Engage Iran

We may not leave Baghdad with Iraqis scrambling to the roof of our billion-dollar embassy and clinging to the struts of departing American helicopters, but we will likely bequeath a state incapable of protecting its people or defending its borders against even today’s threats. Ultimately, Iraq’s democratic edifice, erected at such great cost, will likely crumble from a combination of internal and external pressures, and whatever succeeds it will surely be even less appealing for the United States and for Iraq’s neighbors. We will face a profusion of trigger points and potential dangers from actors inside Iraq and across the region. Some proportion of Iraq will no doubt continue to provide hospitable sanctuary for Al Qaeda and its aspirants seeking to hone their tactics. In the meantime, the entanglement of the broader Gulf and the Middle East in Iraq’s internal turmoil is likely to worsen.

Looming over this dire scene is the specter of Iran. No piece of the tragic puzzle that is post-Saddam Iraq evokes greater anxiety within Washington or among its regional allies than the role and ambitions of the Islamic Republic. Tehran has emerged if not triumphant then at least greatly empowered by the American adventure in Iraq, and a dramatic reversal of its fortunes, as the United States begins to script its departure or redeployment, is highly unlikely. Under almost any conceivable near-term scenario, the regime that is Baghdad’s historic adversary and an implacable antagonist of the United States will inherit the dominant role in shaping Iraq’s future and the security environment of the Persian Gulf. And this reality is the starting point from which a new American strategy in the region must flow.

The centrality of Iran to Iraq’s current morass and prospective trajectory makes it an indispensable player in fashioning an American exit path and a viable framework for stabilizing Iraq and the region. Iran is undoubtedly part of the problem in Iraq, but there can be no effective, enduring solution without Tehran playing a constructive role. Achieving Iranian cooperation will necessitate the very tool that the Bush Administration has disdained in dealing with Iran, dialogue–in particular the sort of quiet, sustained, pragmatic diplomacy between Washington and Tehran that from 2001 to 2003 generated a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. In this way, engaging Iran to help salvage Iraq could also offer the best platform for an incrementalist approach to altering Iran’s more objectionable policies.

That Iran has reaped the inadvertent windfalls of regime change in Iraq is as much a product of choice as chance. By virtue of the long war between the two countries, the Islamic Republic was the natural sponsor and host of most of Saddam’s opponents. Beyond that accident of history, however, Iran has worked assiduously since the fall of the Baathist regime to maximize its leverage in post-Saddam Iraq and hedge its bets against an unfriendly Baghdad. As a result, it has the dubious distinction of being the most ardent regional supporter of American-administered Iraq, at the same time as its leadership has fortified the networks and capabilities of the anti-American insurgents who have reduced the Baghdad government to a brittle shell. Iran’s primacy significantly compounds the alarms sounded by Iraq’s internal inadequacies, and it upends the intended outcome of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the prevailing American strategy in the Gulf.

Nevertheless, it is not axiomatic that as Tehran becomes the regional heavyweight it will begin to play the hegemon. Iran’s massive, multi-faceted investment in Iraq is driven by existential rather than ideological interests, a distinction that is critical to appreciating Iranian actions in Iraq as well as to anticipating its future course. Iran has not sought to export its revolutionary theocracy to Iraq, nor has it exploited its influence there to destabilize Iraq’s neighbors or disrupt key energy markets and transportation corridors. Such restraint should not be interpreted as evidence of Iranian benevolence–no doubt such exploits remain gleams in the eyes of some Iranian hardliners–but rather as confirmation that Iran’s most vital interests can in fact override the temptations of ideology.

In Iraq, what matters most to Tehran is deterring the two threats–one historic and one prospective–with the proven capacity to imperil the Islamic regime: Sunni Baathists and the American military. To ensure against the former, Iran has thrown its weight behind any and every Shia and Kurdish faction that will accept its largesse, while lavishing Iraq’s precarious central government with the sort of diplomatic and financial support that U.S. diplomats routinely, fruitlessly importune the Gulf governments to provide. Its generosity toward Shia militants in Iraq has the added benefit for Iran’s leadership of bloodying its other adversary, the United States.

Iran’s supporting role in the violence perpetrated by some of its Iraqi allies invites a direct and correspondingly forceful U.S. response, such as the efforts over the past six months to interdict Iranian agents in Iraq. Limited, effective strikes on Iran’s most nefarious activities may well temper Tehran’s recklessness, as Iranian leaders want to avoid provoking a reeling American giant. But escalating against Iran in Iraq also risks inciting a full-fledged proxy war, which will only further inflame Iraq and the region. Iran is likely to persist and prevail in what is effectively its home turf–the killing fields of its own disastrous, futile war.

Engagement, then, needs to constitute the primary thrust of the American approach to Iran. The purpose of engaging with Tehran is not to reward its dangerous policies, but to restrain and redirect them. There are few good alternatives to working more intensively with Iran over Iraq. There is no other country with its interest, investments, or leverage with key Iraqi actors; more disturbingly, its capacity for wreaking havoc in Iraq has been as yet only partially deployed. Developing a vehicle for serious dialogue with Iran’s leaders would be aimed at bolstering Iran’s investment in a functional Iraqi state, encouraging Iran to rein in its recalcitrant allies and help temper their sectarian demands, and identifying clear red lines for Iran’s multifarious activities in Iraq.

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