The Wheel's Still in Spin

Austin Bay, returned from Iraq begins with this provocative
leader:

Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt. ...

Put a circle around Jan. 9. That's the day Palestinians go to the polls to
elect a president. ... Draw another circle around Jan. 30. That's Iraq's first
election day. Underline the two weeks prior to Jan. 30. That will be a savage
fortnight in which terror campaigns and political campaigns collide.
Democratic candidates will be assassinated and polling stations will be blown
to bits, as Saddamite and Al Qaeda reactionaries -- the Middle East's ancien
regime of tyrant and terrorist -- attempt to force an oppressed people to
submit one more time to the yoke of fear.

But they are going to fail.

And earlier Belmont Club post
linked to a Marc
Ruel Gerecht article which argues much the same thing in principle: that a
new Iraqi state represents a real threat to the Mullahs in Iran. He explains
why.

Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary
objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing
around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by
Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical
dictatorship. ... What clerical Iran ideally wants to see next door is strife
that can produce an Iraqi Hezbollah. ... The birth of the Lebanese Hezbollah,
which Iran's ruling mullahs view as their greatest--only--foreign success,
required a civil war and an Israeli invasion. In Iraq, Iran's ruling clerics
have an American invasion. What they lack is civil war. ...

If the neighboring one-man, one-vote clerics can be downed and America can
be physically and spiritually drained in Iraq, then the two most feared,
disruptive forces in Iranian politics--Western-oriented Iranian youth and
pro-democracy dissident clerics--can be further weakened. ... In Iraq, the
U.S. ought to have two obvious goals. To crush the Sunni insurgency before it
can provoke the birth of an exclusive, angry Shiite political identity willing
to do to the Arab Sunnis what the Baath once did to the Shia. If such an
identity is born, it is most unlikely democracy can prevail. Washington must
thus ensure that the democratic process in Iraq, regardless of the violence,
keeps on rolling. As long as it does, clerical Iran will not be able to gain
much traction inside the country.

The really fascinating aspect of both men's analysis is the idea that
freedom and politics are really going to be the agents of destruction for the
"ancien regime of tyrant and terrorist",  not as a figure of
speech but as literal truth. The role of the US military would be strategically indirect and
subtle: to ensure that the old regimes cannot contain the forces that would
naturally spring up against them.

In this view, victory against terror need not take the form of the 101st
Airborne marching into Teheran. It would be enough to merely hold the ring in Iraq to
win over the Mullahs. Nations often return to strategies which they are most
familiar with. Iran
instinctively turned to the Lebanese experience to model its confrontation with America.
It was natural that the United States might remember Europe and Korea when at
war again. In both cases America won a decisive victory not by marching into
Moscow or Pyongyang, but by merely ensuring that Western Europe and South Korea
developed separately. In Iraq the old was new again.

John Burns of the New
York Times describes the potential of the Iraqi election to rock Damascus,
Teheran and even Washington.

On a list of 228 candidates submitted by a powerful Shiite-led political
alliance to Iraq's electoral commission last week, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name
was entered as No. 1. It was the clearest indication yet that in the Jan. 30
election, with Iraq's Shiite majority likely to heavily outnumber Sunni
voters, Mr. Hakim may emerge as the country's most powerful political figure.

Mr. Hakim, in his early 50's, is a pre-eminent example of a class of Iraqi
Shiite leaders with close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs. He spent nearly a
quarter of a century in exile in Iran. His political party, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was founded in Tehran, and its
military wing fought alongside Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war.
American intelligence officials say he had close ties with Iran's secret
services.

For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni
Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to
power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in
Iraq.

It was the Americans who seem most confident about the possible outcomes.
"They say Iraqi clerics are generally wary of the idea of religious
government, partly because of an entrenched doctrinal opposition among Iraq's
Shiite religious leaders to direct rule by clerics, and partly because they
recognize that Iraq's Sunni Muslims would fiercely resist it." Hakim
himself has publicly said that clerics should keep out of politics and remain in
the mosques.

In addition, Iraqi and American officials say, the ethnic and cultural
divisions that have carved deep historical fissures between Iran and Iraq
militate against Iraq becoming a client state of Iran. ... American and Iraqi
officials said polls commissioned by the American occupation authority, and more
recently by the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, have shown
that ordinary Iraqis, including Shiites, are deeply suspicious of Iran's
religious leadership and strongly averse to a government dominated by religious
figures. ...

Many American and Iraqi officials say the talk of Iranian influence here
reflects what they call a more plausible fear: that Shiite dominance in Iraq,
coupled with Shiite rule in Iran, would reshape the geopolitical map of the
Middle East. The development would be particularly threatening to Sunni-ruled
states that border Iraq and run down the Persian Gulf, the officials say,
carrying as it would the threat of increasing unrest among long-suppressed
Shiite populations.

The outcome is far from foregone. The great likelihood is that the
Palestinian and Iraqi elections, far from pouring oil to calm the waters, is
likely to ignite them. While there may be a reduction in physical violence, the
elections herald a shift in the ethnic balance of power and inaugurate a new
standard for a political change in the Middle East. The US is calculating that
its armed forces and political process will give it the edge in the tectonic
upheavals that it will itself provoke.