[size=30]An American institution reveals secret Iranian documents regarding the results of the Iraq war
[ltr]2023.03.20 - 21:54[/ltr]
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[ltr]2023.03.20 - 21:54[/ltr]
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Baghdad - Nas
Twenty years after US forces first invaded Iraq, classified Iranian intelligence documents, leaked to The Intercept and first reported in a series of stories published in early 2019, shed light on the important question of who actually won the war. One victor emerges clearly from hundreds of pages of classified documents: Iran.
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The following are the highlights of the American News Corporation's investigation:
Today, Iran has privileged access to Iraq's political system and economy, while the United States has been reduced to a minor player. Iraqis themselves remain deeply divided. Many of their political elites are close allies of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security cables, written between 2013 and 2015, at the height of the international campaign against ISIS, provide no less than examples of the expansion of Iranian influence in Iraq.
While helping to train and organize Iraqi security forces ideologically linked to the Islamic Republic, activities documented at length in cables, Iranian officials were also routinely involved in promoting favored Iraqi politicians to important roles in the Iraqi government for Iran's economic and political protection.
One classified 2014 report in the Iranian cable collection described Adel Abdul Mahdi as having a "special relationship" with Iran and listed other Iraqi cabinet members who were close to the Islamic Republic — often people who had spent years in exile in Iran. The cables discuss how these close ties have benefited Iran, including by allowing sympathetic Iraqi officials to give Iran access to Iraqi airspace and vital transport links with their allies in Syria.
Iranian officials documented their work to consolidate commercial and security interests in Iraq while obtaining oil and development contracts in the northern Kurdish regions and water purification projects in the south, and the latter won with the help of a $16 million bribe paid to a member of the Iraqi Parliament, according to one of the documents. The cables also show how former Iraqi military officials, including personnel trained or supported by the United States during the occupation, were pressured into serving Iranian intelligence, with one typical agent describing being forced to "cooperate to save himself."
The benefits of the war to Iran were not based solely on political or security grounds. Iraq is home to many sites sacred to Shia Islam, which, as the cables indicate, have opened their doors to Iranian tourism and influence. Documents in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archives mostly provide individual reports on intelligence conversations and activities conducted by Iranian agents inside Iraq. However, they generally portray the far-reaching political, security and even cultural impact of Iran on Iraqi society in the void left by the US invasion.
This image of Iranian hegemony is not only reflected in the intelligence documents of that country. A massive two-volume study published in 2019 by the US Army War College came to a similar conclusion, stating that "a brave and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor" in the conflict. The study is the most comprehensive look yet at the costs and consequences of war from an American military perspective. Some of these costs are obvious: Thousands of Americans have been killed in combat after a loosely defined mission to find weapons of mass destruction devolved into a counterinsurgency campaign and civil war. But although most of the burden of the war was borne by the relatively small number of Americans directly involved, the war had broader effects on American society that are still felt today.
“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most momentous conflicts in American history. It shattered an age-old political tradition against preemptive wars,” the authors of War College write.
The Iraqis themselves have suffered greatly from the war. Millions were killed, injured or displaced as a result of the invasion and subsequent civil conflict. The emergence of the radical Sunni Islamist group ISIS, which Iranian intelligence documents discuss at length, was itself a product of the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including abuses by rogue militias backed by Iran.
In the end, ISIS was destroyed as a result of a tacit alliance between the Iraqi government, the United States, Iran, and the Kurdish Peshmerga, which joined forces to fight the group and regain control of its territory. Today, Iran remains the most powerful external player inside Iraq. Although it has achieved a goal it has craved since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s—the exercise of power in Iraq and the incorporation of Shiite-majority regions into Iran's sphere of influence—it has proven Iran's victory, in many ways.
During protests against government corruption in Iraq in 2019, Iraqis often blamed Iran and its allies, along with the United States, for the country's precarious state. In 2020, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, a key architect of Iran's Iraq policy whose role is extensively documented in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security archives, was assassinated in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport, following revenge attacks. between Iranian-backed militias and US forces in the country.
Despite the relative peace that followed the defeat of ISIS, Iraq today remains a powder keg with widespread unemployment, environmental degradation, and impoverished poverty for the ruling elites, who were widely denounced by Iraqis as corrupt and agents of foreign states, or unwilling to address them. Two decades after the first US forces invaded Iraq, Iran faces its own challenges with internal instability and the economic impact of a US-led international sanctions campaign that has devastated its economy.
However, when it comes to the shadow war between Iran and the United States in Iraq, it is likely that Iranian elites will see themselves as having won.
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