Mick Hartley

Irina Tsukerman on increasing Iranian encroachment into Iraq – and why no lasting deal with Tehran is possible:

Iran has decided to send 7,500 troops to Iraq, supposedly to provide protection for Shiite pilgrims. But once they are there, there will be little accounting of the extent to which those special forces units will partake in the ransacking of anti-Iran media offices or the targeted sniper shootings of Shiite protesters, who are on the streets demanding that Iran withdraw from Iraq. With 130 protesters reported dead and over 6,000 wounded, the US-backed Al Hurra publication suspended for three months for exposing corruption, and Al Arabiya and multiple other foreign and domestic news agencies ransacked and silenced, Iraq is facing a crisis over increasing Iranian involvement that has been developing ever since the election of the new government a year ago.

The US embassy has been largely silent over concerns that further pressure on the government will “lose Iraq.” The Iraqi government claimed not to have authorized the killings of the protesters and said it did not know who was responsible, and Iranian passports were reported found in the areas of the protests and attacks. Journalists in the ransacked offices reported seeing Iranian officers in uniform in addition to masked gunmen who were likely from the Iran-backed PMUs, which were supposedly integrated into the Iraqi army under orders from Baghdad several months prior to these events.

As Baghdad seeks to distance itself from any responsibility for the ongoing crisis, Iraq appears to be lost to US influence… […]

The targets at risk in the Gulf today, including Bahrain, Iraq, and the Levant, have been the targets of Iran’s ideological outreach and strategy since the early post-revolutionary days. As Tehran’s ideology is driven by an apocalyptic vision and a sense of divine mission, no pragmatic consideration can ultimately deter it from its goals, and “deals” are seen as no more than temporary stopovers on the way to the fulfillment of that mission. Iran sees the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] not as a terrorist tool with which to fulfill its power needs and ambitions, but as a force carrying out a divine undertaking: first enforcing the way of jihad among Muslims (who have thus far been the primary targets), and then anyone else who refuses to bow before it.

The West’s willful blindness to the theological motivations behind Iran’s ideological strategy stands in the way of any coherent response to its growing aggression, as well as its increasingly successful spread of influence and entrenchment of forces and proxies around the world despite seemingly overwhelming odds and crushing sanctions. The events observable in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere today are predictable echoes of the revolution’s not only being exported, but enforced as part of a jihadist messianic vision promulgated by the progenitors of the Islamic Republic. Defying conventional logic, Washington doublespeak, and the wishful thinking of all looking to avoid conflict, the Islamic Revolution carries on.