The Iran Connection
The Baghdad files: A trove of secret Intelligence reports spells out in chilling detail how Iraq's dangerous next-door neighbor is aiding the anti-U.S. insurgency
Even before the first American bomb fell on Baghdad, one oft-stated goal for entering a war with Iraq was widely disparaged as a chimera posing as policy. That the removal of Saddam Hussein would somehow pave the way for the introduction of democracy across the Middle East was decried back then as impossibly naive; today it is dismissed, even by some of President Bush's supporters, as a dangerous gamble. History, however, may prove more generous in its reckoning. The seeds of democracy are seldom quick to thrive, and in the hard soil of the Middle East, they will surely need time.
The record may prove less forgiving, however, of Washington's management of postwar Iraq. That the insurgency is both far wider and more violent than the Pentagon had anticipated has long been obvious. What is less clear are the specific elements fueling the opposition to the American-led forces. U.S. commanders, with good reason, have focused their firepower on the so-called Sunni triangle, including hot spots like Fallujah, where the opposition has been most fierce. But new waves of foreign fighters are turning up almost every week, in every zone, to throw in their lot alongside the Saddam loyalists at the core of the insurgency. The danger now looms that whether or not American soldiers and Iraqi security forces are successful in Fallujah and other key areas, Iraq will become a permanent magnet for militant jihadists determined to wage holy war.
In that scenario, no actor is more dangerous than Iran. With their long-standing ties to, and support for, the majority Shiite population in Iraq, Tehran's hard-line Shiite clerics pose an infinitely complex series of challenges to America's goals in the Middle East. Their unbridled nuclear aspirations and their unrivaled status as the world's most determined state sponsors of global terrorism deepen the threat posed by Iranian meddling in Iraq. And Washington's apparent wait-and-see stance in Iran complicates this conundrum further. For the past quarter century, since Iranian militants overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage, America has banked on regime change rather than deal with the mullahs. With U.S. leverage at a low ebb, Iran has the potential to take what is already a bad situation in Iraq and make it drastically worse.
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.