The U.S. wouldn’t need to do much to signal to Middle Eastern allies — and enemies — that it means business.
The U.S. wouldn’t need to do much to signal to Middle Eastern allies — and enemies — that it means business.
A major crisis has begun in Iraq, as Iran seeks to maintain its influence in the country despite its eroding strategic position. Opportunities to reverse strategic trends are difficult to anticipate. But there is now a clear opportunity to curb Iranian power, and quietly and carefully, the U.S. should seize on this chance, pushing harder to divide Iran’s attention and undermine its grip on Iraq.
Iraq is at the heart of Iran’s interests in the Middle East. It is the region’s only majority-Shiite country apart from Iran. It has significant oil reserves and is a potential avenue for illicit oil exports. It is the graveyard of American and Baathist power. And it is the geographic bridge between the Zagros Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. One way or another, Iraq must fall under Iran’s control if Iran wishes to be a regional power.
Pressuring Iran’s proxies in Syria — as the Trump administration likely did, at least covertly — might curb Iranian power. But pressuring Iran’s position in Iraq poses a mortal threat to Iran’s regional strategic interests.
This explains the emotional significance and strategic relevance of the U.S.’s 2020 killing of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, Tehran’s premier power-projection tool. Soleimani was a battle-hardened military, political, and bureaucratic operator. The architect of Iran’s influence in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, he had the respect and loyalty of a variety of Iraqi paramilitaries, and through them, a powerful means of exerting influence over the direction of the Iraqi state.
Iraqi politics is fickle. As is the case in the Middle East more broadly, sectarian divisions do not alone determine loyalty. Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Sadrist movement in Iraq, is a particularly influential Shiite cleric who commands the loyalty of a significant proportion of Iraqi Shiites. The Middle Eastern Shiite community has always been split between Iran and Iraq, Karbala and Qom. Yet during the Iraq War, Sadr accepted Iran’s support against the U.S. and the Iraqi government.
As always, these supposedly ideological actors are acutely Machiavellian, shifting sides depending upon the threats they face. Following the U.S. withdrawal and rise of ISIS, Sadr shed his temporary alliance with Iran and positioned himself and his movement as a counterbalance to the Islamic Republic. This new stance had particular political potency as Iranian-backed paramilitaries infiltrated the Iraqi state. Sadr’s Mahdi Army, once a perennial opponent of Coalition forces and an Iranian ally, became the Peace Brigades, a tacit U.S. partner in the fight against ISIS and a military obstacle to Iran’s expansion into Iraq.
The assassination of Soleimani, and alongside him Abu Mahid al-Muhandis, the Iranian-aligned Iraqi militia commander, undermined Iranian command structures in Iraq. The result has been a slow unraveling of Iran’s strategic position, which has led ultimately to the current unrest in Iraq. This unrest was touched off when Sadr’s supporters recently stormed Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” occupying the Iraqi presidential palace and attacking Iranian-aligned militias in the area. It came after a hotly contested election in which neither the Coordination Framework — a collection of Iranian-backed Shiite parties — nor Sadr’s Sunni–Shiite nationalist electoral bloc won an outright majority.
The Green Zone incident was the latest in a series of back-and-forth clashes between Sadr’s bloc, which is allied with the Kurdish KDP, and Iranian-backed forces. It signaled Sadr’s resolve to Iran, and Tehran must now respond. It can either back down, accept new elections, and (likely) allow Sadr’s coalition to form a government, jeopardizing its position in Iraq, or it can escalate the cycle of violence and seek to box Sadr out. For the moment, it appears to still be weighing these two options. Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, a dual Iraqi–British citizen who also runs Iraq’s intelligence service, is viewed as a moderate, although he is unpopular with Iranian-backed militias and likely wields limited power within Baghdad. He, along with Kurdish Iraqi president Barham Salih and Sunni parliament speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, have agreed to consider early elections. Yet it is unlikely that the crisis will end there, because no major player has any incentive to back down. Sadr has demonstrated his power, Iran has been challenged, and Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds have no need to pick a side while intra-Shiite divisions chip away at the federal government’s power.
This is where the U.S. comes in. Now is the time, quietly, to apply pressure to Iran. A major confrontation in Iraq would redirect Iranian attention and resources from elsewhere, opening opportunities for America and its allies in Syria, Lebanon, and even Yemen. Much of the support the U.S. could provide would be clandestine and indirect — Sadr has a relationship with the Saudis and Emiratis that he can leverage, and that the U.S. should exploit to support him.
Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have a clear and reasonable issue with American Iran policy. Neither trust the U.S. to engage robustly in the region or forestall Iranian nuclear breakout. Active engagement on the Iraq question would demonstrate the U.S.’s commitment to the region. This need not entail public measures — the U.S. should not, for example wade in as an open diplomatic mediator and thereby place itself between Iran and the Gulf Arab states. Instead, it should exert quiet, behind-the-scenes pressure to encourage Sadrist intransigence in the face of Iran’s demands, solicit Emirati and Saudi support for anti-Iranian forces in Iraq, and signal to Kurdish and Sunni actors that the U.S. would accept an Iraqi coalition government that excluded Iran’s proxies. Iran would then be forced to either back down, accepting a severe strategic setback, or escalate, giving the U.S., at long last, a leverage point over the Islamic Republic, and an issue to unite its sometimes-fractious coalition of regional allies.
Moreover, a show of force would signal to Iran that the U.S. is aware of its difficulties and will exploit them. If the Biden administration is smart, it will recognize that Iran is working directly in concert with the U.S.’s greatest enemies, and that it must be pushed, not coddled. Such a push is well within the U.S.’s capabilities, and it could pay great dividends in both the short and long terms.