It's About Iraq, Not US or Iran

Today, Prime Minister Maliki went walkabout in the capital - surrounded by heavily armed US and Iraqi troops and without advance notice because of the security situation - to show how well the surge was doing. There he claimed that the conference due to begin tomorrow was a sign that the Iraqi situation was improving - although if the Iraqi situation was any good the conference wouldn't be needed.

It will be surprising if attendees at the conference heed this call from his government though.

Iraq wants action not words from a regional conference in Baghdad on Saturday and will urge Iran and the United States not to use it as a playing field to settle their scores, Iraq's foreign minister said on Friday.

Iraq has called the meeting to enlist support in stopping a slide into full-scale civil war but it is being closely watched as a rare opportunity for officials from Washington and Tehran to meet at a time of tension over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"We do not want Iraq to be the battleground to settle scores for other countries and for them to settle their scores with the United States here at our expense," Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview.

Indeed, the Bush administration has said that the main item on its agenda is a presentation to the assembled diplomats on what it alleges is Iranian "meddling" in Iraq, including the furnishing of weaponry. The last time it made a presentation on the subject, the administration soon had to back off from it's claims after senior general Peter Pace refused to back them. It ended up claiming that a briefer had overstated the evidence which had been widely seen as none too convincing to begin with.

It remains to be seen if the new presentation will be any more convincing to diplomats from the region well used to disinformation and the murky nature of arms trafficking. In any case, the presentation is sure to begin a round of tit-for-tat accusations with Iran, which has made its own accusations of US and UK aid for terrorists in Iran.

As foreign minister Zebari was telling Reuters that Iran and the US should beware of using the conference as a venue for their own feud rather than helping Iraq, the leader the largest bloc of MPs in the Iraqi National Assembly, Abdel-Aziz Al-Hakim, was telling Shiite pilgrim crowds in Karbala that the interests of Iraq should be put before the interests of the occupying Multi-National Forces and calling for a partition of iraq into three confederated provinces. He called "for a security accord to be concluded on the law and order issue between the Iraqi government and the multi-national forces (MNF) in line with UN Security Council resolutions". Such an accord, which would permanently establish that the Iraqi legal system would be pre-eminent and govern all MNF activities in Iraq, was required by the letter the Iraqi government sent to the UN asking for an extension of the occupation's mandate but it has not been acted upon as yet.

Such neglect of Iraqi sovereignty issues has characterized the occupation to date. What other nation would accept a drop-in unnanounced visit from a foreign leader followed by a peremptory summons to that leader's presence? If anything, Iran has a stronger case for involvement, as Tony Karon points out today (h/t Ezra):

the propaganda effort has been cranked up to proclaim Iran the source of all trouble in the Middle East — and much of the media is being naively helpful, as usual, by failing to question many of the fundamentals. For example, the idea that Iran is “meddling” in Iraq. What exactly is the U.S. doing there? Iran has far more legitimate interest in shaping the politics of its neighbor, whose last Sunni regime initiated a war that killed more than a million Iranians. Not only that, the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s democratically elected political leaders (both Shiites and Kurds) are on close terms with Iran and welcome its involvement in rebuilding their country. And the Iraqi government has not echoed the U.S. accusation about Iranian activity.

Still, the trope that “Iran is meddling in Iraq” has now been embraced by much of the mainstream media. The distortion is clear in the language of this report from CNN on changes being considered in the Iraqi intelligence structure: Under the headline “Pro-Iran Agency May Take Over Iraq’s Intelligence,” it notes that the current Iraqi intelligence structure was created entirely by the U.S. and that the Iraqi government wants to bring it under its own authority. “But now, the future of the U.S.-controlled agency appears to be in jeopardy. A document from Iraq’s National Security Council lays out a blueprint for Iraq’s new intelligence community. Under that plan, all intelligence gathering would be consolidated under Iraq’s Iranian-friendly central government.” So, the democratically elected government of Iraq wants to exercise its sovereignty by putting its own intelligence service under its control (rather than that of a foreign power, i.e. the U.S.), and this is portrayed as some sort of Iranian power grab!