Did the fall of Saddam Hussein and the violent birth of Iraqi democracy really empower Iran?
That conventional wisdom might have been true in the shorter term during the chaotic Iraqi insurrection, but it was never an accurate assessment over the longer haul — as we are beginning to see, nearly seven years after the Iraq War began.
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In the last twelve months, mass civil disobedience has spread throughout Iran, most notably when nearly a million people hit the streets to protest last summer’s rigged elections. There is unrest in Iraq as well, and a myriad of conflicting interests, but note that the tension is of a completely opposite sort. Whereas in Iran an unpopular government uses violence to squelch a majority that seeks free elections, in Iraq a legitimately elected government enjoys public support against occasional attacks from small cadres of terrorist extremists. So in an Iran supposedly at peace, more died voting than in an Iraq purportedly at war.
The use of Saddam Hussein as a proper balance to
Iran was always an atrocious idea — and it is bizarre to hear critics of the war cite post facto his obscene government as a once-necessary check on the Iranian theocracy. Given Saddam’s genocidal policies, and America’s war against him in 1990–91, there was no way that the United States should ever again have used his dictatorship to thwart Iran’s. And while the present democratic government of Iraq is dominated by Shiites — logically, given demographic realities — it is not true that they are all pro-Iranian Muslims who have forfeited their Iraqi identities. In time, a stable democratic Iraq may be one of the very few mechanisms by which Iranian regional influence can be checked.
That is why
Iran for the last five years has done its best to destroy Iraqi democracy, by supplying money and weapons to cross-border terrorists. Yet Iraq has survived, and it is now slowly proving subversive to Iran, albeit in quite a different manner — by reminding Iran’s uneasy Shiite population that free elections are not incompatible with their religion, as they can now readily see from the free, uncensored media across the border. The percentage of Iraqis who turned out for this round of voting was greater than the percentage of Americans who turned out for our landmark election of 2008.
As a result of Saddam’s removal, and the success of the subsequent democracy,
Iran is looking not just at a free Iraq, but also at a semi-autonomous, prosperous, and pro-Western Kurdistan, and a Lebanon without Syrian occupation troops. In the short term, Iran must also weigh in the fact that there are hundreds of American aircraft just across the border in Iraq — basing that would have been impossible under Saddam. And whereas a few years ago Iran was threatening Israel, hand in glove with Saddam Hussein, who was subsidizing the families of suicide bombers on the West Bank, today Iraq is not fueling unrest in the Middle East. If anything it may be, along with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, secretly not upset that Israel might address the ominous Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iraq last month also achieved its highest level of oil exportation since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And with the latest round of auctions and the new transparent oil contracts, the Iraqis are hoping to reach an incredible figure of 10 million barrels of oil pumped per day within seven years.
Given international interest in
Iraq’s oil, competitive bidding, and the growing security in the country at large, Iraq might well come close to meeting such once unimaginable goals. If it were to pump another seven or eight million barrels per day, such a spike in production by the nation with the third largest known oil reserves in the world would work to moderate oil prices for years — and thus especially irk Iran.
