After weeks of hesitation, the Obama administration last week responded to an Iraqi demand for airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Tikrit, a largely Sunni city north of Baghdad. Initially, Washington decided to stay out of the battle for Tikrit as a gesture of goodwill to the Islamic Republic.
Secretary of State John Kerry believed by letting Iran lead, he would reassure the mullahs the US will not oppose their quest for influence in the broader Middle East.
However, the battle for Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, proved three things.
First, it showed that by abdicating its leadership position, the US creates a vacuum that others — including Iran, IS and even Turkey and so-called moderate Arab states — will try to exploit, thus further complicating an already tangled situation.
Next, weeks of fighting for Tikrit have shown that, though praised by Obama as a “power in the region,” the Islamic Republic does not have the wherewithal to win a major battle against a determined enemy such as IS. For weeks, Tehran made a great deal of noise about Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Corps and the man in charge of exporting the revolution. A master in the art of self-promotion, Suleimani has been distributing photos and videos showing him in various outfits at various, always unidentified, locations claimed to be “in the heart of the battlefield.”
However, the extended fighting has shown that Suleimani’s supposed genius, hyped beyond reason by sections of the US media, is more Madison Avenue than anything else. The forces supposedly led by Suleimani have sustained what official Iranian media describe as “heavy losses.” Among the “martyrs” were two generals and more than a dozen officers of lower ranks attached to Suleimani’s ad hoc force.
Finally, the Iranian failure in Tikrit underscores, once again, the toxic nature of Tehran’s intervention in the affairs of its neighbors. In fact, Tehran’s aggressive promotion of the most radical version of Shi’ism is exploited by groups such as IS to mobilize Sunni Muslim opinion in their favor.
Many Iraqis believe that without Iranian intervention in Iraq, both directly and indirectly through former Premier Nouri al-Maliki, there would’ve been no IS to start with. Iraq had never been torn by sectarian feuds, although it suffered from ethnic conflicts between Arabs and Kurds. It was Khomeinism, a particularly obscurantist form of Shi’ism, that injected a high dose of sectarianism into Iraqi politics.
That sectarianism is now a key factor in Iraqi politics cannot be doubted. In Tikrit, a city of over 300,000 people, fewer than 200 joined the “liberating forces” sent by Baghdad but spearheaded by armed Shi’ite groups led by Iranian officers. Thanks to massive deployment of heavy weapons, these forces made advances in the suburbs of Tikrit that had already been depopulated when the arrival of IS forced the inhabitants to flee.
Worse, there are numerous reports that the Shi’ite militias carried out acts of massacre and pillage in some of the “liberated” suburbs, forcing the remaining population to seek shelter in areas held by IS.
Iranian intervention has also angered a majority of Iraqi Shi’ites. Last week there were clashes between pro- and anti-Iran Shi’ites, with the latter distributing portraits of Ayatollah Ali Sistani in “liberated” areas, while the former offered money to anyone who would put up portraits of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian “ Supreme Guide.”
President Obama and Kerry have invented a new kind of strategy, one that could be labeled “room-service diplomacy.” Under it, US power is no longer used in the service of a clearly stated American strategy but is made available on demand from real or imagined local allies. The so-called coalition against IS was itself a fiction from the start. Thus, the US claim of leadership is a fiction within a fiction.
“Room-service diplomacy” cannot destroy IS, let alone help Iraq regain the measure of stability without which the whole of the Middle East would remain in deadly turmoil for the foreseeable future. The real cause of the expanding chaos in the region is the US abdication of a leadership role thrust upon it by history since the 1940s.