What's In It for Them?

Iran, a country that the U.S. accuses of supporting the Iraqi insurgency (as well as sponsoring terrorism elsewhere), is now a country that we want to talk to. About Iraq. Not anything else, mind you, just Iraq. I suppose it's pointless to talk to them about the nuclear issue, since they seem to have the upper hand on that. But Iraq, well, that's another matter. The Bush administration must be desperate indeed if it feels the need to engage Iran, charter member of the 'axis of evil', on the Iraq quagmire. (It also must be a nightmare for the neo-cons, who once dreamed of being showered with roses on the streets of Baghdad before moving on to the streets of Tehran, to have to now watch a helpless and hapless Bush administration sit down and talk to the Iranians.)

Although the State Department insists that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has a "very narrow mandate" in talking to Iranian officials, one wonders if they will agree to not breathe a word of anything else. What if the Iranian ambassador to Baghdad, between sips of tea at a neutral venue suddenly switches topics and says, "By the way, Zalmay-joon, you're fucked on the nuclear issue. We start uranium enrichment at Natanz in ten days." He might even go on to add, "Regime-change this," pointing to his crotch. Will Zalmay put his hands over his ears and loudly say "BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, I don't hear you!!"?

But seriously, how are the Iranians to take this news? After their sense of victory on the nuclear issue, they will surely look at this as another defeat for America in the region. The Bush administration can argue that it is in the interests of Iran to engage the U.S. on just the Iraq question, for it is in the Iranians' interests for both the U.S. forces to leave Iraq and for Iraq to be a stable, secure and functioning neighbor of Iran. That may not be necessarily true, however. It is in the interests of Iran for Iraq to have a Shia government, preferably an Islamic Republic, and it is in the interests of Iran for that Republic to be subservient to (or at least vastly weaker than) Iran. It is also in the interests of Iran for the U.S. military to be either bogged down in Iraq indefinitely, or to leave thoroughly defeated, as either scenario leaves Iran immune to regime-change plans that may or may not be still on the White House table, and results in the diminution of America's power and prestige.

The U.S. has already conceded a Shia government (albeit with Kurdish elements, which the Iranians seem to have no problem with since the Kurds hate the Baathists as much as the Shias do), but why should the Iranians help George Bush out of his Iraq mess otherwise? As long as the government of Iraq is Shia-dominated (and dominated by Iran), Iran will, to use GW's favorite Iraq phrase, "stay the course". They will continue to sign treaties and contracts with Iraq, they will continue to arm and train the Shia militias, and they will continue to watch with amusement the low-level guerilla war that is sapping America's power. But they will surely not do anything that the U.S. asks of them unless they intended to anyway, or unless, despite Sean McCormack's assertion, George Bush has authorized Zalmay Khalilzad to talk to them about much, much more than Iraq.