by Jay Solomon
A less publicly stated—or debated—aim of Saddam’s overthrow, according to Bush administration strategists, was to increase the military and political pressure on Iran’s clerical rulers, and to a lesser extent on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government. It was the dynamic laid out in David Wurmser’s writings heading into the Iraq War, embraced by some in the Bush administration, that a U.S. takeover of Iraq would isolate Iran. A popular refrain repeated by U.S. government officials in the days after the invasion was “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Damascus, and then on to Tehran.” But the level of Iranian influence in Iraq was not well understood in Washington. And, as evidenced in Saddam’s intelligence files, Iran was actually lying in wait for the invasion to begin.
The presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops on Iran’s eastern and western borders in Afghanistan and Iraq would hem in Tehran’s ability to threaten its neighbors and destabilize the Persian Gulf, many Americans officials believed. And they thought that the sight of Iraq’s majority Shiite population voting in open elections and choosing a government not ruled by clerics would galvanize the Iranian citizenry, which was seen as perhaps the most pro-American population in the Middle East outside of Israel. To some extent, they would be proven right. In 2009, massive protests broke out in Iran following the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which was believed to be fraudulent. But Khamenei and his forces would brutally put down the revolt.
The key in the long term, U.S. officials believed, was freeing the Iraqi city of Najaf, traditionally the most powerful and important center of Shiite learning, from Saddam’s repressive rule. The seminaries there, overseen by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejected the Iranian government’s philosophy that one supreme leader, known as the velayat al-faqih in Persian, served as a pope-like leader for all Shiite Muslims worldwide. Indeed, most Muslim scholars held that this belief system, established in Tehran after the 1979 revolution and backed by the Iranian clerics in the holy city of Qom, was antithetical to the true teachings of Shiism, which respected the division between church and state while accepting some blending of politics and religion. Sistani preached a “quietist” brand of Islam that kept the clerics and the seminaries strictly out of politics. Changes in Iraq, beginning with freeing quietist Shiite scholarship, would gradually force changes in Iran, some U.S. strategists believed.
“If you can release Najaf, you can cure one of the great rifts in Islam,” said Ladan Archin, an Iranian American who worked for Wolfowitz and Feith as an Iran analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005. “That was one of the underlying themes of the U.S. strategy.”
Inherent contradictions within the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq and Iran, however, soon became clear to Arab governments throughout the Middle East, and in Israel as well. For decades the United States and the Sunni states had seen Saddam Hussein as the bulwark against any expansion of Iranian influence into Iraq and westward into the Levant, particularly in Shiite-dominant areas. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Sunni states had sent billions in financial aid to Baghdad during its eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s, specifically to blunt Tehran’s advances. By removing Saddam Hussein, the United States would empower the very Iraqi Shiite politicians whom Tehran had nurtured and financed for years, including SCIRI, the Badr Corps (SCIRI’s military wing), and Dawa.
Israeli officials grumbled that Iran’s borders would effectively move hundreds of miles closer to the Jewish state’s once the Baathists were gone and the Shiites took power in Baghdad. As co-religionists with Iran, Iraq’s new government would naturally sympathize and cooperate with Tehran. Sunni leaders in Arab countries such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia agreed. Some thought that the United States and Iran had forged a secret compact to overthrow Saddam. They spoke of a “Shiite Crescent” running from Iran through Iraq and into Syria. In their view, only Tehran would benefit from this war. But the Bush administration continued to argue the opposite—that Iran would be weakened.
The conferences for Iraqi opposition leaders, staged by Zalmay Khalilzad in London in late 2002, brought the point home. Many of the politicians who attended—particularly the Iraqi Shiite politician Ahmad Chalabi—had been cultivating both Washington and Tehran for years, if not decades. Chalabi was the scion of a prominent Baghdad family that had grown rich during the time of the Ottoman Empire as privileged members of the Baghdad royal court. Chalabi and his relatives were forced to flee the Iraqi capital in 1958 when the Iraqi military staged a coup d’état against King Faisal II and massacred the royal family. Ahmad Chalabi went into exile, first living in Lebanon and then moving between Jordan, London, and the United States. A brilliant mathematician, Chalabi received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (which had also produced some of Bush’s top advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz and Khalilzad). He eventually grew close to many conservative politicians and strategists in Washington and shared intelligence with the CIA.
Many in the White House and Pentagon in 2003 had hoped Chalabi could emerge as Iraq’s first democratically elected president after Saddam’s fall. But while living in Beirut and London in the 1990s, Chalabi had also maintained an office in Tehran for his political organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was solely focused on galvanizing international support to unseat Saddam. The U.S. Congress was providing the INC with $25 million per year, even though lawmakers knew some of these funds were going to pay for the offices in Iran. The organization secured a special waiver from the U.S. Treasury to allow the aid to legally go into Tehran, despite American sanctions that prevented the U.S. government from conducting any business with Iran. This was not an insignificant achievement, given the hostility toward Iran on Capitol Hill.
Weeks before the invasion, Chalabi traveled to Tehran to meet with Iranian leaders and give them insights into Washington’s plans, according to his aides. Among those he met with was Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Qods Force. Soleimani was a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who had quickly risen through the ranks of the IRGC thanks to his experience in conducting both conventional and guerilla warfare (he was in charge of targeting Afghan drug smugglers who operated in Iran’s eastern tribal regions). His position as Qods Force commander made him Iran’s top international spymaster. But his power went beyond that, according to Iranians who worked with him. His responsibilities included serving as one of Tehran’s top diplomatic envoys to foreign governments, a conduit for arms shipments to Iranian proxies, and a manager of the IRGC’s foreign business operations.
Chalabi and his aides viewed establishing ties with Soleimani and the Iranians as a positive development for the United States—which was kept in the dark about these developments. Francis Brooke, a close aide of Chalabi’s who helped run the offices of the Iraqi National Congress in Washington, traveled to Tehran with the INC team shortly before the war. Brooke said the Iranians fully supported the toppling of Saddam but wanted assurances the Americans weren’t planning a prolonged military occupation that eventually could be used as a base to threaten Tehran. What Soleimani and others sought was the quick demise of Saddam followed by a rapid transition to a new, Shiite-led government, made up of the very politicians both the United States and Iran had cultivated. Many senior officials in the White House and Pentagon had initially envisaged the same thing.
But Chalabi’s meetings with Soleimani were never shared with Washington. And it would eventually feed a belief in Washington that the Iraqi politician was working for the other side, particularly as his post-Saddam activities became clearer. By 2004, many officials in the Bush administration came to believe that Chalabi was an Iranian spy. The Pentagon formally accused the Iraqi of supplying Iranian agents with American computer codes that allowed Tehran to listen in on U.S. communications traffic inside Iraq. American troops raided the Baghdad offices of the INC that year, carting away computers and files, though they never arrested Chalabi. The politician repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, though he
never renounced his good relations with Iran.
Once the invasion began, Iran’s government pursued a two-pronged strategy inside Iraq. On one hand, Tehran and Soleimani were happy to allow politicians from Dawa and SCIRI—the parties once exiled in Iran—to gain power in Baghdad, knowing they’d pursue a generally pro-Iranian line and break from the policies of Saddam’s Baath Party. This is what quickly happened with the election of Dawa’s Ibrahim al-Jaafari as president in 2005, followed by Nouri al-Maliki the following year.
But on the other hand, Soleimani and his Qods Force were also arming and funding a wide network of militias and terrorist organizations that could quickly fan the flames of violence in Iraq if Tehran chose to do so. One aim of this strategy, according to Americans and Arabs who studied it, was to keep the U.S. military under constant harassment and prevent the Bush administration from developing the type of pro-Western society it wanted. The other was to make Iran the ultimate arbiter of any political evolutions and alignments on the ground. The Iranian regime wanted to displace the Sunnis from central Iraq and push them out of power in the new Iraqi order.
The Bush administration was being drawn into an Iranian trap. While Wurmser and other U.S. strategists believed toppling Saddam Hussein was a chance to weaken Tehran, General Soleimani saw the opposite: an opening to project Iranian power as the United States removed Tehran’s enemies. It was the outcome many Arab and Israeli officials had predicted.
Indeed, in the months after the war began, the United States seemed unable to stop a constant flow of businessmen, clerics, aid workers, and spies flowing into Iraq from Iran. Because of their shared Shiite faith, these agents of influence could establish aid programs and small businesses much more easily than their American counterparts and competitors. And to U.S. soldiers, who didn’t speak Farsi or Arabic, the Qods Force and its operatives were virtually invisible.
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MICHAEL RUBIN WAS AMONG the first U.S. officials to recognize the speed at which Iran moved to capitalize on the overthrow of Saddam. Rubin, just thirty-one years old in 2003, was one of the directors of the Pentagon’s Office of Iran and Iraq, which reported to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But following the invasion, the Pentagon sent him to help build Iraq’s first post-Saddam government. Rubin had also been a member of the Office of Special Plans, the military unit that played a key role in planning the invasion. Democrats would later charge that the office had failed to assess the sheer enormousness of the task of rebuilding the country.
Rubin’s position in Iraq was attached to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the post-invasion U.S. body tasked with preparing Iraq for elections. President Bush’s special representative to Baghdad, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, headed the CPA. But Rubin kept a special line open to many of his colleagues back at the Pentagon, men and women who believed that Washington needed, without delay, to prepare to confront Iran inside Iraq.
During his first few weeks in Baghdad, Rubin grew increasingly concerned by what he viewed as a blasé attitude within the CPA and allied governments about the presence of Iranian agents inside Iraq. Tehran was quickly moving to consolidate power for its allies, Rubin believed, while Bremer and the civilian U.S. leadership were too overwhelmed with the day-to-day realities of running a new Iraq to try to check Iranian actions. Meanwhile, Rubin thought that the Pentagon’s generals didn’t want to run the risk of sparking a wider war by directly targeting the Revolutionary Guard. As a result, Tehran and its clients were largely allowed to operate without harassment.
“We should be very, very careful of what the Iranians are up to, but our friends in [the State Department] and the British Foreign Service seem to be pooh-poohing the Iranian presence and intentions,” Rubin wrote to higher-ups in the Pentagon just weeks after arriving in Baghdad in July 2003. “We are in very serious trouble here.” He was describing a clandestine Iranian invasion.
Rubin decided to travel into Baghdad’s markets and universities and visit Shiite villages in the south. He relied heavily on Iraqi sources he’d cultivated in Kurdistan and Europe during Saddam’s reign. Moving without American military personnel, he rose at three or four in the morning and drove while it was still dark to mitigate the effects of traveling in 120-degree heat and to avoid detection by insurgents.
He soon saw that Iranian consumer products had flooded into Iraqi households. Tehran’s merchants had beaten America’s to the market, another indication of the growing Iranian influence. Iraqi students in Shiite cities such as Najaf and Karbala had raised portraits of Iran’s two supreme leaders, Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, on their universities’ gates. And Iranian-backed radio stations, newspapers, and television networks had begun distributing Tehran’s message, often speeches by Khamenei, almost immediately after Saddam was deposed.
Najaf was a key barometer for gauging Iranian influence. Rubin visited Najaf in August 2003 and had the uneasy feeling that the Iranians were lying in wait. He met the director of an Islamist job creation center who was seeking American aid to help develop computer and sewing classes for Shiite women. It was the sort of project Rubin believed the Americans should be funding. But as Rubin and the man continued to talk, Rubin learned that the Iraqi was moonlighting as a correspondent for Al-Alam, Iran’s Arab-language satellite television channel. The man said he’d been contacted by the Iranians shortly before the U.S. invasion and given a car, a salary, and a videophone so that he could roam and report.
“It seems like the Iranians knew exactly who to hire, went out and did it,” Rubin reported back to his Pentagon counterparts. “My informal sense from visiting numerous houses is that 90 percent of the people who watch regular broadcast television choose al-Alam over the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Media Network.” Iran was beating the Americans to the punch in the propaganda war and selling their vision of post-Saddam Iraq.
Rubin began to look at the activities of SCIRI and its militia, the Badr Corps. The White House and some Pentagon officials had initially focused on placing Ahmad Chalabi into power. Others believed that former Baathists who had allied and then broken with Saddam, such as the Shiite politician Iyad Allawi, could emerge as major political players in a new Iraq. But Rubin’s reporting showed that SCIRI, with both financial and military support from Tehran, was quickly taking control of large swaths of Iraqi territory right under the noses of the Americans and British. Their political power would give Iran tremendous influence in running Iraq.
In the southern Iraqi city of Al-Amarah, Rubin saw that SCIRI had already virtually taken over the place. The Badr Corps set up its operations in the city hall, which had once served as the Baath Party headquarters. Covering the building’s walls were slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Sharon” (referring to Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon).
The Shiite sheikh Muhammad al-Abadi was a member of SCIRI and with the help of the party and its militia was Al-Amarah’s de facto ruler. Rubin sought an audience with the cleric at his house on the banks of the Tigris River. Members of the Badr Corps ushered him into the living room, where a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini hung on the wall. The American reported back to the Pentagon that the sheikh had said “the U.S. would not have peace in Iraq, even if we stayed here 18 years.”
Toward the end of his first year in Iraq, Rubin’s impression was that Iraq’s oil-rich south was becoming an Iranian protectorate. Iranian intelligence officials often worked covertly, but Rubin sensed that they were controlling the local population through fear. A more effective U.S. administration in Iraq’s south should limit Tehran’s influence, he thought.
In September 2003, Rubin was invited to address a town hall meeting in the southern city of Nasiriyya. At the meeting, a number of the local politicians complained that a “hidden hand” was dictating events in their town, though they refused to speak publicly about Tehran’s activities due to fear of retribution. Rubin was alarmed by the Iraqis’ paranoia. “People simply are afraid to come out and criticize Iran,
” Rubin emailed his colleagues back in Washington. “They realize that the Iranians do not hesitate to use violence, and the U.S. has proven itself unwilling or unable to defend the border and the local Iraqi population.”
In January 2004, Rubin traveled to Qadisiyah province in east-central Iraq to interview its governor, Khalil Jalil Hamza. Hamza had lived in London during Saddam’s rule and spoke fluent English. He was the type of Iraqi Rubin saw as a natural ally as the United States prepared the country for its first legislative elections post-Saddam.
Hamza, however, repeated the concerns Rubin had heard from other Iraqis: that Iran was using cash, drugs, and intimidation to ensure that the elections scheduled there would be dominated by Iran’s allies, particularly SCIRI and Dawa. Beginning the previous May, the governor said, Iraqi refugees from Saddam’s rule had started streaming back across the border from Iran, finding absolutely no security guarding the border. Iranian intelligence agents joined in this convoy.
In the ensuing months, Iran’s political allies appeared to receive a stamp of approval from the U.S. government and Bremer, Hamza said. The CPA and Bremer chose Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim of SCIRI and Ibrahim al-Jaafari of Dawa for seats on the interim Governing Council in Baghdad. The governor told Rubin that “the legitimacy [the United States] bestowed…encouraged both [of the politicians’ organizations] to begin greater activities throughout the south.”
Over the summer, Iranian emissaries, purportedly on the direct order of Supreme Leader Khamenei, had brought ten trucks of high-cost Persian carpets into Diwaniya as gifts for tribal leaders, the governor was told. SCIRI set up a command center in the local offices of Baghdad’s Governing Council to channel funds coming in from Iran (including counterfeit U.S. dollars) to Iraqi provinces. Hamza, however, said he wasn’t provided any funds by the U.S. government for development projects or to build the government’s credibility among moderate constituents in his province.
