Tehran calling, take 54
Michael Ledeen deduces the not very hidden hand of Iran in the events that played out in the Basra offensive over the past few weeks. Today's Washington Post article on the Basra offensive provides a good example of the conventional wisdom that Ledeen seeks to dispel. Ledeen begins with the frank assessment of General Petraeus on the source of the recent attack on the Green Zone in Baghdad:
A big clue to understanding this apparent mystery came a couple of weeks ago, when rockets were lobbed into the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, where many diplomats, intelligence officers and military leaders (including ours) live and work, along with key Iraqi Government personnel. General Petraeus quickly and explicitly blamed Iran for the attacks. “The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone… were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets…All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts.”Ledeen then traces the operational leadership of the Shiite militias nominally under the control of al-Sadr to Iran:Similar remarks about the nefarious Iranian role in Iraq came from Petraeus’ former deputy, General Raymond Odierno, just two weeks ago in Washington. He wryly observed that Iranian President Ahmadinejad felt secure in Baghdad because the attacks there were under Iranian guidance and control.
The Shi’ite militias and al Qaeda in are also closely tied to Iran. Many of the news reports wrongly suggest that the Shi’ite insurgents are under the leadership of Moqtadah al Sadr, the son of a murdered leading cleric and for several years the chieftain of the private Mahdi Army, named after the Shi’ite Messiah. He and his troops were famously armed, paid and trained by Iran, and were as feared as al Qaeda, whose late leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, long operated out of Tehran and worked closely with Hezbollah’s late chief terrorist, Imad Mughniyah.What are we to conclude from this? Ledeen argues:All this attention to Moqtadah is at odds with his actual behavior: he long since abandoned the battlefield. Missing from Iraq for many months, he recently resurfaced with the surprising announcement that he had gone to Iran to devote himself to religious. The Iranians had fired him, and they restructured the Mahdi Army into smaller, more autonomous groups. The recent violence came from the new units, headed by Iranian officers, agents, and recruits who, Tehran hoped, are not well known to Coalition and Iraqi military intelligence.
Iran, then, is the common denominator of recent events in Iraq: the mullahs organized the rocket attacks in Baghdad, they have supported al Qaeda in Iraq from the beginning, and they have a major role in the activities of the Shi’ite militias. It is going to be very difficult, indeed virtually impossible, to achieve durable security in Iraq without forcing an end to Iran’s many murderous activities there.After Ledeen's original post making this point, the not very hidden hand of Iran emerged from behind the scenes to announce a "peace agreement" that seeks the termination of the current offensive. Iranian involvement in this "peace agreement" is noted in the Post article without alerting the authors of the article to Iran's connection to the militias or causing them to question their interpretation of events. In a column that complements Ledeen's post, Jack Kelly makes an overwhelmingly sensible observation. It is an observation that escapes both the authors of the Post article as well as the authors of the New York Times article that is Kelly's fodder, and that belies the theme of these articles: "It is rare in the annals of war for the side which is winning to seek a cease fire."
