4

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FROM TERRORISM TO
POWER POLITICS:
HOW IRAN BECAME A STATIST POWER

George Orwell would have laughed at the charade, the way the United States portrays Iran. Black is white, two plus two equals twenty-two. The way our government declares something as fact, and we just accept it, uncritically and unexamined.

Nearly everything the average American has been told about Iran is wrong. Iran is not fighting a crusade. It does not want to convert us to Islam. Iran truly believes that for the last thirty years, it has been fighting a straightforward war against occupation.

Iran is not a totalitarian state run by “Islamofascists” who believe they’re in some quixotic war with the West and Western civilization. President Ahmadinejad is not intent on starting World War III; he’s a figurehead no more able to take Iran to war than Joseph McCarthy was able to take America to war against Communism. Iran’s real leaders are rational, pragmatic, and calculating.

We live in the past; Iran lives in the future. We think of Iran as a terrorist state, and of Hezbollah as a terrorist cult. Yes, Iran seized our embassy in Tehran in 1979, bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, and bombed the U.S. Marine barracks there the same year. But that was more than a quarter-century ago.

In the meantime, we’ve missed what Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, has turned into. Hezbollah fights for an unambiguous national cause. It operates openly on the battlefield, seizes and holds territory, and exerts sovereignty over a civilian population. In other words, Hezbollah fits the definition of a guerrilla force, not a terrorist group.

Americans have missed Iran’s critical transition, its metamorphosis from a Shia rebellion and a terrorist state to a classic military power. And absent a bloody confrontation with the United States or Israel, Iran will continue to act in this same pragmatic, calculating way.

Until we’re prepared to see facts when it comes to Iran, we’ll never understand how to either confront it or settle with it. Nor will we ever understand that “victory” in the Middle East isn’t a question of rooting out small terrorist cells, a finite war with finite ends, as Washington would have us believe. In Iran we are fighting a war of conviction, against an enemy with a bottomless pool of potential recruits. If America keeps acting on a flawed understanding of this conflict, it will lose to Iran.

The transformation of Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, from a small terrorist group into a classic guerrilla army didn’t happen overnight. It took place over two decades—legacy of the 1982–2000 Lebanon conflict that’s still reshaping Middle East dynamics. The transformation can be traced through the career of Imad Faiz Mughniyah, the honey-eyed Lebanese man who went from Fatah street fighter looking for a war, to the world’s most wanted terrorist, to military commander, and finally to someone pensioned off in Damascus—all in the space of about ten years. His story serves as both illustration and warning of what we face in Iran.

His birth certificate said he was born in the village of Tayr Dibba, a small Shia village in the hills above Sidon. In fact, he was probably born in Beirut, his father a poor farmer and vegetable salesman who pushed a cart around the dusty squalor of the Shia southern suburbs. His family was well known in the neighborhood of ‘Ayn al-Dilbah. Like everyone else who lived there, they were economic refugees.

The Mughniyah family wasn’t without name; one distant cousin was a renowned Islamic scholar whose books are still read. At fifteen, angry over Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, Imad Mughniyah joined Fatah’s student cells, a clandestine organization headed by a Lebanese Christian who had converted to Islam. The student cell members were outsiders: Lebanese Shia and Christians, Islamic fanatics, mercenaries, and anyone else ready to take Fatah’s money. It was then that Mughniyah started to fight in the Beirut neighbor-hood of Sin al-Fil, almost as an after-school activity.

Mughniyah attended the American University of Beirut for a year, where he studied business administration. But as a Shia, he knew he could never get a job in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else in the Gulf where the work was. So he dropped out and again picked up his Kalashnikov.

For a young man like Mughniyah, this was a natural step. Lebanon was an emporium of terrorism, a refuge for almost every terrorist group in the world, from the Baader-Meinhoff Gang to the Japanese Red Army. It had also endured unrelieved occupation—by the Ottomans, French, Israelis, Syrians, and Palestinians. Mughniyah was born four years after President Eisenhower sent the U.S. Marines to Lebanon. He was fourteen when the Syrians sent their troops to Lebanon in 1976. But as with Osama bin Laden, the real turning point in his anger came when the Israelis shelled Beirut in 1982—the first time in modern history that foreign invaders destroyed an Arab city.

In the four years Mughniyah fought with Fatah, he made a name for himself as a smart, fearless fighter. By the time he met with Sheikh Hossein and joined the Revolutionary Guards in 1982, he had vaulted to another level altogether. And when he hijacked TWA flight 847 in 1985, Mughniyah became the emblem of Iran’s terrorist war in Lebanon—a hero within the ranks of Hezbollah, or at least to the ones who knew about him. Mughniyah wasn’t a thoughtful or tutored believer in Islam. Nor did he blindly accept Khomeini’s inter-pretation of Shia Islam. But his ability to make good on his promises was enough for him to become a captain in what the BBC would call “the most effective guerrilla army in the world.”

Though there’s no conclusive evidence for it, Mughniyah may have been at the center of the most notorious terrorist acts of the 1980s: the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing there. He may have been the man who turned the twentieth century’s dream of the car into the nightmare of the car bomb. But it’s known that it was Mughniyah who took dozens of foreign hostages in Lebanon, turning it into a country as hostile to the West as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Until his assassination, on February 12, 2008, there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Mughniyah for the TWA-847 hijacking and the subsequent murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. Mughniyah’s fingerprints were found on the airplane.

But although Mughniyah lived until 2008, his final act of international terrorism came twenty years earlier, with the hijacking of Kuwait Airways flight 422 in April 1988. That hijacking is a metaphor for Iran’s evolution from terrorist state to a Middle East superpower. It shows Mughniyah as both terrorist and soon-to-be-military-commander. It also shows the sophistication of a well-planned commando operation, more precise and disciplined than those undertaken by al Qaeda—one reason Mughniyah and Iran’s other proxies were more dangerous.

That statement might raise eyebrows, considering the slaughter al Qaeda inflicted on September 11, 2001. But we have to remember that the objective of the 9/11 attacks was simply to kill as many people as possible as a way to horrify the world. As carefully planned as the attacks themselves were, nothing lay behind them but a determination to create anarchy. After all, what did al Qaeda gain from 9/11? Absolutely nothing. No territory, no concessions, no goodwill. What’s left of its leadership is living deep in caves just as before, as if the towers never fell.

Iran, on the other hand, even during the bloodiest stage of the revolution, knew what it wanted and what it was doing. It always focused on the objective, to establish a foothold in Lebanon, rather than on the act itself. The Iranians are too smart and too insightful to kill simply for the sake of it, like an insane gunman opening fire in a McDonald’s. This is what makes them so much more of a threat: they learn from their mistakes, and adjust tactics and strategy accordingly. And the hijacking of Kuwait Airways 422 marks one such adjustment—one of the Iranians’ last attempts to use terror as a means to an end.

The hijacking was Mughniyah’s idea. His brother-in-law had been locked up in a Kuwaiti prison for nearly five years, as one of seventeen Da’wa members arrested for attacks on the American and French embassies in Kuwait in December 1983. Those attacks had come at the behest of Iran, which had taken in the Da’wa members after Saddam Hussein expelled them from Iraq.

Mughniyah knew his brother-in-law would die in that Kuwaiti cell if he didn’t do something. Along with Iraqi Da’wa, he had already made several attacks on the Kuwaiti regime in an effort to get the men, known as the Da’wa 17, released. But Kuwait always held firm.

By 1988, Mughniyah was frustrated that the Iranian government hadn’t done more to free his brother-in-law. To Mughniyah the loyalist, Iran had an obligation to leave no soldier on the field of battle. Moreover, Kuwait had supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, so why should Tehran have any reluctance to do the Kuwaitis harm? With the same single-mindedness and anger that had fueled him this far, Mughniyah badgered the Iranian government to let him hijack a Kuwaiti airliner.

But in Tehran, a shift was under way. There had already been several attempts at freeing the Da’wa 17, none successful. Why would this time be any different? And in a larger sense, why spend all this time fighting the Arabs, when the real enemy—Israel—still occupied Lebanon? The Iran-Iraq War was at last coming to a definitive end, and the time was right for the shift. The pragmatists in Tehran thought it was time for Iran to look at the bigger picture, to become better disciplined and concentrate on Israel.

But Iran wasn’t completely finished with its transformation, so in a nod to their tireless fighter Mughniyah, the Iranian government gave him the green light to hijack a Kuwaiti airliner in April 1988. This was one of the last gasps of the zealots, and Iran would begin to regret it even before the hijacking had ended. The outcome would serve only to confirm that Iran’s move from terrorist to military struggle would be the right one.

Mughniyah wasted no time once he’d received his permission. On April 5, eight hijackers operating under Mughniyah’s orders seized flight KU 422, which was nearing Kuwait after a long flight from Bangkok. Three of the hijackers, armed with hand grenades, entered the cockpit and informed the captain they were taking control of the plane.

The plane first put down in Mashad, Iran, where it remained for several days. The Iranians wouldn’t let the hijackers deplane, as they had in the past. This was Mughniyah’s first hint things weren‘t going well.

Mughniyah’s hijackers were proficient, professional terrorists. They understood the psychology of hostages—how to keep them quiet, obedient, disoriented, and terrified. From the moment the flight was hijacked in Bangkok, even though Mughniyah himself was not on the plane, his handpicked team demonstrated they were in charge, making decisions that reflected sharp military precision.

Throughout the hijacking, the team stayed hooded. They spoke to one another in classical Arabic, to hide their Lebanese accents. They swapped clothes. They kept the plane fueled up and the doors roped closed to defeat a rescue attempt. They turned the lights and air conditioning off and on. They prowled the aisles, picking out passengers and shining lights in their faces, making them believe they were about to be executed.

From his base in Beirut, Mughniyah ordered the pilot to fly to the Beirut airport, which Hezbollah controlled. But even as the plane was in midair, someone on the Iranian side began to have second thoughts. The Iranians had given Mughniyah the go-ahead for this hijacking, but several days into it, they wanted no part of having the plane touch down in Lebanon—they didn’t want to risk losing the foothold they’d won in that country. The Iranians lied to the Syrians, who had troops around the airport, telling them they had nothing to do with the hijacking.

The plane circled the airport for hours, and Mughniyah realized that Syria and Hezbollah wouldn’t let it land. Dramatically, Iran seemed to have reached an ideological turning point right in the middle of its own hijacking.

He directed the hijackers to fly to Larnaca, Cyprus, deciding Cyprus was the next best airport to put down after Beirut. The Cypriots didn’t have a particularly good hostage rescue team, and Larnaca International Airport was small, with a view of all directions. But just as important, Mughniyah had a network in Larnaca that would alert him to any suspicious movement of troops preparing for a rescue.

On April 10, as the plane sat on the tarmac in Larnaca, Mughniyah radioed the airplane in the open: “Golden fiat 101 for this 3.” The message was indecipherable to anyone listening in, as was the follow-up message: “We 209 true as a sign everything cold sun.” The coded communications displayed a level of sophistication not seen before in terrorist acts of this type. In the course of just a few years, Mughniyah had clearly come a very long way from jagged-edged street fighter.

As the days dragged on, however, the Kuwaitis still wouldn’t bend, refusing to release Mughniyah’s brother-in-law or any other members of the Da’wa 17. Mughniyah’s frustration and anger grew. He knew he had to up the stakes—to murder passengers. He issued the order, and the hijackers shot and killed two of them.

It had no effect. The Kuwaitis would not give in. Mughniyah next directed the hijackers to fly the plane to Algeria, where PLO negotiators became involved. Soon enough, it became clear to Mughniyah that nothing would budge the Kuwaitis. Finally, fifteen days after it began, the drama of KU-422 came to an end when the eight hijackers were granted safe passage back to Lebanon in exchange for abandoning the plane and freeing the remaining hostages.

In the end, Mughniyah’s hijacking accomplished absolutely nothing, except perhaps to display the level of discipline and skill he and the Iranians had achieved during the Lebanon conflict. Though it was perfectly executed, it still didn’t work—one reason it would be one of the last hijackings Iran would back. The times had changed, as had Iran’s objectives. It was time for Iran to grow up, get serious in Lebanon, concentrate on capturing ground from the Israelis, and act like the mature power it had become.

But Mughniyah wasn’t interested in Iran’s transformation, and when the Iranians told him his terrorist days were over, he didn’t take it well. He had lived by the sword for too many years; it was all he knew.

For a few years Iran put him on the front against the Israelis. He fought well, leading several ambushes of Israeli patrols. But he never adjusted to his new role, there were dozens of other independent Hezbollah commanders he had to compete with, and he started to fight with his Iranian handlers. By now, like Leon Trotsky after the Russian Revolution, or Robespierre after the French, he was considered irrelevant, even a liability. When the revolutionaries settle into power, the firebrands aren’t so useful: Mughniyah was too radical, so the Iranians marginalized him.

There had been no military academies for Mughniyah, no awards or medal ceremonies, no cash bonuses, no photo ops. He lived and operated in the pitch black, with recognition from only a handful of people. Anger alone kept him in the battlefield. But the same anger that had made him such an effective fighter and terrorist had now made him dangerous to Iran.

Mughniyah, like so many other young Lebanese men, was a nihilist: he wanted to bring down the Lebanese temple around him—the constitution, the political parties, the secular political leaders, anything tainted by the West. For a while, that was exactly what Iran wanted too. But because in the late 1980s Iran had made the transition from being a revolutionary troublemaker trying to export a Shia uprising, to statist, Napoleonic-like conquest, the goal was no longer to destroy and sow unrest. It was to impose order, to take ground, to expand. Even Mughniyah understood that his skills were no longer wanted. He was resigned to end his career training a new generation of Iran’s foot soldiers.

In 1996, Iran offered Mughniyah his choice of two missions: to collect intelligence, or to train its two client Palestinian groups, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Iranians ignored Mughniyah when he asked to carry out attacks against Israel during the Israeli elections. Iran had too much to lose at that point. Hezbollah was in parliament now; the oppressed were in power. Attacks on Israel would have to wait. Mughniyah, the good soldier, had no choice but to salute.

Not everyone adjusted so easily. Mughniyah’s brother-in-law, the man he had tried to free with the KU 422 hijacking, eventually escaped from his Kuwait jail and returned to Lebanon. Mughniyah arranged to appoint him to a senior military command in the south. But the brother-in-law went back to his old ways and started kidnapping foreigners—without Iran’s permission. He had no idea how much had changed since his imprisonment seven years before. The Iranians released the hostages and removed him from his post. Later, he complained bitterly to his friends that everything had changed—that Iran had abandoned Khomeini’s revolution.

Another Mughniyah lieutenant also couldn’t make the adjustment, and when he kidnapped the children of a rich Lebanese businessman, Iran’s response was draconian. He was arrested and executed, his past service to Iran forgotten.

The arc Imad Mughniyah traveled is unambiguous—from rootless teenager with a Kalashnikov, fighting for secular Fatah, to Islamic terrorist, then to military commander fighting to liberate Lebanon. He was invaluable to the Iranians because he was inured to the prospect of death, he took orders, and he terrified the West. But it was only his military role Iran wanted him to be remembered for.

After Mughniyah was assassinated in February 2008, the Syrian foreign minister, speaking for the Iranians, said in a press conference, “The fighter Imad Mughniyah was the target of lots of intelligence agencies—he was the backbone of the Islamic resistance.” In acknowledging Mughniyah’s role as military commander, but not his terrorist role, Syria’s foreign minister wanted to put the past behind him and force the world to focus on the military struggle against Israel.

Within Hezbollah, Mughniyah is a legend—Hezbollah’s Patrick Henry. After his assassination, Hezbollah put up his poster all over Beirut’s Shia southern suburbs. But in a sense, that’s all that he was: an iconic figure, a hero of the early days of the resistance, revered but irrelevant to Iran’s larger, new conflict. And at the end of the day, he was only one among the thousands of young fighters recruited out of the chaos of Lebanon. Foot soldiers ready to die for Iran and for Allah.

Iran’s transformation from terrorist state to classic military power will have a profound long-term effect on the world’s geopolitics. It produced historic victories in Lebanon in 2000 and 2006, victories that became Iran’s paradigm for expansion. What does it mean for the next ten years? And what can the West do about it? The answer lies in Basra, which is in the middle of a transformation of its own.

The city of Basra offers Iraq’s only maritime access and its main oil export route. A half-million barrels of oil a day pass through Basra, heading to offshore oil terminals in the Gulf. Iraq’s Shia-dominated south produces 1.9 million barrels a day, accounting for the bulk of the country’s production. The south also possesses 71 percent of Iraq’s proven oil reserves, and accounts for 95 percent of Iraq’s government revenues. Basra is the beating heart of Iraq’s economy.

Yet Basra and its surrounding area are not really part of Iraq anymore. Quietly, without firing a single shot, the Iranians have effectively annexed the entire south, fully one-third of Iraq. In Basra today, the preferred currency is the Iranian rial. The Iraqi police, the military, and at least one of its intelligence services answer not to Baghdad, but to the Iranian-backed political parties, SCIRI, Da’wa, and other Shia groups under Tehran’s control. But it’s not just the police; the same Iranian proxies run the universities, the hospitals, and the social welfare organizations. They exert more control over daily life in Basra than the central government does—and clearly more than Britain or the United States.

Iran supplies Basra with refined fuel and nearly every other raw commodity that keeps the city alive. An Iranian-allied faction is in charge of Iraq’s oil exports, siphoning off hundreds of thousands of barrels a day to support the faction and its sponsors in Iran. Iran takes a direct role in reviewing lists of foreign companies bidding on Iraq’s mega oil fields in the south. In other words, you can’t do business in southern Iraq without a green light from Tehran. And no one even bothers to hide Iran’s role.

Iraq’s Shia oil minister was quoted in the Iranian press as saying there was an agreement between Iran and Iraq to jointly invest in Iraq’s oil fields. Iran specifically demanded a say in the development of Iraq’s huge Majnoun field, which contains approximately 30 billion barrels of oil.

As I pointed out earlier in this book, if Iran’s annexation of the south holds—and nothing seems likely to turn it back—the almost inevitable implication is that Iran will one day have de facto control of Iraq’s oil, giving it considerably more weight in OPEC. If the Majnoun oil field and other untapped Iraqi fields were to be developed, Iran’s and Iraq’s total production would begin to rival that of Saudi Arabia. And if Iran were able to fulfill its ambition of producing 8 million barrels a day by 2015, its combined total would surpass Saudi Arabia’s.

How did Iran manage to annex southern Iraq right under every-one’s noses, without a military incursion?

First, Iran applied the lessons it learned in Lebanon, compelling, cajoling, and persuading warring factions that it was in their best interest to follow Tehran’s orders. It took nearly fifteen years, but Iran eventually forced Hezbollah and the more secular Amal Party to cooperate. It was also in Lebanon that Iran learned how to corral normally independent Shia clerics by taking control of their bank accounts and charities, systematically destroying Lebanon’s moderate, nationalist, independent clerics—anyone who called into question the legitimacy of the mullahs in Tehran.

Second, Iran demonstrates extraordinary patience and long-term vision when moving its pieces on the chessboard. It’s able to tolerate chaos for long periods of time, waiting for local players to fail and then come to Iran for help. And by the 2003 Iraq invasion, Iran had truly absorbed the lesson that the Kalashnikov rules—not Adam Smith, Jeffersonian democracy, or even the Koran. Unless it is some-how miraculously contained, Iran will end up fulfilling Ayatollah Khamenei’s 2000 promise to repeat in Iraq Iran’s victory in Lebanon.

Iran knows it can’t simply march its army across the border and impose order in Iraq. It tried that in 1982, laying siege to Basra in its long, ultimately unsuccessful war against Saddam Hussein. Military incursion didn’t work then, so why try it again now? Instead, Iran has decided on a soft takeover, offering a gentle hand, tamping down the fighting when it can, taking control of mosques and charities, keeping Iraq supplied with refined oil products, keeping city services running, gradually building up Shia militias for the day they’ll expel the new invaders and take Baghdad. Above all, the Iranians know that they cannot appear to be colonialists in Iraq. Better to let the Iraqi Shia arrive at the conclusion that they can’t do without Iran.

And Basra certainly did need a strong Iranian hand, as the place was in utter chaos: car bombings, assassinations, attacks on bars and restaurants. Through the early years of the Western occupation, the situation worsened by the day, but Iran waited patiently rather than taking action, knowing that the chaos by itself would eventually drive out the foreign occupiers, the British army.

Just after the 2003 invasion, British TV audiences had been reassured when they saw their troops patrolling Basra in regimental berets and without armor. This was so different from the heavy-handed Americans, who patrolled Baghdad in tanks. The ready explanation was the British knew what they were doing, having learned about occupation in Northern Ireland. But the calm was not to last.

In the January 2005 elections, the Da’wa and other Islamic parties won 38 out of 41 seats in the Basra provincial elections, as well as 35 of 41 seats in Maysan, another Shia province in the south. The SCIRI and Da’wa had been in exile in Iran for twenty-five years, and for moderate Shia nationalists, their election victory was far from welcome. Soon, factions of the SCIRI and the Mahdi army started to fight for control of Basra. (The SCIRI had renamed itself the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council to put space between its present incarnation and the years it spent in exile in Iran. But no one was fooled.)

The British forces might have had the upper hand militarily, but they were utterly powerless politically. And as they soon learned, the struggle for Iraq at this stage was not military, it was political.

Britain had lost long before the first British soldier ever set foot in Iraq. Though they did get support from a few Shia tribes, this was no match for the SCIRI and Da’wa. The British soon realized they were helpless against Iran’s proxies—they weren’t even able to sort out who was who. They were fighting a war they couldn’t understand, let alone win.

Unlike Britain, Iran had been preparing for this day since the start of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980. It fed, clothed, and armed the SCIRI and Da’wa. It filtered out cadres who wouldn’t go along with Iran’s agenda. Thanks to SCIRI and Da’wa agents in Basra, Iran understood the politics there better than the British ever could. It took only a matter of months for the Iranian proxies to eliminate their—and by extension, Iran’s—opposition. The Iranians clearly knew what they were doing.

“The Iranians aren’t crazy or naïve enough to send their own secret service agents, nor do they have to,” one Shia politician in Basra told the independent International Crisis Group. “Thanks to the parties that used to be exiled in Iran and those that currently dominate the local government, they already have Iraqi accomplices on the ground.”

As for the Iraqis in Basra, whether they’re completely controlled by Tehran or not, they’re pragmatic and take Iranian support when they need it, whether in the form of rations, bandages, ammunition, or anything else. They’re coming to learn that they cannot survive without Iran.

And Iran, as it demonstrated in Lebanon, will work with any Shia group that matters, regardless of any differences in ideology. It won’t be long before the Iranians in Basra will start corraling the fanatics—the ones who kill women for wearing lipstick—and the criminal groups kidnapping and ransoming for money. It’s all the same to the Iranians, who will work with any armed groups that can impose order and one day force Britain and the United States to leave Iraq. Iran will allow the Iraqi army to take Basra, knowing one day the Iraqi army will answer to Tehran.

Basra in 2007 resembled nothing so much as Beirut in 1982. The shootings, bombings, grotesque corruption, and political and social anarchy weren’t identical, but the situations were similar enough to give Iran the confidence it needed to annex Basra.

All this raises a question: If Iran is able to annex a large chunk of Iraq without ever firing a shot, what can the United States do about it?

We could send tanks into Basra, but what good would that do? We couldn’t hope to do what the British failed to do. Just rolling into town with conventional arms and armor would do nothing in terms of winning Basra back politically. And if we were to try to use force, as we did in Fallujah, whom would we fight? We could shell Basra, but we’d only succeed in creating more hatred, just as Israel did in 2006 when it bombed Beirut’s Shia southern suburbs.

Even assuming the Americans could temporarily impose order, it would be little more than symbolic. And then who would we turn Basra over to—the Iranian-allied government in Baghdad? The Iraqis will continue to embrace the order Iran brings. Either way, the Iranians win.

Here’s a quote from Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah about Israel’s war in Lebanon. Substitute “American forces in Iraq” for “Israel” and you’ll have Iran’s blueprint for how they intend to beat us in Iraq. “It is impossible for us to fight the Israelis through traditional and classical methods, but rather through a war of attrition, whereby we drain its energy, weaken it, then one day force it to withdraw.”

The Iranians know the official estimates of the Iraq War’s cost will soon surpass one trillion dollars, and that America will eventually run through its money and political will. But the Iranians would like to keep the United States engaged in Iraq as long as possible, as it serves their long-term interests, giving them more time to consolidate control over the Shia south. In the long term, Iran intends to wear down the United States to the point that it will not want to confront Iran anywhere in the Middle East.

But there’s another option for the United States, one that is neither clean nor risk-free: simply getting up and leaving, dropping the Iraqi mess in Iran’s lap.

All of a sudden, it would be Iran deciding whether it wanted to be directly responsible for keeping a lid on the anarchy, and whether it wanted to send in its own troops and start killing Iraqis. A direct Iranian role in Iraq would involve Iranians killing Sunni and even Shia, turning the conflict into a civil war. Everything Iran achieved in Lebanon, turning the Shia and the Sunni against Israel and the United States, would be lost. The Iranians would suddenly be the occupiers, and as such would absorb the full political impact of running a foreign country. They’d no longer be able to hide behind their proxies. It is unlikely Iran would do well as pure colonial power, burdened by the inevitable blame that comes with occupation.

Withdrawing is a high-risk gamble, of course—a threat to the Arab peninsula, as the Arabs on their own cannot hold back Iran. But in staying in Iraq indefinitely, the only thing the United States can absolutely count on is going broke.

Removing Saddam in March 2003, destroying Iraq’s military, exposing the moderate Shia clerics as powerless, and creating another vacuum for Iran to fill was a colossal blunder. The United States effectively offered up another Arab country to Iran—another jewel in Iran’s imperial crown.

Iraq isn’t just a quagmire, another Vietnam we can just walk away from without consequence. If we were to withdraw today, what would stop Iran from pushing the chaos into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, starting a Shia insurgency along the rim of the Gulf, which is 90 percent Shia?

Yet if the United States sticks it out and spends twenty or more years holding Iraq together, we’ll still have a messy, impermanent solution, one that will quickly fall apart the moment we leave. There are three main reasons why:

First, any government the United States installs in Iraq, no matter if it includes our avowed enemies, will always be viewed as a puppet regime. We are outsiders, and Iraqis, the most xenophobic people in the Middle East, will never see us as otherwise.

Second, Iran’s interest in Iraq is considerably stronger and more enduring than America’s, its will is stronger, and it will never overcome the temptation to meddle, to undermine us in Iraq. Iran also cannot afford to allow Shia Islam’s historical center of learning in Iraq, Najaf, to return to being a moderate rival of the Iranian learning center, Qum. Iran will not abandon its quest for control over Shia Islam, nor allow a quietist form of Shia Islam to challenge the legitimacy of Iran’s mullahs.

Third, and most important, Iran has a pragmatic, realistic strategy and the United States doesn’t. It knows that in one way or another, every major Shia political party in Iraq will ultimately have to answer to Tehran, whether it’s for money, for arms, or just to keep a safe rear base. Iran knows how to use its strengths. Iranians are Muslims, and like the majority of Iraqis, they are Shia. The two countries’ histories are intertwined and their bloodlines mixed, as are their economies, which both depend on oil. In other words, Iran is only half-foreign. Iran will always have more pieces to play with than the Americans do.

To Iraqis, Tehran matters. Washington doesn’t.