategically, criticism of Iran will come faster than argument can be made against the points.
  – Tactically, we’ll continue to dominate the 24-hour cycle but work to reduce perspective by others this time.


• Phases
  – Building the Base
  • Sub-theme: Iran is bad, but diplomacy is the best option for dealing with the problem.
  – Expanding Support at Home and Overseas
  • Sub-theme: (1) Diplomacy is failing. (2) This is not just a problem for the United States,
  – The Time Has Come
  • Sub-theme: Diplomacy has failed; we have no choice.


• Timing: Communications plan and the military plan have to be synchronized.

Until we see this kind of a drumbeat--and we know how loud and persistent this administration can be when it is pushing something--along with genuine efforts (as opposed to Senatorial mumbles) to improve friendly airbases around the region, I won't believe any rumors like Ritter's.

I think that the administration is truly undecided at the moment, and recognizes that it has a weak hand. There may be an element of "strategic ambiguity" going on that is designed to spook the Iranian government. There are certainly reports of American aircraft violating Iranian airspace and of Pentagon teams training in Karachi, but these are mostly taking place under the radar screens of most Americans. The Pentagon, in any case, denies that "U.S. military aircraft" are "flying reconnaissance missions" in Iran. That doesn't necessarily mean that other things aren't going on -- the CIA could be operating UAVs without official Pentagon knowledge, or "military aircraft" might not technically apply to drones, or Israeli drones could be doing the dirty work. Or we could be bluffing. Who knows?

In any case, until the public drumbeat happens, I'm not going to be impressed by RUMINT. I will be thrilled, however, if the adminstration decides to back the European efforts to negotiate a deal and offer some kind of "grand bargain" that recasts our relations in a more friendly light, while continuing to ask that Iran live up to its commitments on human rights. Even if such a policy fails, it would be much better than the current muddle.

UPDATE: Greg Djerejian reacts to a solid Pollack/Takeyh piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Perhaps the vaunted "Triple Track" approach is not dead after all!

Praktike reminds us that Mojtaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi are bloggers who have been jailed by the Iranian government, just for speaking freely. Today, thanks to the media savvy of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, is "Free Mojtaba and Arash" day around the world.

As praktike notes, other arrested Iranian bloggers have described being beaten and coerced into revealing or inventing embarrassing personal information before being released.

Iran does not have an embassy in the the United States, but if you live here you can contact their representatives via their UN mission or the Pakistani embassy.

Dr. Mohammad Javad Zarif
Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran
622 Third Ave. New York, NY 10017
Tel: (212) 687-2020 / Fax: (212) 867-7086
E-mail: Email the ambassador

- OR -

Iranian Representative
Embassy of Pakistan
Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran
2209 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.Washington, D.C. 20007
Email the Interests Section

The Committee asks that you be polite, and make reference to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As a member of the United Nations, Iran is a party to the UDHR, which is non-binding. For bonus points, you can reference the Tehran Declaration of 1968.

For more on human rights in Iran, see also Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

---

{update Feb-22-05 3:30PM} by nadezhda
Prak notes that our brooding friend offers some further observations on the illuminating magic of language and "captivating names."

Some major reasons for brooding

Von at Obsidian Wings has a fascinating and vigorous thread going over how/whether to debate the use of torture, all triggered by the Gonzales hearings and the new legal memo from the Justice Dept's Office of the Legal Counsel. But in Iran, bloggers are facing this dilemma personally in fact, not in theory. This extremely unsettling news from Iran via Hoder and Reporters Without Borders , has set me to more than just brooding, but to absolutely fulminating.

For the past several months, those of us who follow goings on in Iran have watched as the Iranian internal security and judiciary apparatus has been moving against individuals connected to blogging and internet services. They've been after the techies as often as anyone. The pressure has ratcheted up, with reports in December of not only arrests but also compelled "confessions" and torture. This Jan 6 2005 press release from Reporters Without Borders summarizes what's been happening. The page also has links to their previous articles on the situation.

In the past several days, the authorities now seem to have moved on to a full-fledged assault to shut down the entire infrastructure that supports the Persian social network that has built up on the internet. Since the theocrats attempt to monitor and control the most ordinary freedoms of speech, thought and association we take so for granted, the internet has been a rare open space available to Iranians. This is attested by the very high internet usage figures in Iran. For example, one commenter on a Joi Ito thread about the problem noted that Persians are the #3 demographic in Orkut. The reassertion of power by the hard-liners is extending to this space that expresses, by its very existence, a profound threat to what they stand for.

Hoder passes along the following disturbing report, as of Jan 6, which suggests that rather than trying to regulate the internet for disturbing content, the theocrats are trying to shut down the important social network spaces the internet creates.

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.

They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

For ISPs this means a big loss, since much of their recent sales have been because of people writing and reading blogs and surfing Orkut. So the government is effectively eliminating small and private ISPs by bankrupting them, whiteout [sic] paying a political price for it.

He goes on to list some of the actions that might be taken. In addition to technical means of circumventing the authorities, he says:

While still relevant and potentially effective, I believe they are not enough now.

The EU and the US must seriously consider demanding for an end to the Internet censorship during their negotiations with the Iranian government.

We also have to look for ways to beam Internet direcly to Iranian users in Tehran and other big cities via cheap satellite connections.

I call this "open access" and it's actually one of the projects a few friends and I are working on: to use millions of satellite dishes in Iranian houses to access the net, without interference of local ISPs.

According to BloggersWithoutBorders, it seems that Joi Ito, who asked a question about the availability of typepad and live journal and was answered by Hoder in an update to his post, has had his own site just banned, so there may be problems with following up with Hoder directly through his blog. Joi's blog has a growing thread of comments and trackbacks.

Today is just not the day for me to feel that "write your Congressman" is going to do much good -- with their attention absorbed in the current torture debate in the US, I find it difficult to imagine they'll get too wound up about what's going on in Iran. Or if they do get riled, it's going to be in a transparently hypocritical fashion that matches partisan agendas. This is, unfortunately, what happens when we allow our moral bearings to get knocked akilter, and what Lech Walesa meant a few weeks ago when he was quoted by the WSJ as saying:

[The Americans] are a military and economic superpower but not morally or politically anymore. This is a tragedy for us.

Ah well. After I've simmered down, I'll brood on whether some other useful action might be undertaken.

A minor bit of laughter

Which brings me to our favorite brooding friend who, I am pleased to see, has reappeared in a splendid new year's edition, and brings us a taste of Persian humor that's LOL and, pun intended, deliciously funny .

I find I owe him an apology for being a tad cryptic in my end-of-the-year greetings. I told him to hum a sentimental little song without telling him the tune! For shame, since it's been covered by truly all of the greats, although primarily with the English lyrics by Johnny Mercer rather than the French original.

Why is this man smiling? Because President Saparmurat Niyazov's ingenious election officials have invented a revolutionary approach to "Get Out the Vote" efforts. The bureaucrats in Ashgabat have set a new standard for "full service" -- in addition to handing out special gifts for voters who show up to vote, they even make house calls!

"Polling stations were nearly empty throughout Sunday's Parliament election in Turkmenistan, forcing officials to carry ballot boxes door to door. But the government announced a nearly 80-percent turnout in the former Soviet republic that is ruled by a one-time Communist boss who now is president-for-life."

That would certainly get around those pesky problems of long lines due to too few voting booths, provisional ballots tossed because they were cast at the wrong precinct, lost ballots showing up months later in warehouses, and troublesome e-voting or butterfly ballots. Karl Rove, eat your heart out!

Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko, AP (File May 2000)

Not a total surprise, given the inevitable burgeoning PR debacle, but the Office of Foreign Assets Control at Treasury has seen fit to reverse itself.

We've been carping, along with many other friendly bloggers who follow things Iranian, about Treasury's abusrd rule that extended US sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan to publications of dissident authors.

The United States eased a controversial ban on publications from Iran, Sudan and Cuba on Wednesday in a bid to allow dissidents to be heard while maintaining an embargo on official documents.

The rule change by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control comes after Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi sued the United States because its economic embargo on Iran blocked U.S. publication of her memoirs.

"OFAC's previous guidance was interpreted by some as discouraging the publication of dissident speech from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want," Stuart Levey, Treasury's undersecretary for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement.

"This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy," Levey said.

The new rule allows U.S. publishers to engage in "most ordinary publishing activities" with people in Cuba, Iran and Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on interactions with government officials and agents of those countries.
[...]

David Adesnik writes: "My impression has been that SCIRI is not an advocate of Shi'ite fundamentalism."

Setting aside the fact that their name is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI is at least nominally in favor of clerical rule. They don't say so explicitly on their home page, but their list of favorite clerics, such as the late Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr (who was murdered by Saddam's goons in 1980), make it clear that they ain't exactly liberals.

But the more I think about it, that doesn't mean they're jonesin' for a theocracy, or capable of instituting one. Yitzhak Nakash writes in The Shi'is of Iraq:

Sadr had a charismatic aura and was the most prominent intellectual figure among the Shi'i radical ulama of post monarchic Iraq ... The surge in Islamic radicalism symbolized the response of Shi'is to the assault of the Sunni Ba'thi elite on their very identity as Iraqis. While the affairs surrounding the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution served as a major catalyst for stimulating Iraqi Shi'i anti-Ba'thi and anti-Saddam Husayn sentiments, it is doubtful whether there existed a genuine "Islamic revolutionary frame of mind" among the Iraqi Shi'i masses, let alone the socioeconomic infrastructure necessary for carrying out an Islamic revolution. Moreover, the concept of jurist rule (wilayat al-faqih) as developed by Ruhallah Khumayni did not gain ground among the large majority of Iraqi Shi'i laymen affiliated with Da'wa. Also, members of the organization expressed allegiance to an Iraqi entity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and did not support the idea that Iraq and Iran would merge ... Although at times they flaunted their sectarian identity, the Iraqi Shi'is did not go so far as to advocate self-rule or a merger between Iraq and Iran, and instead stressed their Arab origins and attempted to accomodate their dual identity within the framework of the Iraqi state. This point was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the Iran-Iraq from 1980-1988 when Iraqi Shi'is, who constituted a large majority of the rank and file of the infantry, demonstrated their loyalty to the state overrode their sectarian allegiance and discontent with the Sunni Ba'th government.

And later:

In 1991 Iran played a role in making propaganda and it provided weapons to some Iraqi rebel groups, particularly to the Badr Brigade organized by the Supreme Islamic Council headed by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim. The Brigade was composed of Iraqi Shi'is recruited from among refugees expelled to Iran by the Ba'th in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it appears that several thousand of them entered Iraq a few days after the insurrection had started. In training and arming these refugees, Iran demonstrated the continuity of its traditional aspirations to gain leverage over Iraq by influencing Shi'i affairs in the country. Yet more than two years after the War, it seems that if Iran really tried to shape the ideological direction of the insurrection, this attempt did not lead anywhere.

All in all, a mixed bag. I guess it all depends on how one defines Shi'ite fundamentalism. But who knows? SCIRI might turn out to be good small-d democrats after all, and the recent spate of Iran-bashing on the part of Allawi and friends (which were immediately met with hot denials by the hawza) leads me to believe that it's bad news in Iraqi politics to be seen as an Iranian tool. Still, one would think that a staunch and often haughty advocate of a military invasion and democratic transformation of a country would take the time to investigate such things, you know, beforehand.