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HOW IRAN BEAT AMERICA

Iraq is lost. Iran won it.

To be sure, American and British armies won the campaign, routing what was once a truly formidable army. We accomplished what Iran failed to do over eight years of warfare, while suffering remarkably light casualties. The allies’ onslaught left Iraq’s cities standing, its infrastructure in place. There were relatively few Iraqi civilian casualties. It helped, of course, that the Iraqis didn’t put up a real fight, but still, this was one of the most rapid, successful military campaigns in the last hundred years. And it was all the more remarkable a victory because, unlike in the Gulf War of 1991, the Iraqis were fighting for their own country.

But as history has told us often enough, military victory does not necessarily translate into political victory. As it turned out, Iraq was a mirage, a country that had been Balkanized long before the first coalition soldier set foot in it. The Kurds were independent in all but name and had no intention, under any conditions, of again answering to a Sunni, or, for that matter, Shia central authority in Baghdad. The attitude of Iraqi Shia was similar: they would never again agree to be ruled by a Sunni. As for the Sunnis, they wanted nothing less than the old order back, with or without Saddam.

Saddam had been holding on by only a thread. As the insurgency started, supporters of the war argued that the only problem was that there hadn’t been enough coalition troops at the beginning to hold Iraq together during those crucial first months. But how do you hold a nation together when there wasn’t one to start with? The Israelis had thirty years and more than enough troops to occupy and rebuild the West Bank and Gaza into a nation, but that failed as well.

Even before the guns went silent, Washington became increasingly alarmed at how easily and quickly Iranians crossed the border into Iraq. The Iranians took command of their Iraqi proxies—the same Iraqis who had lived in exile in Iran for almost the last twenty-five years. Iranian clerics showed up in Shia mosques around Iraq, claiming Najaf, Shia Islam’s holiest shrine city, and condemning American imperialism from the pulpit. Any Iraqi with aspirations of political power made the overland trek to Tehran to offer an oath of fealty to Iran.

No Iranian regular troops entered Iraq, because they didn’t need to—Iran needed only proxies, money, and commerce. Iran didn’t publicly acknowledge what it was doing and made no declarations of victory. For form’s sake, Iran did demand the United States end its occupation. But it didn’t press the point.

In fact, there was suspicion among Iran hands in Washington that Iran was happy the United States was bogged down in Iraq. The on-and-off insurgency and uncontrollable corruption undermined the legitimacy of the occupation, and also made Washington dependent on Iranian neutrality. Iran was delighted when its Shia allies won parliament, of course—Iran benefits from a gloss of legitimacy as much as the United States does—but Tehran knew this was only one milestone among many on the road to absorbing Iraq under its control.

The Iranians are patient. They think in centuries, eras—unlike the Americans, who think in fiscal years. In Iraq, the Iranians will map progress over the next thirty years, not timed for the next Majlis or presidential election. If Iraq remains an ungovernable country for the next decade, debilitated by corruption and civil war, that’s enough to prove Iran’s point: American imperialism doesn’t work. All Iran has to do in Iraq is turn up the pressure when America’s attention strays, then turn it down when they see they’ve twisted the lion’s tail a little too hard. The Iranians know we’ll leave sooner or later.

“The Iranians have us on a slow boil,” as a former colleague assigned to Baghdad in 2004 put it to me.

Iran senses that with Iraq failing, it’s on an equal footing with the United States in the Gulf. Along with that, there’s a growing confidence in Tehran today that the United States will finally have to come around to recognizing Iran’s true stature in the world as the only important player in the Middle East—a superpower, even. Iran is confident that America will have to accept the inevitable, that we’ve been wasting our time with the Gulf Arabs, and that we have to come to terms with Iran.

Between March 20 and April 9, 2003, allied forces obliterated the state of Iraq, a nation that will never be put back together in any form resembling the old Iraq. What the war planners didn’t understand was that Iraq was an army rather than a country. In destroying the Iraqi army, the allies destroyed Iraq.

Driving into Baghdad days after allied forces took the city, I saw how technology accomplished what Iran had failed to in eight years of warfare. The backbone of Saddam’s army, T-72 main battle tanks, lay strewn around the city—burned-out hulks. One tank I saw was wedged in a small alley between a couple of two-story buildings, where the driver had obviously parked it hoping to hide it from American Cobra helicopters and Hellfire missiles. It did no good—there was a neat hole in the tank’s glacis, a bull’s-eye. Other tanks had sought protection under trees and bridges, but they too had been hit. There was no place to hide from the technology of a modern army.

Another thing I learned firsthand was that allied forces had unchallenged control of Iraq’s airwaves, the brain of any modern army. Or, as the U.S. military puts it, the allies established from the war’s outset complete “information dominance.” Iraqi phones were either knocked off the air or intercepted, leaving Iraqi leadership with only commercial satellite phones for communicating. And those also were compromised, as I found out.

Before the war started, I had planned to stay with a Sunni tribal chief near Ramadi, an old friend. But it was too early in the war to cross the border from Jordan—fortunately for me, as it turned out. The tribal chief’s house, the house I was supposed to stay in, was hit by six U.S. cruise missiles. A call had apparently been made on a Thuraya satellite phone from near the house. The military suspected it was made by Saddam. Why he was there was another story, but the point was, he had effectively lost contact with his forces the moment the war started. Saddam’s only link with the outside world was the equivalent of the corner pay phone.

The allied victory was total. And now, with Saddam Hussein’s regime gone, two truths were immediately evident. First, the new occupiers would never be able to force Iraqis to live together within the same borders. Second, without the T-72 tanks whose burned-out hulks I’d seen in and around Baghdad, neither would whatever Iraqi regime replaced Saddam’s. The coalition understood too late that for Saddam, the tanks were an instrument of internal repression rather than a national army to defend against external enemies. It overlooked the fact that in March 1991, when the Shia revolted in the south, it was these same T-72s—and helicopters—that kept Saddam from falling.

The only real way to hold Iraq together was through the same kind of brutality Saddam had employed. Was the United States really ready to do that? In 1995, Saddam’s son-in-law Husayn Kamil defected with his brother to Jordan. He then proposed the United States overthrow Saddam and install him in Saddam’s place. As a qualification, he bragged that one way he intimidated Shia villagers was by making them drink gasoline, then firing a tracer bullet through their stomachs, causing them to explode. No, the United States never envisaged and would never consider using the level of violence needed to hold Iraq together. And the Iranians knew this before the war started.

Without any Iraqi secret police—or really any police at all—Iranians went where they wanted and did what they liked. The borders were wide open, and they could bring anything they wanted into Iraq. The Iranians didn’t wear uniforms, and many spoke native Iraqi Arabic, so they could move around the country unnoticed. They were welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi Shia.

And it wasn’t just in the Shia shrine cities like Karbala and Najaf that Iran was taking over through proxies. The Iranians quickly infiltrated the newly formed Iraqi security service and the army too. Members of groups that had been based in Iran during the eighties and nineties, such as the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Da’wa Party, were placed in key positions, awaiting Iranian orders. Iranian-affiliated militias assumed security for Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad, including Baghdad’s vast Shia slum of Sadr City. Iran’s proxies were so confident of their place in Iraq, they still carried their Iranian identification cards.

Iran also proved adept at co-opting the most militant Iraqi nationalists—those led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Though a devout Shia, Muqtada had never been a friend of Iran. The scion of one of Shia Islam’s most revered clerical families, Sadr is the son-in-law of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the founder of Iraq’s Da’wa Party. More important, he is the son of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a populist and revered ayatollah who Saddam assassinated in 1999, along with two of Muqtada’s brothers. Sadr City is named after Muqtada’s father.

After the invasion in 2003, Muqtada attempted to build on his father’s popularity by trying to stir up class war and issuing an ultimatum that the coalition forces leave Iraq. In 2004, Muqtada’s militia, the Mahdi Army, fought the coalition for several months. They were defeated, and Muqtada went on the run—although he wasn’t happy about it—to Iran.

There’s no evidence that Iran incited the 2004 fighting, and Iran was more often at odds with Muqtada than not—but the Iranians were certainly more than happy to offer him a hand, in the form of money and arms, knowing that one day they would be in a position to co-opt Muqtada’s movement. This wouldn’t be difficult, because Muqtada and his army were broke.

At the start of the 2003 invasion, Iran gave responsibility for Muqtada and its other Iraqi proxies to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, if for no other reason than that the Guards were ruthless and knew what they were doing, having meddled in Iraq and Lebanon for the last twenty-five years.

The Revolutionary Guards—or as it’s known by its full name, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—was born in blood. Founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to solidify control over Iran, the Revolutionary Guards started as a brutal vigilante outfit, torturing or assassinating anyone suspected of opposing the revolution.

When the Iran-Iraq War started, the Revolutionary Guards were integrated into the military and sent to the front, where they learned to fight in a conventional war. During the war, the Guards benefited from the Darwin effect: the smart ones went home, leaving behind on the battlefield the ones who had only zealotry going for them. Today, almost entirely integrated into Iran’s regular armed forces, with their own air force and navy, the Revolutionary Guards are Iran’s special forces. They number about 125,000.

Although on paper they’re part of Iran’s sovereign armed forces, the Revolutionary Guards are, in a sense, a state within a state. They own more than a hundred companies and control as much as $12 billion, possibly more, in assets. They have their own arms-procurement network, their own prisons. They have powers of arrest. The Revolutionary Guards are an exclusive fraternity, almost a rite of passage for Iranian men with political ambitions. President Ahmadinejad is a former Revolutionary Guard, as is a majority of the Iranian cabinet. Former Revolutionary Guard officers hold a plurality of the 290 seats in parliament.

I had my run-ins with the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon in the eighties, and more recently in Tehran when I tried to make a visit to the U.S. embassy, which the Revolutionary Guards still occupy. I found them to be a dour bunch, without the least sense of humor or willingness to engage a foreigner. I had a hard time reconciling the fact that a large percentage of them had voted for Iran’s reformist president Muhammad Khatami in 2001—another Iranian paradox I decided to let pass.

What particularly concerned the allies in Iraq was when the Quds or Jerusalem Force, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards, started showing up in Iraq, contacting their agents in the Iraqi Shia militias, Da’wa, SCIRI, and commanders in the Mahdi Army. Originally known as the birun marzi (“outside the borders”), the “liberation movements,” or Department 9000, the Revolutionary Guards finally settled on calling them the Quds Force, or Jerusalem Force. (Quds in Arabic means Jerusalem, a promise that one day the Revolutionary Guards would liberate Jerusalem from the Jewish colonizers and destroy Israel.)

The Jerusalem Force has a long history of backing coups, assassinating dissidents, and kidnapping foreigners. It was behind the two U.S. embassy truck bombings in Beirut, the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and most of the foreign hostage-taking in Lebanon during the eighties and early nineties. And now the American military has accused it of supplying to the insurgency in Iraq sophisticated curved platter charges, or “explosive formed projectiles” (EFPs), which can put a hole in the armor of a tank. At this writing, it hasn’t been proved that the Jerusalem Force is in fact giving the in-surgency EFPs, but then again, it has a history of knowing how to hide its hand.

Whether it’s supplying the EFPs or not, the Jerusalem Force has a well-deserved reputation for having been the most organized, disciplined, and violent terrorist organization in the world, arguably more so than even al Qaeda. When President Bush designated the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization in August 2007, he was referring to the Jerusalem Force’s past. All of which makes the administration’s 180-degree turnaround four months later the more telling. It’s evidence of how very tenuous our hold on Iraq has become, and of the compromises the United States is prepared to make in order not to lose it completely.

In December 2007, the U.S. State Department’s senior official for Iraq, David Satterfield, gave an on-the-record interview in which he said the decline in attacks on American forces in Iraq “has to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision.” In thanking Iran for containing the violence in Iraq, Satterfield was thanking by extension the Jerusalem Force. It would have been unthinkable to have the Jerusalem Force as our new partners before the invasion of Iraq.

And Satterfield certainly knows what the Jerusalem Force is. Satterfield and I served in Beirut together in the mid-eighties, at a time when it was established with complete certainty that the Jerusalem Force was kidnapping many of the American and other Western hostages. Now, some of those same Jerusalem Force operatives who were in Lebanon then—ones with American blood on their hands and indictable in a U.S. court of law—are helping us maintain our hold on Iraq.

Turning necessity into virtue, the Bush administration has tried to make the case that the Iranians were intimidated by the show of force on their borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the corridors of the National Security Council, the CIA, and the State Department, Middle East watchers realized that when we legitimized Iran’s presence in Iraq—even that single nod by Satterfield in Tehran’s direction—Iran was well on its way to forcing U.S. recognition of the flag it had planted in Iraq.

Where were the moderate Iraqi Shia, the ones who were supposed to embrace the occupation and steer a course independent of Iran? How, in 2005, could the Shia vote Iranian allies—two prime ministers from Da’wa—into the Iraqi parliament? Why didn’t they vote in Chalabi, or any of the other exiles the United States flew into Iraq in April 2003?

And what about the moderate Shia clergy? The Iraqi Shia were supposed to listen to us, if for no other reason than gratitude for our getting rid of Saddam when Iran couldn’t. Why weren’t the Iraqis helping us, instead of forcing us to deal with Tehran and the Jerusalem Force?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Iraqi army wasn’t the only thing we destroyed when we invaded Iraq. We destroyed another institution as important: the moderate Shia clergy.

In late April 2003, as T-72 tanks still smoldered across Iraq, with Saddam Hussein swallowed up somewhere in the desert and the Iraqis waking up from their long nightmare, the city of Karbala prepared to mark Arba’in, the fortieth day of mourning after Ashura, the holiest day in Shia Islam. It was twenty years since the Ashura demonstration in Nabatiyah that set off the Islamic resistance against Israel in Lebanon.

Saddam had kept a tight rein on Ashura observances, afraid they might spark a Shia uprising. In fact, with the Shia at roughly 65 percent of Iraq’s population, crushed under centuries of Sunni dominance, this was one of Saddam’s biggest fears, right after an Iranian invasion. But now, with no central government in Baghdad, the Shia could celebrate any way they wanted.

By the time I got to Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, the city was braced for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims arriving from all across Iraq. Green and yellow banners fluttered across the streets. A thick haze from grilling lamb kebabs hung over the open-air markets. City workers watered the streets to keep the dust down.

Families walked around town, the men arm-in-arm and greeting neighbors, women in chadors following a few steps behind. With their dark, indestructible faces, the Shia look different from other Iraqis—1300 years of oppression shows. A couple of cops, still wearing the blue uniform of Saddam’s police, kept the peace, which as far as I could see meant chatting with local shopkeepers. No coalition troops were anywhere to be seen.

I had my driver take me five miles south on the Basra road to watch the first groups of pilgrims approach Karbala.

In groups of fifty or so, they spanned the two-lane road. There were people of every age, from swaddled babies to men and women in their eighties. Families sat along the road on blankets, resting, eating slices of watermelon. Many had walked for hundreds of miles, some until their feet were so blistered they had to be trucked the rest of the way. Every mile or so there were mobile medical aid stations to help. Still, no one had any intention of turning back.

Ashura commemorates the murder of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad. In A.D. 680, Husayn was on his way to Najaf in answer to an appeal from his followers there to overthrow the ruling Umayyid Caliphate. But no one moved to join Husayn, and when he reached Karbala an Umayyid force intercepted him and his small band. Husayn was beheaded, and his family killed.

Sunnis also observe Ashura, as a day the prophet fasted. But in the Muslim popular consciousness, Ashura is associated with the Shia, marking the centuries of Sunni oppression. Ashura is the day the Shia betrayed the prophet’s line, by turning their backs on Husayn, and a believing Shia will spend a lifetime atoning for it. And Ashura is the foundation of another tenet of Shia Islam: martyrdom, the burning, endless readiness for sacrifice. Karbala is Shia Islam’s Calvary.

I had no idea what the practice was for a foreigner, an unbeliever, to march in an Ashura procession. I asked a young man walking along if I could join him. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the center of his group.

As we walked he told me he was from Basra, a city 280 miles away. He had come much of the way on foot.

He talked about Iraq’s future—a very bright one, as he saw it. Like other Shia, he rejoiced at Saddam’s departure. But this was just the beginning. Soon, he said, the Shia would also rejoice at the departure of their deliverers, the Americans and the British.

“And then, Iraq’s Shia will at last be free,” he said.

I knew what he was getting at: the impossible Shia dream that history one day would reverse itself, that the Shia would unite with Iran and depose the Sunni usurpers. The Shia would then become the guardians of Islam’s holiest city, Mecca. This had long seemed a fantasy. But now, why not? No one had expected Saddam would have been gotten rid of so quickly and easily, after all.

I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t worried Iran would just annex Iraq. The Sunni Iraqis I’d talked to over the last couple days had made up their minds that Iran had already started. After erasing the state of Iraq, they asked me, how would the United States keep Iran out? It was obvious that a National Guardsman from Kansas couldn’t do it. He was sent to Iraq to remove a regime, not build a new one.

I wondered, too, if the Shia were going to try something this Ashura. Would they demand their independence? Ashura was often the occasion for some dramatic Shia political pronouncement. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose Ashura on June 3, 1963, to denounce the Shah and declare his rule illegitimate. Although Khomeini had spent a lifetime trying to distance himself from popular Shia custom, like Ashura, he knew that in order to attract a wide following he needed to tap the deep emotional wound of Husayn’s martyrdom and the battle of Karbala.

Back in Karbala, I asked around to find someone who could explain to me why the city’s Ashura was unfurling so smoothly. Ashura demonstrations I’d seen in Lebanon involved young men who pounded their chests and slashed their heads with razor blades. So far there was no sign of this. (It would come later, after I’d left Karbala, to the shock of television viewers in the West.)

A policeman in front of the Imam Husayn Mosque pointed me toward a shabby, four-story cinderblock building across a narrow street from the mosque’s main entrance. “The imam will answer all of your questions,” he said.

I was shown into a third-floor office with smudged walls and peeling paint. The furniture was filthy. Imam Karbalai appeared five minutes later. His black turban told me he was a sayyid—a descendant of the prophet, and of Imam Husayn. His woolen robes were neatly pressed. There was the scent of rosewater about him. He sat on the settee across from me.

“It’s delightful to talk to an American,” he said, in beautiful classical Arabic, “especially on the occasion of Ashura. Who would have ever thought I would be receiving an American in these happy days?”

We talked a little about the war, how quickly Saddam’s army gave up. I commented how with Iraq’s borders open, Iranian pilgrims were flooding into the city. You couldn’t miss them, particularly the women in their distinctive black abayas, chatting in musical Farsi.

“Iranians, of course, are more than welcome,” Karbalai said. “Thanks be to Allah’s grace, after all of these years, they’ve come back.”

Ever since the Arabs converted Iran to Islam in the seventh century, Iranian pilgrims have been vital for the economies of Iraq’s shrine cities such as Karbala. That came to an end at the start of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, when Saddam closed the border and expelled tens of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis of Iranian origin. Many were pure-blooded Iraqis he just wanted to be rid of.

But now it wasn’t just Iranian pilgrims coming across the border. I’d also seen Iranian produce in open-air stalls, everything from pomegranates to pistachios. For Iraq, a country that had been at war for most of the last twenty-five years, teetering on the edge of starvation, opening the border to Iran was a godsend.

I knew nothing about the man sitting in front of me. “Karbalai” means “the man from Karbala.” It could have been an assumed name, for all I knew. He could even have been Iranian. Some estimates put Karbala’s residents at 75 percent Iranian or Iranian descent.

I noticed that Karbalai never mentioned Baghdad; only Najaf, Karbala, Qum—the Shia shrine cities, a cosmopolitan link older and more enduring than Iraq itself. This wasn’t a surprise. A moderate Shia cleric like Karbalai gives temporal political capitals as wide a berth as possible, preferring to tend to the flock instead.

“Who is the mayor of Karbala?” I asked Karbalai.

He tilted back his black-turbaned head and laughed. “I suppose I am,” he said. “For now.”

According to Karbalai, the American tank column that dashed north through Karbala to Baghdad didn’t stop long enough to hand over the keys of the city to anyone. The Americans assumed order would somehow impose itself. And indeed it had, falling into the lap of the man sitting in front of me.

No one had appointed Karbalai. He had, seemingly without dissent, stepped into the power vacuum left by the Americans. The citizens of Karbala accepted his authority as if Allah himself had appointed him.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lebanon when the Lebanese state collapsed in 1984. Hezbollah filled the void like water finding its own level, and never stopped appropriating sovereign authority until it became a state within a state. In Lebanon, Hezbollah had proved Friedrich Engels right: “The state is not ‘abolished’; it withers away.”

It was then, listening to Karbalai, that I finally understood that Saddam’s Iraq was gone for good. The Sunni were not coming back. The Shia were going to make a go of it on their own, even if it meant dividing up Iraq. Given the opportunity, they’d take the whole country. But the one thing they were absolutely determined to do was never again take orders from a Sunni.

But what was going to fill the vacuum left by Saddam’s exit? A Shia Islamic republic? Headed by whom?

It did not seem possible that this very pleasant and sophisticated man’s religious authority was enough to withstand the inevitable political storm, one that every Iraqi was expecting. Could his tiny police force, with only their sidearms, stand up to the anarchy of Iraqi politics? Iraq is the toughest, most uncompromising, xenophobic country in the Arab world. Worse, Iraq was afloat in arms—Kalashnikov machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, the weapons that have made more than one revolution in the Middle East. And what about Karbalai’s boss, Ayatollah Sistani? Was he any tougher?

Ayatollah Ali Sistani is very roughly the pope of Shia Islam. This is by virtue of the fact that Sistani has the most followers among Shia Islam’s largest subsect, “Twelver Shia,” so called because of its tenet that the prophet was followed by twelve divinely chosen successors. About 80 percent of Shia follow Sistani’s spiritual guidance. Generally viewed as apolitical, a moderate, and a rival to the Iranian clerics—a “quietist” cleric—he was the man the United States and Britain had pinned their hopes on to line up Iraq’s Shia behind the occupation and shepherd them into building a modern, secular, democratic Iraqi state. Our ayatollah on our white horse.

There’s no doubt about Sistani’s religious credentials. Born in Mashad, Iran, Sistani, like many Iranian scholars, finished his religious studies in Najaf, Iraq. A brilliant scholar, in 1992 Sistani succeeded Iraq’s highest-ranking ayatollah, Abul-Qassim Khoei.

But Sistani’s turban always sat uneasily on his head. He represented a threat to Iran’s political mullahs, who considered him too moderate, too independent, and too passive. Sistani also disagreed with Tehran about whether clerics should get their hands dirty in day-to-day politics. In contrast to Sistani, Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, both held that a Shia cleric must govern in a truly righteous Islamic republic—one accountable for both the temporal and spiritual affairs of its citizens.

Moreover, Sistani’s popularity and scholarship—in comparison with Sistani, Khamenei is a virtual illiterate in Islamic jurisprudence—was seen as a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority. Sistani’s quietist doctrine also implicitly called into question the legitimacy of the regime in Tehran. According to Sistani’s interpretation of Shia Islam, the mullahs could be voted out, if that was the wish of Iranians, and replaced with a secular government.

The fight between Sistani and Tehran came to a head in December 1993, when Shia Islam’s most senior ayatollah died. Sistani was clearly the most qualified candidate to succeed him, if the standard was religious scholarship. But Tehran supported a relatively unknown ayatollah instead, an old man practically on his deathbed. And he, unlike Sistani, had no significant popular following. Tehran prevailed; Sistani’s vastly larger following counted for nothing.

Tehran’s passing over Sistani came close to causing a civil war among Shia. Lebanon’s highest-ranking ayatollah supported Sistani’s candidacy. But he was forced to keep quiet after the Iranians circulated a rumor that they intended to assassinate him. It was a credible threat—in 1985 the Lebanese ayatollah had been the target of a massive car bombing. Moreover, the Lebanese ayatollah’s body-guards were under the control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

In March 2008, I went to visit this ayatollah. His house and office had been destroyed by Israeli air bombardment during the 34-day war of 2006. He himself escaped death when Hezbollah pulled him out of his house the day before it was hit. Immediately after the war, Iran rebuilt his house and office and supplied him with a new security detail, as well as the latest metal detectors, flat-screen closed-circuit TVs, and energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs. He was in an Iranian gilded cage.

As for Sistani, he got the message: Stay out of Tehran’s way or else.

But Tehran wasn’t Sistani’s only problem. Born in Iran, Sistani is a full-blooded Persian. He speaks Arabic with a heavy Persian accent. He cannot understand, let alone speak, colloquial Iraqi Arabic. And from 1980 on, he was under virtual house arrest under Saddam. Having had almost no contact with average Iraqis, Sistani comes across as cloistered, aloof, and elitist—in other words, little better than an exile. He may be more credible than Ahmed Chalabi, but the Iraqis can’t help but look at Sistani as a foreigner. Sistani isn’t as powerful as the raw number of his followers suggests.

Before the invasion, I managed to meet a few of Sistani’s aides in Syria and ask them about what they intended to do after they got home. “We’ll see,” one of them told me. My impression was that they were anxious about how they would be received in Iraq’s shrine cities like Najaf and Karbala. The younger ones hadn’t even been born in Iraq. They too were exiles, even more out of touch with Iraq than their boss. And like Sheikh Karbalai, they were not prepared for a civil war.

Other Shia exiled clerics I met over the years were the same. Majid Khoei, the son of the Ayatollah Khoei (whom Sistani replaced in 1992), was one of the more articulate and sophisticated ones. Thoughtful and cosmopolitan, he spoke flawless classical Arabic and fluent English. He was a multi-millionaire, having inherited part of his father’s estate, which was estimated to be in the billions. But with no desire to stay in the West, he was determined to return to Iraq—he had fled in 1991—and follow in the footsteps of his father, who was Iraq’s supreme religious leader for decades.

Like the other exiles, Majid lived in the past. He had an outdated view of the place of Iraq’s Shia clerics in history, when the Shia clergy delved into politics only during periods of crisis, righting the nation when it was in trouble, in a kind of noblesse oblige. Majid was convinced that as soon as Saddam was gone, the clock could be turned back and the Shia clerics would smoothly resume their traditional role in Iraq, taking care of mosques, charities, and schools.

“And what about Iran?” I asked him at a meeting in Paris in December 1990, not long before the Gulf War started.

“The Iraqi Shia would never allow the Iranians to interfere in their country,” he told me. The foundation of his argument was that the Persians and the Arabs don’t mix. It was a question Majid had thought a lot about; his family was Iranian, though ethnically they were Turks.

I intentionally pressed Majid on Iran, cautioning him to be careful about the Iranians. He was on his way to Tehran the next morning.

“Ya’badu an-nar, al-farsiin,” I said, laughing. The Persians worship fire.

The allusion was to a prejudice in the Middle East, especially among Sunni fundamentalists, that the Persians never gave up Zoroastrianism, the ancient Iranian religion that worships fire. In other words, they’re not real Muslims. If I’d meant it seriously, Majid might have taken it as an insult. But he understood my intention was only to gently prod him.

Majid coughed up a nervous laugh, no doubt wondering whether it was worth it to give me his frank opinion. He was mostly immune from Iranian political reprisal, thanks to his father’s standing, but then again he also knew how unpredictable Iran’s security services were.

“Don’t worry,” he finally said, falling back on his old argument. “Iran will never take Iraq. Ever.”

It was only in April 2003, when I read in the newspapers that a Shia mob had hacked and shot Majid to death in the Ali ibn Talib Mosque in Najaf, that I fully realized just how wrong he’d been. It’s still not clear whether Majid’s murder was ordered by Iran or by Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, or whether he’d simply been murdered by an enraged mob. Either way, what was clear was that his father’s memory didn’t matter after all. And neither had the moderate Shia clergy—Najaf was a city Ayatollah Sistani was supposed to have sway over.

The truth is that, as in Lebanon, the Kalashnikov, not the Koran, rules in Iraq. Both Sistani and Majid represented an old Shia aristocracy that never stood a chance in postinvasion Iraq. The country they thought they knew had died under Saddam’s brutal regime, the eight-year war with Iran, and thirteen years of a crushing international embargo. It didn’t help that the Shia clergy had been in a steep decline under the assault of twentieth-century secularism. But it was the invasion that ripped away the last illusions.

Washington and London had been encouraged when Sistani supported Iraq’s constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections. (Then again, Iran and Iran’s proxies did the same. With the Shia a majority in Iraq, this wasn’t a surprise.) But democracy wasn’t what was at stake in Iraq; armed force was. Without a militia, Sistani couldn’t control the street. He was unable to stop intra-Shia violence or Shia assassination squads, or influence the Shia government in Baghdad. Several of his assistants were assassinated. And so today—little different from Saddam’s era—Sistani rarely leaves his house in Najaf. He is no more capable of controlling Iraq than Karbalai was Karbala.

The trouble in Karbala started in December 2003, when a suicide bomber attacked the Bulgarian base there, killing dozens. On Ashura the next year, nine explosions went off in Karbala, killing 178 and injuring 500. On April 14, 2007, a bomb went off in a bus station near the Imam Husayn Mosque. The shock waves from the blast would have shattered the windows in Karbalai’s office, where we’d met.

Americans were not immune from Karbala’s violence. In January 2007, Shia militants executed five American soldiers visiting Karbala. Although the U.S. military was convinced Iran was behind it, there was nothing we could do. Iran’s proxies now controlled the police—the same police Imam Karbalai had thought were under his control.

Just as Iran knew how to capitalize on chaos, it also knew how to wield a stick. When Iran’s proxies started to fight street-by-street for Karbala, Iran stepped in and imposed order. Shia militia commanders were summoned back to Iran and dressed down. The leader of the Mahdi Army, Muqtada al-Sadr, was given refuge in a religious school in Iran until the storm blew over. The head of Iraqi intelligence told me that in a couple instances the Revolutionary Guards themselves arrested renegade commanders.

By 2007, there was little doubt Iran, rather than Sistani, was pulling the strings. It was again Iran that stepped in to calm the situation when fighting broke out between Muqtada al-Sadr and U.S. forces. With Sistani unmasked, Iraq’s independent, moderate clergy was shown to be irrelevant. The British, during the Iraqi mandate in the 1920s, used to talk about a Shia cleric’s authority “to loose and bind.” Now that’s an artifact of history, as quaint as afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Baghdad British residency.

There’s a debate today within the U.S. government about how obligated the Shia Iraqi are to Iran. But in my run-ins with the SCIRI and Da’wa, they never bothered to hide their allegiance. They openly acknowledged that they depended on Iran for religious guidance, money, and sanctuary. Even after the invasion, their families would stay in Iran to avoid Iraq’s violence.

But Iran’s support had come at a price. A contact in Da’wa told me that in 1982, Da’wa was given the choice of either accepting Ayatollah Khomeini’s dictatorship, the “rule of the Islamic jurisprudent,” or leaving Iran. There was little choice but to accept. When I met representatives of the SCIRI in northern Iraq, they were accompanied by their Iranian handlers—a reminder to me that the SCIRI answered to Iran. The Shia who assumed police powers in Iraq, then, were Iranian proxies.

Why do we care if Iran is hijacking Shia Islam and the shrine cities in Iraq?

For a start, Iraq gives Iran a platform to recruit new legions of believers in its quest for empire. But just as important, with Najaf and Sistani under Iranian control, the world’s Shia now will have only Iran and its shrine city of Qum to look to for spiritual guidance. The rivalry between Iraq’s Najaf and Iran’s Qum had been the guarantor of an independent Shia clergy. But now the spiritual counterweight to the authoritarian clerics who run Iran is gone, along with the Iraqi army.

Losing Karbala to Iran was a catastrophe few predicted. Just as few predicted the consequences of destroying the Iraqi army.

There will be no de jure Iranian takeover of Iraq. No Iranian flag will fly over the Green Zone. Iranian troops will not occupy Iraqi cities, and there will be no declarations of victory. Iran will be happy to pull the strings behind the curtain, ruling through proxies and economic ties that bind. Iran will take over Iraq piece by piece.

As I’ve said, it will start with oil, the lifeblood of Iraq. Even though Iraq’s southern petroleum-export facilities are nominally held by British forces, Iranian proxies have systematically looted them. Some estimates put the amount of theft as high as 600,000 barrels a day—nearly a third of Iraq’s production. The crude reportedly was barged to the United Arab Emirates, refined, and sent to Iran to meet its gasoline shortages.

Iran will continue to eviscerate Iraq’s independent Shia clergy. It will buy off Sistani’s followers, appropriate his tithes, and undermine the seminary in Najaf. If it needs to, it will assassinate Sistani or any other cleric who challenges Tehran. Iraqis already believe that Iranian intelligence has bought houses around Sistani’s for that eventuality.

Iran will not delve too deeply into Iraqi politics, or promote one faction over another. As Iran learned in Lebanon, pitting Shia against Shia doesn’t serve Iran’s interests. Iran found it was more effective to steer a careful course between Hezbollah and more secular Shia groups. Iran will play off differences between Iraq’s major Shia parties, gradually imposing its own order through money and arms. It will push them to undermine the occupation but rein them in when the situation threatens to turn into a full-fledged war. Iran is a patient, pragmatic player, and it knows exactly where the red lines are, although this scenario won’t hold if Iraq slips into an out-and-out civil war where Shia are slaughtered in large numbers. In that case, Iran would find it difficult not to intervene directly.

Iran also has a geopolitical strategy in Iraq: Bleed the United States dry. Iran demands publicly that America withdraw from Iraq. But its real long-term interest in Iraq is to diminish the United States’ will to resist Iran’s expansion. Iran has a clear interest in keeping our military bogged down in war without end, which drains our treasury and makes Americans reluctant to enter into another conflict in the Middle East.

The Iranians read American newspapers; they understand that Americans are averse to losing soldiers and squandering hundreds of billions on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars with an end we can’t define. Iran knows that Iraq will remain a chaotic, corrupted, ungovernable country no matter what the United States does. Iran ignores the false hopes of the Bush administration, like those that accompanied the “surge.” Iran will hold back its proxies to make it appear things are getting better, but then let them loose when the United States looks as though it might achieve some passing order.

By bleeding the United States, Iran knows it can keep it from acting against Iran’s allies Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas. More crucially, a United States bogged down in Iraq will not attack Iran.

Second—and again, this is in the long term—Iran intends to use Iraq as a platform for dominating the Persian Gulf. Given the world’s addiction to hydrocarbons, the Gulf is a body of water as strategic as the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Iraq is the first piece in Iran’s quest for hegemony, a reminder to the world that the Persian Gulf has that name for a reason.

In this book, I will focus primarily on the single most important American interest in the Middle East: oil. Obviously, there are wider, more complex issues that drive the United States. But oil is the common denominator that all Americans, opponents and supporters of the Iraq War, share. Oil has apparently now become the official justification of the war. In a closed hearing to Congress in April 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, testified that once Iraqi oil is fully developed, it will be greater than that of Saudi Arabia. Oil, Crocker said, is our vital interest in the region: “An unstable Iraq,” he said, “equals an unstable region, equals unstable oil prices.”

Iran believes that the Iraq debacle will force the United States to finally come around to an inevitable truth: that Iran has an undeniable place in Iraq, the Gulf, and the rest of the Middle East. Open-ended containment of Iran, with an American fleet and army perpetually in the Gulf, is too expensive for the United States to continue indefinitely. And so, for the first time in its undeclared thirty-year war with Iran, the United States will be forced to deal with Iran on an equal basis.

America’s invasion of Iraq wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Where did everything go wrong? And how did Iran become so strong, right under our noses—even as we crushed what was once the world’s fourth-largest army in two short weeks?