Iran’s Role in Post-Occupation Iraq: Enemy, Good

Neighbor, or Overlord?

Reidar VisserACentury Foundation Report The Century FoundationHeadquarters: 41 East 70th Street, New York, New York 10021  212-535-4441D.C.: 1333 H Street, N.W., 10th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20005  202-387-0400 www.tcf.org

This report is part of a series commissioned by The Century Foundation to inform the policy debate about Iran-related issues.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Century Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress.

Copyright © 2009 by The Century Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of The Century Foundation.

Reidar Visser 3
Introduction

“Despite the speculations by the opponents of Nuri al-Maliki’s government, the Shiite coalition will remain undivided. The Shiites will notify the occupation forces in two different languages that they have no choice but to leave Iraq.”

—Keyhan, conservative daily, Tehran, April 23, 2007

The subject of Iran’s role in Iraq—what it is, and what it should be—is a hotly contested one. Some analysts stress the role of Shiite identity and religion as a unifying bond between Iran’s approximately 60 million Shiites and the 15 million strong Shiite majority in Iraq, mostly concentrated in Baghdad and areas south. A few suggest the existence of even vaster schemes of cooperation, with Shiite solidarity extending from Iran via Iraq to the Alawite minority that rules Syria and into the south of Lebanon, which is also dominated by Shiites—a “Shiite crescent” that seems ideally positioned to dominate the entire Middle East through its hold on strategic territory and with its control of combined oil resources that rival those of Saudi Arabia. At the same time, other scholars reject the idea of any particular closeness between the Shiites of Iran and those of Iraq. These analysts tend to stress the Arabness of the Shiites of Iraq—who in many cases descend from recently settled nomadic tribes whose conversion to Shiism took place within the past couple of centuries—and point to historical facts such as the loyal Shiite participation on the Iraqi side in the eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s as proof of the Iraqiness of the Shiites and as a formative experience in its own right. Often, this kind of perspective goes hand in hand with a view that Iraqi Shiites are actively hostile to the model of government instituted in Iran after the 1979 revolution, and that they in

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