The election results are starting to come in now, and
they seem to raise serious questions about the strategic position the US will be involved in Iraq.
Baghdad -- Partial results from Sunday's election suggest that U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's coalition is being roundly defeated by a list with the backing of Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, diminishing Allawi's chances of retaining his post in the next government.
Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Party, likened the vote outcome to a "Sistani tsunami" that would shake the nation.
"Americans are in for a shock," he said, adding that one day they would realize, "We've got 150,000 troops here protecting a country that's extremely friendly to Iran, and training their troops."
Any way you slice it, this situation poses serious problems for America's situation with Iran. The Shia'h connection between the Sistani backed slate and the Iranian hardline clerics is going to be something that will in all likelihood make our already virtually impossible work in denying Iran nuclear capabilities, all but impossible.
Its certainly clear that the government formed will have clear sympathies in favor of Iran over the US. It would be political suicide to maintain anything other, as Allawi's slate is clearly demonstrating. Whether those sympathies will translate into trusting Iran with nuclear weapons is anyone's guess, however.
The partial totals so far show the Iraqi List headed by Allawi, a secular Shiite and onetime CIA protege, trailed far behind with only 18 percent of the votes, despite an aggressive television ad campaign waged with U.S. aid. A lopsided majority of votes, 72 percent, went to the United Iraqi Alliance list, topped by a Shiite cleric who lived in Iran for many years and whose Sciri party has close ties to Iran's clerical regime. More than a third of the alliance's vote came from Baghdad, the cosmopolitan capital where Allawi had been expected to fare well...
Already, Western officials in Baghdad appeared to be downplaying worries about the possible victory by the alliance, topped by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric who spent years exiled in Iran.
The alliance "is a very diverse group of people, from Westernized independents to Sunni sheikhs to people who really believe in an Islamic state, " one Western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity said of the alliance on Wednesday. "It will be hard to maintain unity."
Hard, but not hard enough to change the what will be the basic trajectory toward Iranian alignment. From this point forward, the political situation of Iran and Iraq with become increasingly intertwained with one another. The more bellicos the US dealings with Iran become, the more problems the Iranians are likely to create for us in the Shite regions of Iraq. On the other hand, the more the reform movement gains power in Iran, the better our chances become in Iraq.
The mistake would be in thinking that we could install the reformers in power, an idea which any student of Iranian history will tell you would do little more that drive the Iranian populace to the side of the hardliners. The US may have no other option than allowing Iran to arm itself, and than hope against hope that it provides the nation with the security it's always needed to let the reform movement progress.
This may not be as unbelievable as it seems. In many ways Iran and the US have a great deal of strategic interest in common. If the US and Iran could get over the huge amount of psychological baggage they maintain toward each other, they could find a lot in common. In that sense, a nuclear deterent could be just what the Iranians need to help them get over the persecution complex they have always maintained. Speaking in an interview to Mother Jones, Kenneth Pollock said,
I think if you could remove all of the baggage--all of the ideology, the history, whatever else--and look in purely geostrategic terms, I think it's hard to figure out why the US and Iran would necessarily be in conflict. In fact during the shah's era, before 1979--recognizing that there were all kinds of other problems--the US and Iran worked together splendidly at the strategic level.
But the source of the problem is this history--our support for the Shah, the CIA coup in 1953--has become infused into the Iranian political discourse. The regime that came to power in 1979 during the Iranian revolution actually defined itself as anti-American, and that's now a critical ingredient in the Iranian domestic political debate. That really is the source of our problems--the regime in Tehran continues to see itself as opposing the US. In their eyes, everything the US does is directed at them in a very malevolent way, and therefore they have to fight back against it.