The Looming Iran Problem

Asia Times Online today has a disturbing report on Iranian efforts to hijack the electoral process in Iraq:

The kerfuffle triggered in Iraq by a government panel’s recent disqualification of over 500 candidates from the parliamentary elections in March has engendered a new crisis that threatens to unravel delicate national reconciliation and stabilization goals.

Despite the immediate intervention of United States Vice President Joseph Biden with a peacemaking solution that would allow all the candidates under the scanner to contest the elections and narrow the investigation to victorious ones after the results, the bad blood from the 2005 elections lends a foul air to the whole fracas.

SNIP

The latest disqualification drama has focused light on the mysterious figure of Ali Faisal al-Lami, Chalabi’s deputy on the AJC and a friend-turned-foe of the Americans in Iraq. The recriminations that flew back and forth after Iraq’s election commission released the list of 511 candidates for alleged links to the Ba’ath Party have centered on Lami’s perceived extremist Shi’ite ties and biased background.

Once an honored guest at the George W Bush White House in Washington, along with his boss, Chalabi, Lami was arrested by American forces in August 2008 on grounds that he was involved with Shi’ite terrorist groups and Iran’s intelligence apparatus. Held and tortured for close to one year in different jails, including what he claims was a secret US-run prison facility, Lami was so high-profile a captive that he recounts being directly advised to “cooperate” by General David Petraeus, the top commander of American forces in Iraq at that time.

Lami makes no secret of his role as a “liaison” between the followers of radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army (now inactive) and Chalabi’s INC. He also admits to having forged a “close friendship” with the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous) militia, which is a splinter faction of the Mahdi Army and a militant movement that continues Muqtada’s resistance agenda of driving Western occupiers out of Iraq.

All the circumstantial evidence thus points to Iranian blessings for the AJC’s bombshell on Iraq’s Sunni politicians, further complicating the US’s goal of phased withdrawal following the March elections. If Iraq’s sectarian divide settles down into an ominous and lengthy shadow over the post-election state’s make-up, the Barack Obama administration’s timetable of winding up combat operations and exiting the scene by August 2010 might leave behind a status quo that strategically benefits Iran the most.

Iran flaunted its territorial aims in southern Iraq earlier this month by sending regular troops to occupy an oilfield on the Iraqi side of the border. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, it will be very difficult to discourage.

Bush’s foreign policy was self-defeating; Obama’s is self-destructive.