Newsday
August 27, 2005
Basra, Iraq - The professor sat at his computer, insistently pulling up pictures of Basra as the gem it was 30 years and four wars ago. He seemed fixated on the past, deflecting questions about the present and the future.
After much time, he reluctantly turned from the screen to face a visitor and the reality of "the awfulness" of what is happening now.
The day before, the body of Jumhour el-Zergany, his university mentor, had been found dumped alongside the road. Zergany had been tortured, his arms broken, before his tormentors finally put three bullets in his head. His crime, the professor said, was that he had converted years before from Shia to Sunni Islam and had dared to hire religious Sunni professors in the history department that he chaired.
A police van was seen by witnesses to have stopped Zergany's car at the time of his disappearance, and police vehicles and sometimes men in police uniforms have been involved in others of the hundreds - perhaps as many as 1,000 - assassinations in Basra in the past 18 months.
It is not just Sunnis who are being targeted in this majority Shia city, the professor said, but other Shia as well. All professors - particularly those interested in politics, like himself - are in danger. And not just professors, but judges, and doctors and journalists. And politicians who are seen as secular alternatives to the clergy now in power. And those, especially women, who work for foreigners. And Christians.
U.S. and Iraqi sources say it is often police intelligence officers who commit the killings. British forces, which patrol this region, made a deal to integrate the religious militias here into the police in return for the militias' disbanding. But they never stopped serving their former masters, the Shia clerics who lead the political parties now in power.
Most troubling for U.S. policy in the Middle East is that many Iraqis believe the police who commit these killings are working ultimately for Iran, where most of them lived for many years in exile from Saddam Hussein. Sources with access to U.S. intelligence confirm that Shia Iran has infiltrated large numbers of agents into both police security and Interior Ministry paramilitary forces.
"I am Shia, but I am afraid of these parties that were in Iran. They are like the fire under the ash," said an expert on Shia religious movements who was in exile in Iran with many of them. "I am afraid of those Iranians who are behind them, also."
"Of course I'm afraid," the professor, a Shia, said emphatically in response to a question, telling a reporter not to use his name. "Some assassinations are political. Some are ethnic. Some are simply of scholars. They are targeted because they are influential, and they are not protected." In Basra, he said, "there is no longer a distinction between order and freedom."
Political leaders from the religious parties deny these charges.
Salah Al-Batat is a member of the Provincial Council and a leader in Basra - Iraq's second largest city - of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a religious party close to Iran. He attributed the assassinations to former members of Saddam's government. "We are a target of terror," he said. But he said he was "20 times 100 percent certain that there is not one person from Iran in the land of Basra. If there was anybody from Iran, we would arrest them."
No one keeps any records of the assassinations. Indeed, the police, when asked, say they do not occur or are the work of terrorists. One political leader said they are in the hundreds and may have reached a thousand.
Nazar Habib, 45, is the dean of the College of Education at Basra University, a huge institution with two campuses. He is also one of two professors elected to the Basra Provincial Council. He said he, like other Shias, "lived under the former regime in terror." But for him the danger has not ended. Two weeks before a recent interview with Newsday, he said, men with submachine guns opened fire on his car near his home. He was not in the car and no one was injured. He hinted that he was targeted because he had dared to suggest an end to the killings. "Sometimes I said, forget the past, let us begin from zero point. This speech was hated by others," he said.
The family of el-Zergany lives in bitterness toward the British and Americans who they thought would greatly improve their lives. "We felt the ambition to see a better life that Bush and Blair promised us," one of his relatives said. "But now the professors, the doctors and the educated people die every day. Is this freedom? Is this democracy? Where is security? Our fate is unknown, because we face a bad day to a worse day."
"Tell Bush, who came on the back of a tank under the slogan freedom and democracy, we don't care for freedom and democracy, we care only for security," the relative said.
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Time Magazine
August 22, 2005
A Time investigation reveals the Tehran regime's strategy to gain influence in Iraq - and why U.S. troops may now face greater dangers as a result
The U.S. military's new nemesis in Iraq is named Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, and he is not a Baathist or a member of al-Qaeda. He is working for Iran. According to a U.S. military-intelligence document obtained by Time, al-Sheibani heads a network of insurgents created by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with the express purpose of committing violence against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Over the past eight months, his group has introduced a new breed of roadside bomb more lethal than any seen before; based on a design from the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hizballah, the weapon employs "shaped" explosive charges that can punch through a battle tank's armor like a fist through the wall.
According to the document, the U.S. believes al-Sheibani's team consists of 280 members, divided into 17 bombmaking teams and death squads. The U.S. believes they train in Lebanon, in Baghdad's predominantly Shi'ite Sadr City district and "in another country" and have detonated at least 37 bombs against U.S. forces this year in Baghdad alone.
Since the start of the insurgency in Iraq, the most persistent danger to U.S. troops has come from the Sunni Arab insurgents and terrorists who roam the center and west of the country. But some U.S. officials are worried about a potentially greater challenge to order in Iraq and U.S. interests there: the growing influence of Iran. With an elected Shi'ite-dominated government in place in Baghdad and the U.S. preoccupied with quelling the Sunni-led insurgency, the Iranian regime has deepened its imprint on the political and social fabric of Iraq, buying influence in the new Iraqi government, running intelligence-gathering networks and funneling money and guns to Shi'ite militant groups - all with the aim of fostering a Shi'ite-run state friendly to Iran. In parts of southern Iraq, fundamentalist Shi'ite militias - some of them funded and armed by Iran - have imposed restrictions on the daily lives of Iraqis, banning alcohol and curbing the rights of women. Iraq's Shi'ite leaders, including Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have tried to forge a strategic alliance with Tehran, even seeking to have Iranians recognized as a minority group under Iraq's proposed constitution. "We have to think anything we tell or share with the Iraqi government ends up in Tehran," says a Western diplomat.
Perhaps most troubling are signs that the rising influence of Iran - a country with which Iraq waged an eight-year war and whose brand of theocracy most Iraqis reject - is exacerbating sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites, pulling Iraq closer to all-out civil war. And while top intelligence officials have sought to play down any state-sponsored role by Tehran's regime in directing violence against the coalition, the emergence of al-Sheibani has cast greater suspicion on Iran. Coalition sources told Time that it was one of al-Sheibani's devices that killed three British soldiers in Amarah last month. "One suspects this would have to have a higher degree of approval [in Tehran]," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. The official says the U.S. believes that Iran has brokered a partnership between Iraqi Shi'ite militants and Hizballah and facilitated the import of sophisticated weapons that are killing and wounding U.S. and British troops. "It is true that weapons clearly, unambiguously, from Iran have been found in Iraq," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week.
How real is the threat? A Time investigation, based on documents smuggled out of Iran and dozens of interviews with U.S., British and Iraqi intelligence officials, as well as an Iranian agent, armed dissidents and Iraqi militia and political allies, reveals an Iranian plan for gaining influence in Iraq that began before the U.S. invaded. In their scope and ambition, Iran's activities rival those of the U.S. and its allies, especially in the south. There is a gnawing worry within some intelligence circles that the failure to counter Iranian influence may come back to haunt the U.S. and its allies, if Shi'ite factions with heavy Iranian backing eventually come to power and provoke the Sunnis to revolt. Says a British military intelligence officer, about the relative inattention paid to Iranian meddling: "It's as though we are sleepwalking."
The Iranian penetration of Iraq was a long time in planning. On Sept. 9, 2002, with U.S. bases being readied in Kuwait, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei summoned his war council in Tehran. According to Iranian sources, the Supreme National Security Council concluded, "It is necessary to adopt an active policy in order to prevent long-term and short-term dangers to Iran." Iran's security services had supported the armed wings of several Iraqi groups they had sheltered in Iran from Saddam. Iranian intelligence sources say that the various groups were organized under the command of Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani, an adviser to Khamenei on both Afghanistan and Iraq and a top officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Before the March 2003 invasion, military sources say, elements of up to 46 Iranian infantry and missile brigades moved to buttress the border. Positioned among them were units of the Badr Corps, formed in the 1980s as the armed wing of the Iraqi Shi'ite group known by its acronym sciri, now the most powerful party in Iraq. Divided into northern, central and southern axes, Badr's mission was to pour into Iraq in the chaos of the invasion to seize towns and government offices, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam's regime. As many as 12,000 armed men, along with Iranian intelligence officers, swarmed into Iraq. Time has obtained copies of what U.S. and British military intelligence say appears to be Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence reports sent in April 2003. One, dated April 10 and marked confidential, logs U.S. troops backed by armor moving through the city of Kut. But, it asserts, "we are in control of the city." Another, with the same date, from a unit code-named 1546, claims "forces attached to us" had control of the city of Amarah and had occupied Baath Party properties. A 2004 British army inquiry noted that the Badr organization and another militia were so powerful in Amarah, "it quickly became clear that the coalition needed to work with them to ensure a secure environment in the province."
For many Iraqis in the south, the exile militia groups brought with them forbidding religious strictures. "These guys with beards and Kalashnikovs showed up saying they'd come to protect the campus," says a student leader at a Basra university. "The problem is, they never left." Militants frequently "investigate" youths accused of un-Islamic behavior, such as couples holding hands or girls wearing makeup. "They're watching us, and they're the ones who control the streets, while the police, who are with them, stand by," says a student leader who did not wish to be identified. "From the beginning, the Islamic parties filled the void," says a police lieutenant colonel working closely with British forces. "They still hold the real power. The rank and file all belong to the parties. Everyone does. You can't do anything without them." Military officials say they believe Iranian-funded militias helped organize a mob attack in the southern township of Majarr al-Kabir on June 24, 2003, that resulted in the execution of six British military-police officers. According to a classified British military-intelligence document, a local militia leader is "implicated in the murder of the 6 rmp [Royal Military Police]." The man heads a cell of the Mujahedin for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (miri), a paramilitary outfit coordinated out of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's base in Ahvaz, Iran. Although U.S. and British officers think it unlikely the soldiers were killed on orders from Revolutionary Guard officers, they agree that the slayings fit within the Iranian generals' broad guidelines to bog coalition forces down in sporadic hit-and-run attacks.
The Iranian program is as impressive as it is comprehensive, competing with and sometimes bettering the coalition's endeavors. Businesses, front companies, religious groups, ngos and aid for schools and universities are all part of the mix. Just as Washington backs Iraqi news outlets like al-Hurra television station, Tehran has funded broadcast and print outlets in Iraq. A 2003 Supreme National Security Council memo, smuggled out of Iran, suggests even the Iranian Red Crescent society, akin to the Red Cross, has coordinated its activities through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The memo instructs officials that "the immediate needs of the Iraqi people should be determined" by the Guard's al-Quds Force. More sinister are signs of death squads charged with eliminating potential opponents and former Baathists. U.S. intelligence sources confirm that early targets included former members of the Iran section of Saddam's intelligence services. In southern cities, Thar-Allah (Vengeance of God) is one of a number of militant groups suspected of assassinations. U.S. commanders in Baghdad and in eastern provinces say similar cells operate in their sectors. The chief of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, has publicly accused Iranian-backed cells of hunting down and killing his officers. In October he blamed agents in Iran's Baghdad embassy of coordinating assassinations of up to 18 of his people, claiming that raids on three safe houses uncovered a trove of documents linking the agents to funds funneled to the Badr Corps for the purposes of "physical liquidation."
A former Iraqi official and member of Saddam's armored corps, who identifies himself as Abu Hassan, told Time last summer that he was recruited by an Iranian intelligence agent in 2004 to compile the names and addresses of Ministry of Interior officials in close contact with American military officers and liaisons. Abu Hassan's Iranian handler wanted to know "who the Americans trusted and where they were" and pestered him to find out if Abu Hassan, using his membership in the Iraqi National Accord political party, could get someone inside the office of then Prime Minister Iyad Allawi without being searched. (Allawi has told Time he believes Iranian agents plotted to assassinate him.) And the handler also demanded information on U.S. troop concentrations in a particular area of Baghdad and details of U.S. weaponry, armor, routes and reaction times. After revealing his conversations to U.S. and Iraqi authorities, Abu Hassan disappeared; earlier this year, one of his Iraqi superiors was convicted of espionage.
Intelligence agencies say Tehran still funds various political parties in Iraq. Documents from Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps files obtained by Time include voluminous pay records from August 2004 that appear to indicate that Iran was paying the salaries of at least 11,740 members of the Badr Corps. British and U.S. military intelligence suspect those salaries are still being paid, although Badr leader Hadi al-Amri denies that. "I've told the American officers to bring us the evidence that we have a deal with Iran, and we will be ready, but they say they don't have any," he says. What remains murky is the extent to which Iran is encouraging its proxies to stage attacks against the U.S.-led coalition. Military intelligence officers describe their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps counterparts' strategy as one of using "nonattributable attacks" by proxy forces to maximize deniability. What's uncertain, says a senior U.S. officer, is what factions within Tehran's splintered security apparatus are behind the strategy and how much the top leaders have endorsed it. Intelligence sources claim that Brigadier General Sullaimani ordained in a meeting of his militia proxies in the spring of last year that "any move that would wear out the U.S. forces in Iraq should be done. Every possible means should be used to keep the U.S. forces engaged in Iraq." Secret British military-intelligence documents show that British forces are tracking several paramilitary outfits in Southern Iraq that are backed by the Revolutionary Guard. Coalition and Iraqi intelligence agencies track Iranian officers' visits to Iraq on inspection tours akin to those of their American counterparts. "We know they come, but often not until after they've left," says a British intelligence officer. Shi'ite political parties do not dispute that the visits occur. And a steady flow of weapons continues to arrive from Iran through the porous southern border. "They use the legal checkpoints to move personnel, and the weapons travel through the marshes and areas to our north," says a British officer in Basra. Top diplomats and intelligence officials know that some Iranian officers are providing assistance to Shi'ite insurgents, but it's dwarfed by the amount of money and materiel flowing in from Iraq's Arab neighbors to Sunni insurgents.
Western diplomats say that so far, the ayatullahs appear to be acting defensively rather than offensively. An encouraging sign is that even Shi'ite beneficiaries of Tehran exhibit strains of Iraqi and Arab nationalism; and many have strong familial and tribal ties with the Sunnis. "We are sons of Iraq. The circumstances that forced me to leave did not change my identity," says Badr leader al-Amri. He's proud of his cooperation with the Revolutionary Guard to battle Saddam but says it extended only "to the limit of our interests." An informed Western observer thinks that while those groups maintain a "shared world view" with Tehran, much as Brits and Americans share each other's, they are now trying to balance their interests with those of their backers and are eager to wield power in Baghdad in their own right. "I think you'll never break a lifelong relationship," says the senior U.S. military officer, "but as time goes by, as they become politicians fighting local issues, they will change."
That may be true. But Iran shows every sign of upping the ante in Iraq, which may ultimately force the U.S. to search out new allies in Iraq - including some of the same elements it has been trying to subdue for almost 21/2 years - who can counter the mullahs' encroachment. The Western diplomat acknowledges that Iran's seemingly manageable activities could still escalate into a bigger crisis. "We've dealt with governments allied to our enemies many times in the past," he says. "The rub, however, is, Could it affect [counterinsurgency efforts]? To that I say, 'It hasn't happened yet, but it could.'" The war in Iraq could get a whole lot messier if it does.
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Los Angeles Times
August 21, 2005
That perception has fed fear that autonomy for Shiites would fragment Iraq. Tehran has voiced support for the political integrity of its neighbor.
Baghdad - As the deadline bore down on Iraqi leaders drafting a new constitution, some participants said a deal seemed within reach. Then out of nowhere, they said, came a demand from a key Shiite politician.
Abdelaziz Hakim, the leader of the main party in the powerful Shiite parliamentary bloc, spoke before a crowd of supporters Aug. 11 in Najaf and called for a Shiite autonomous region consisting of Iraq's nine oil-rich southern provinces. Hakim, who once headed a militia trained and nurtured by Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guard, called the mini-state a "sacred" goal.
Sunni Arabs were flabbergasted when Hakim's political allies brought up the issue at constitutional negotiations. Long suspicious of Iran's intentions, they charged that the Shiite theocracy was trying to meddle in Iraq's internal affairs.
"It appeared all of a sudden," said Iyad Samarrai, a member of the country's leading Sunni party. He serves on the constitutional committee that had to extend the deadline a week, until Monday, largely over Sunni Arab refusal to endorse a weaker central government. "We interpreted this as an Iranian push."
Iraqis in impoverished southern provinces have long said they would like more control over local resources and revenue. They sit atop most of Iraq's energy reserves, but their cities and villages were neglected for decades under successive Sunni-led governments in Baghdad.
But Sunnis fear that the federalism advocated by Hakim is a trick to give Iran de facto control over the south.
"The issue of federalism for the south was always on the table, but not on this scale and at this speed," said Hassan Zeidan, a member of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni group that has representatives on the constitutional panel.
Sunnis may yet come together with Shiites and ethnic Kurds to approve an Iraqi constitution that enshrines federalism by Monday's deadline. But their perception that Iran was behind the call for autonomy for Iraq's south has hampered efforts to ease worries that federalism would be used to dismember Iraq.
"The Sunnis fear federalism in the south," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of the constitutional committee. The Kurdish north has enjoyed de facto autonomy since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "The south is already close to Iran. Now they fear it's getting closer," he said.
Iran and Iraq share a long border and centuries of rivalry. Iranian Shiites are mostly of Persian descent, while Iraqi Shiites are Arab, clustered in the country's south where three of the sect's key shrines are located. In 1980, Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, leading to an eight-year war of attrition that neither country's emotionally scarred veterans have forgotten.
The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq brought new perils and opportunities for Iran, giving it a chance to build influence with the newly dominant Shiites and Kurds in Iraq while bringing arch-rival America to its border.
But Iran's initial fears of the United States waned as U.S. soldiers became caught up in an insurgency led mostly by discontented Sunni Arabs. U.S. officials recently alleged that weapons were being smuggled from Iran into Iraq.
In public statements, Iran's leaders advocate a strong Iraq and accuse Americans and "Zionists" of trying to dismember it.
"The new Iraqi constitution could and ought to act as a document for proving and consolidating Iraq's political integrity, independence as well as territorial integrity and uniformity," Jomhouri Eslami, an Iranian hard-liner whose positions are considered close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's, said in an editorial last week.
After all, Iranian officials say, if Iraq were to fragment along ethnic and sectarian fault lines, it might inspire its own restive minorities - which include Kurds, Arabs and Azerbaijanis - to revolt.
But experts say Iran is playing a double game. Although it may publicly support a strong Iraq led by its old friends, it is simultaneously pushing it toward instability to keep the United States off balance, said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now at the National Defense University in Washington.
"Iran never takes ... a risk without a backup plan and plausible deniability," she said.
"Tumult keeps Iraq weak, the U.S. tied down and distracted, and [Iran] might even gain a controllable ally in a semi-autonomous southern province."
Wayne White, a former Iraq specialist in the State Department, pointed to ties between the Iranian government and Iraq's transitional prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari.
"At a time in which efforts to draw the largest number of Sunni Arabs into the Iraqi political mainstream should take high priority, the two governments engaged in high-level diplomatic exchanges shortly after Jafari completed forming his government," said White, who is with the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Such moves are "sure to drive Sunni Arab suspicion and paranoia about continued, deep Iranian ties with Iraqi Shiites ever higher."
During constitutional committee meetings, Sunnis accused Shiites of doing Tehran's bidding, said Suha Azzawi, a Sunni Arab member of the panel. A decentralized federal Iraq, they said, would give Iranians everything they wanted: a weak Baghdad, a pliant south and a bargaining chip to use against the U.S. and Gulf state Shiites.
Iraq's Shiites say the federalism they advocate is a way to maintain the cultural character of the south, giving them the option of funding religious ceremonies instead of military parades, mosques instead of playgrounds.
So it came as a surprise when Shiite politicians haggling over the constitution demanded that states be given the right to do business with foreign countries. Many Iraqis suspect Iran would rather cut oil energy and business deals with friendly faces in border provinces than go through Baghdad.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd known for his discretion and diplomatic politesse, confirmed that he was uncharacteristically blunt when he broached the subject with Iranian counterparts.
"We asked the Iranian government to change its policy on bilateral agreements it is signing with Iraqi [provinces] without the central government's knowledge or involvement," Zebari said last week in the London-based Al Hayat newspaper.
"We are asking the Iranian government not to enter into negotiations or joint understanding outside the central government's authority."
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AFP
August 11, 2005
Washington - An influx of Iranians and Iranian weapons is hampering efforts to bring peace and democracy to violence-wracked Iraq, Washington's ambassador to the country said Sunday.
"Weapons and people coming across the border to undermine Iraq must be stopped, and we're working with the Iraqis, including the prime minister, to make this message clear to the Iranians," Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told CNN television.
"We do oppose weapons and people seeking to undermine stability in Iraq coming across the border from Iran," said Khalilzad, who also fingered Syria as fomenting trouble in Iraq.
Khalilzad said he did not oppose good relations between Iraq and neighboring Iran.
"But at the same time, there are Iranian activities that undermine the current system," Khalilzad told ABC television in a separate interview.
"There are weapons that come across the Iranian border. There are people that come across from the Iranian border into Iraq. There are efforts by some in Iran to gain influence in parts of Iraq or in some of the institutions," he said.
"We are aware of this. We are mindful of that. And we are working with the Iraqis to deal with it," the ambassador said.
Khalilzad's comments came as the US magazine Time reported in its online edition Sunday that Iran is backing a network of insurgents operating in Iraq.
Time, citing a US military intelligence document, reported that Iran is backing a man named Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani and his network of insurgents, which consists of 280 members, divided into 17 bomb-making teams and death squads.
Over the past eight months, Sheibani's group has used a new type of roadside bomb, deadlier than any seen before, that is based on a design from Lebanon's Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, the magazine said.
Time also said that a former Iraqi official and member of Saddam Hussein's armored corps, Abu Hassan, said he was recruited by an Iranian intelligence agent last year to compile information of Interior Ministry officials in close contact with American military officers.
Hassan said the agent also wanted him to get someone inside then prime minister Iyad Allawi's office without being searched, according to the magazine.
Western diplomats believe that information they give the Iraqi government is shared with Iran, Time said.
"We have to think anything we tell or share with the Iraqi government ends up in Tehran," a Western diplomat was quoted as saying in the magazine.
Allawi told Time he believes Iranian agents plotted to assassinate him.
Time also reported that before the US-led invasion of Iraq, Iran devised a plan to gain influence in the neighboring country.
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Washington Post
February 14, 2005
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy - potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base - and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy - $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
Yesterday, the White House heralded the election and credited the U.S. role. In a statement, President Bush praised Iraqis "for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom. And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."
Yet the top two winning parties - which together won more than 70 percent of the vote and are expected to name Iraq's new prime minister and president - are Iran's closest allies in Iraq.
Thousands of members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite-dominated slate that won almost half of the 8.5 million votes and will name the prime minister, spent decades in exile in Iran. Most of the militia members in its largest faction were trained in Shiite-dominated Iran.
And the winning Kurdish alliance, whose co-leader Jalal Talabani is the top nominee for president, has roots in a province abutting Iran, which long served as its economic and political lifeline.
"This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. "In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for."
Added Rami Khouri, Arab analyst and editor of Beirut's Daily Star: "The idea that the United States would get a quick, stable, prosperous, pro-American and pro-Israel Iraq has not happened. Most of the neoconservative assumptions about what would happen have proven false."
The results have long-term implications. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations played Baghdad and Tehran off each other to ensure neither became a regional giant threatening or dominant over U.S. allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf sheikdoms.
But now, Cole said, Iraq and Iran are likely to take similar positions on many issues, from oil prices to U.S. policy on Iran. "If the United States had decided three years ago to bomb Iran, it would have produced joy in Baghdad," he added. "Now it might produce strong protests from Baghdad."
Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed most strongly by the Bush administration lost big. During his State of the Union address last year, Bush invited Adnan Pachachi, a longtime Sunni politician and then-president of the Iraqi Governing Council, to sit with first lady Laura Bush. Pachachi's party fared so poorly in the election that it won no seats in the national assembly.
And current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, backed by the CIA during his years in exile and handpicked by U.S. and U.N. officials to lead the interim government, came in third. He addressed a joint session of Congress in September, a rare honor reserved for heads of state of the closest U.S. allies. But now, U.S. hopes that Allawi will tally enough votes to vie as a compromise candidate and continue his leadership are unrealistic, analysts say.
"The big losers in this election are the liberals," said Stanford University's Larry Diamond, who was an adviser to the U.S. occupation government. "The fact that three-quarters of the national assembly seats have gone to just two [out of 111] slates is a worrisome trend. Unless the ruling coalition reaches out to broaden itself to include all groups, the insurgency will continue - and may gain ground."
Adel Abdul Mahdi, who is a leading contender to be prime minister, reiterated yesterday that the new government does not want to emulate Iran. "We don't want either a Shiite government or an Islamic government," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." "Now we are working for a democratic government. This is our choice."
And a senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 percent vote won by the Shiite slate deprives it of an outright majority. "If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation," he said on the condition of anonymity because of department rules.
U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate. Iraq's Arabs and Iran's Persians have a long and rocky history. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's Shiite troops did not defect to Iran.
"There's the assumption that the new government will be close to Iran or influenced by Iran. That's a strong and reasonable assumption," Khouri said. "But I don't think anyone knows - including Grand Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani - where the fault line is between Shiite religious identity and Iraqi national identity."
Iranian-born Sistani is now Iraq's top cleric - and the leader who pressed for elections when Washington favored a caucus system to pick a government. His aides have also rejected Iran's theocracy as a model, although the Shiite slate is expected to press for Islamic law to be incorporated in the new constitution.
For now, the United States appears prepared to accept the results - in large part because it has no choice.
But the results were announced at a time when the United States faces mounting tensions with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, support for extremism and human rights violations. On her first trip abroad this month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran's behavior was "something to be loathed" and charged that the "unelected mullahs" are not good for Iran or the region.
One of the biggest questions, analysts say, is whether Iraq's democratic election will make it easier - or harder - to pressure Iran.
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