The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

M A R C H 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 Seven years later, the Obama ad- ministration remains committed to the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. How- ever, major uncertainties remain concerning our future role there and how it will affect Iran. Two key emerging issues have special importance in Iranian eyes. One is whether the U.S. Air Force will be able to continue using the bases it has developed in Iraq to de- ploy long-range bombers capable of striking Iran. The other is whether the United States will continue to tolerate the political dominance of Tehran-ori- ented Shiite political forces in Iraq, as it has done since the 2005 elections, or will work, instead, with Saudi Arabia to contain Iranian influence in Baghdad. Washington’s posi- tion on these little-discussed issues could well prove to be of critical importance in its ongoing effort to negotiate a modus vivendi with Iran. The centrality of Iraq in Iranian attitudes toward the United States was underlined to me repeatedly during three visits to Tehran in 2007 and 2008. On one of these trips, I attended a four-hour seminar with 15 Iranian spe- cialists on Iraq from different government agencies, arranged at my request. “You know, we’ve been waiting for this moment since 1639,” commented Mahmoud Vaezi, a former deputy for- eign minister who now directs the Center for Strategic Re- search, a think-tank affiliated with the Expediency Coun- cil, a government body headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. I didn’t know what had hap- pened in 1639, but soon learned that it was the year in which the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin was signed. This was the treaty that defined the boundary between Safavid Persia and the ad- vancing Ottoman Turks, who push- ed Persia out of what was to be- come the modern state of Iraq. As Richard D. Frye observes in The Golden Age of Persia , “The sep- aration of eastern and western Iran is evident, and throughout Iran’s history the western part of the land has been frequently more closely connected with the lowlands of Mesopotamia than with the rest of the plateau to the east of the central deserts.” Before 1639, Persia had extensive influence inMesopo- tamia through local Shiite principalities. The Shia religious universe embraced parts of both Persia andMesopotamia, and the Shia faithful commuted between religious centers on both sides, just as they do today. (An estimated four million Iranians visited Karbala and Najaf in Iraq last year and some two million Iraqis visited Qom in Iran.) After 1639, the Turks and, later, the British installed a succes- sion of Sunni puppet regimes in Iraq. Then came Saddam Hussein’s Sunni dictatorship and his invasion of Iran in 1980, launched with U.S. help and encouragement. What Vaezi’s reference to 1639 meant was that for nearly five centuries, Iran has been hoping the day would come when Sunni minority rule would end in Baghdad, and Tehran would get back some of its old influence. In Friendly Hands? During the Foreign Ministry seminar, S.A. Niknam, who had been chargé d’affaires in the Iranian embassy in Baghdad for five years during the Iran-Iraq War, ex- claimed: “How can you accuse us of ‘interfering’ in Iraq? You have come from 6,000 miles away with 160,000 sol- diers. We are an immediate neighbor with a 1,000-mile border and intimate historical, religious and economic ties going back centuries. You helped Saddam against us in a war that cost us more than 300,000 lives, so naturally we want to be sure that Iraq is in friendly hands.” By a “friendly” Iraq, Iran means one dominated by its Shiite co-religionists, who make up about 62 percent of the population. Thus, Tehran was delighted when the United States, prodded by United Nations mediator Lakhdar Brahimi and Iraq’s pre-eminent Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, bowed to demands F O C U S For nearly five centuries, Iran has been hoping Sunni minority rule would end in Iraq, allowing Tehran to regain some of its old influence. Selig S. Harrison visited Iran in June 2007 and in Febru- ary and June 2008. As South Asia bureau chief of the Washington Post and, later, as a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he did re- search there before the 1979 revolution and authored a study of its ethnic tensions, In Afghanistan’s Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations (CEIP, 1980), as well as four other books on Asian affairs and U.S.-Asian relations. He is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy.