Iraq, Iran and The U.S. - The Soleimani Triangle
“HE that makes war without many mistakes has not made war very long.’’ So said Napoleon!
As U.S.-Iran tensions flare, Iraq is caught in the middle between the rock and the hard place. Iraq knows it’s turning into a battlefield for the U.S. and Iran, but its hands are tied.
Secret documents show how Tehran wields power in Iraq. Iranian intelligence reports largely confirm what was already known about Iran’s firm grip on Iraqi politics.
Successive Iranian regimes have managed to convince many Shiites outside Iran that their strength and safety lies in the strength of Iran, and that they must work to strengthen the power of Iran in order to protect them as weak minorities!
General Qassim Soleimani and Iran’s supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana.
In recent years Soleimani began expanding Iran’s imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran’s various enemies.
And therefore, it was Soleimani and his proxies, his “kingmakers” in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.
Iran’s strategic ambitions stretches all the way to the Mediterranean. To achieve that objective, it must secure strategic corridors to build a railroad system, a superhighway that cut via the Christian areas and the Nineveh plains from its borders through Iraq. To split and tear apart the heart of geography, the Iranian vault must go through the strategic Nineveh plain area.
Finally, it was Soleimani’s project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro-democracy forces — both Sunnis and Shiites — in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
On January 3rd, the world changed. The American strikes with the drones that killed Qassim Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis were a shock we had not faced for decades. Soleimani was believed to be outside the border of a hit. Soleimani himself clearly thought that. But this is was his big mistake. Soleimani pushed his country to build an empire but drove it into the ground instead.
Over the course of two decades, his partner Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis was the engineer behind all foreign strategic gains of Iran in Iraq and the region. He was behind the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Bulgaria, and the United States.
And it was not days after the retribution of the powerful general, until another mask of the Iranian regime was exposed, when the Revolutionary Guard coerced under the pressure was behind the shooting down of the Ukrainian plane, despite the fact that it was a civilian plane launched from its lands. This sparked hatred among the Iranians, of whom most of the plane’s passengers were the unfortunate victims.
This is what spread the new uprisings in Lebanon. The spark of awareness soon moved to the Iranian interior, which made Khamenei wonder what his regime wants to spend its capabilities on (1) countries outside its borders and independent peoples, or (2) his own people suffering poverty, narrowing freedoms, and basic human dignities.
In the wake of Soleimani’s killing and the downing of the Ukrainian jetliner, Iran is now on the defensive. The “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad in December 2019 was almost certainly a Soleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.
President Trump made it clear that the U.S. presence is to maintain a free and independent Iraq and support its sovereignty when threatened by ISIS and Iran-controlled militias. Most Iraqis know the U.S. played a decisive role in defeating Islamic State and have no interest in becoming Tehran’s colony.
After seventeen years of Americans and Iranians influencing the Iraqi political scene, the Iraqi people are left oppressed and defeated. The U. S. policy to dislodge Iran, reverse the mistakes of the past, regain the trust and hopes of the Iraqi people remain uncertain. One thing is certain, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” does not exist in Iraq. As the classic Iraqi saying goes “after the ruin of Basra.”