The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

18 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 for elections in 2005 on terms that assured the victory of the Shiite ma- jority. Then and now, Iran has carefully avoided committing fully to any fac- tion in Iraq’s internal Shiite power struggles. The Ministry of Intelli- gence and Security, also known as VEVAK, and other Iranian intelli- gence agencies have assisted militias maintained by both the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the vehicle of the Shiite mercantile and middle classes, and Moqtada al- Sadr’s urban populist movement. They have also worked closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s smaller Daawa Party, and have gradually increased their influence in the internal security agencies of his ISCI-linked regime. Soon after its 2003 invasion, the United States spon- sored the creation of the National Intelligence Service, headed by a longtime anti-Saddam CIA ally, Mohammed Shahwani, a Sunni. Al-Maliki countered by installing an Iran-trained VEVAK protégé, Sheerwan al-Waeli, as head of the Ministry of National Security, and succeeded in re- placing Shahwani with his own man in August 2009. Iranian concerns about the direction of U.S. policy have focused on the so-called “Sunni Awakening” that the George W. Bush administration promoted after the 2005 parliamentary elections. This amounted to the employment of some 91,000 mercenaries in Sunni militias under U.S. control in a program aimed at improving security that cost an estimated $150 million per year at its peak. Each fighter was nominally paid $300 a month. But as Steven Simon points out in his article in the May/June 2008 Foreign Af- fairs , the Sunni tribal sheiks involved took “as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent,” which meant that “commanding 200 fighters could be worth over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief.” Because the Sunni militias posed a direct challenge to the predominantly Shiite army that al-Maliki was building up, ISCI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim complained that “weapons should be in the hands of the government only, and the government alone should decide who gets them. The alternative will be perpetual civil war.” Pressure from al-Maliki eventually led to the termina- tion of the program in return for promises that the demo- bilized fighters would be absorbed into his army. But this has yet to happen on any significant scale. In Baghdad, the principal legacy of the program is Sunni outrage that could lead to a rebirth of al-Qaida activity in Iraq. And in Iranian eyes, the Sunni Awakening has aroused deep suspicion that Washington is pursuing a conscious “divide and rule” strategy designed to build up a Sunni counterweight to Shiite power. The death of Supreme Council leader al-Hakim on Aug. 26, 2009, accentuated a power struggle within the Shiite leadership that could affect the stability of the Baghdad government, but it is not likely to weaken Iran’s political clout in Baghdad. Iran orchestrated the creation of a new Shiite coalition at a meeting last Au- gust that united the ISCI, al-Sadr’s forces and the Tanzim- al-Iraq branch of Daawa in the new United Iraqi Alliance. “A Disgraceful Pact” Al-Maliki, like many other Shiite political leaders of his generation, spent the Iran-Iraq War years (1980-1988) in exile in Iran and has longstanding ties with VEVAK. Ini- tially, he had Tehran’s blessing when he became prime min- ister, but relations suffered during the protracted struggle with the Bush administration in 2007 and 2008 over the terms of the security agreement under which the United States has pledged to withdraw all of its combat forces. When a draft U.S.-Iraq accord without a withdrawal timetable was signed on March 17, 2008, it remained a well-kept secret until nationalist critics within al-Maliki’s inner circle leaked it to Iranian diplomats and to the Iraqi media. The reaction in Tehran was explosive. OnMay 11, 2008, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hardline daily newspaper Kayhan , attacked the agreement in a vitriolic signed editorial titled “Iraq on the Edge.” He handed a copy to me during an hourlong interview this past June. “If you want to know what has been happening,” he said, “I suggest you read this.” Shariatmadari is the “Per- sonal Representative of the Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is seen as his media spokesman. “How is it,” the editorial asked, “that the Maliki govern- ment took the first steps toward signing such a disgraceful pact in the first place?” The United States, it said, is using the treaty to “sow the seeds of discord” between al-Maliki and his coalition partner, al-Hakim, so that “the U.S. can put pro-American individuals in charge. It is amazing that al-Maliki failed to see such a conspiracy coming.” In a clear warning to the prime minister, the editorial added that if F O C U S Tehran has carefully avoided committing to any single faction in Iraq’s internal Shiite power struggles.