The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 0 dish separatist group. And New Yorker reporter Jon Lee Anderson interviewed a senior Kurdish official in 2008 who said that Pejak operates out of bases in Iraqi Kurdistan with “covert U.S. support” to conduct raids in Iran. Precisely because Tehran fears Kurdish separatism, Iran shares the goal of a unified Iraq with the United States. It does not want to see the Iraqi Kurds break away and link up with the Kurds in Iran and Turkey. This shared opposition to the balkanization of Iraq and a mutual interest in promoting its economic stability provide the basis for U.S.-Iranian cooperation in Baghdad — but only if Washington is sensitive to Iranian security concerns and recognizes that Tehran views the maintenance of a “friendly” regime in Iraq as essential to its security. George W. Bush sharply limited U.S. options when he ended five centuries of minority Sunni rule by deposing Saddam Hussein. Iraq will now be, willy-nilly, closer to Iran than to any other external power, and it would be self-defeating for the United States to fly in the face of this reality by aligning with Sunni interests in Baghdad. To be sure, the United States does have a moral obligation to do what it can to minimize persecution of Sunnis. But there is no escaping the hard reality that they will now have to ad- just to Shia dominance, just as the Shias did for so long under Sunni rule. Ray Takeyh, a leading Iran scholar who has advised the Obama administration, puts it well. “The door to walk into a larger negotiation between the United States and Iran would be through Iraq,” he said, “where there is some co- incidence of interests. But you can’t do that if your declared policy is to prevent a country next door from having any in- fluence in the country that is right there.” ■ F O C U S Tehran does not want Iraqi Kurds to break away and link up with Kurds in Iran and Turkey.