The Death of the ‘Iran Won’ Myth

In the Left’s eyes, Iran was the greatest beneficiary of the Iraq War. Let’s look at the reality.

Victor Davis Hanson
Friday, March 12, 2010

Did the fall of Saddam Hussein and the violent birth of Iraqi democracy really empower Iran?

That conventional wisdom might have been true in the shorter term during the chaotic Iraqi insurrection, but it was never an accurate assessment over the longer haul — as we are beginning to see, nearly seven years after the Iraq War began.

In the last twelve months, mass civil disobedience has spread throughout Iran, most notably when nearly a million people hit the streets to protest last summer’s rigged elections. There is unrest in Iraq as well, and a myriad of conflicting interests, but note that the tension is of a completely opposite sort. Whereas in Iran an unpopular government uses violence to squelch a majority that seeks free elections, in Iraq a legitimately elected government enjoys public support against occasional attacks from small cadres of terrorist extremists. So in an Iran supposedly at peace, more died voting than in an Iraq purportedly at war.

The use of Saddam Hussein as a proper balance to Iran was always an atrocious idea — and it is bizarre to hear critics of the war cite post facto his obscene government as a once-necessary check on the Iranian theocracy. Given Saddam’s genocidal policies, and America’s war against him in 1990–91, there was no way that the United States should ever again have used his dictatorship to thwart Iran’s. And while the present democratic government of Iraq is dominated by Shiites — logically, given demographic realities — it is not true that they are all pro-Iranian Muslims who have forfeited their Iraqi identities. In time, a stable democratic Iraq may be one of the very few mechanisms by which Iranian regional influence can be checked.

That is why Iran for the last five years has done its best to destroy Iraqi democracy, by supplying money and weapons to cross-border terrorists. Yet Iraq has survived, and it is now slowly proving subversive to Iran, albeit in quite a different manner — by reminding Iran’s uneasy Shiite population that free elections are not incompatible with their religion, as they can now readily see from the free, uncensored media across the border. The percentage of Iraqis who turned out for this round of voting was greater than the percentage of Americans who turned out for our landmark election of 2008.

As a result of Saddam’s removal, and the success of the subsequent democracy, Iran is looking not just at a free Iraq, but also at a semi-autonomous, prosperous, and pro-Western Kurdistan, and a Lebanon without Syrian occupation troops. In the short term, Iran must also weigh in the fact that there are hundreds of American aircraft just across the border in Iraq — basing that would have been impossible under Saddam. And whereas a few years ago Iran was threatening Israel, hand in glove with Saddam Hussein, who was subsidizing the families of suicide bombers on the West Bank, today Iraq is not fueling unrest in the Middle East. If anything it may be, along with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, secretly not upset that Israel might address the ominous Iranian nuclear facilities.

Iraq last month also achieved its highest level of oil exportation since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And with the latest round of auctions and the new transparent oil contracts, the Iraqis are hoping to reach an incredible figure of 10 million barrels of oil pumped per day within seven years.

Given international interest in Iraq’s oil, competitive bidding, and the growing security in the country at large, Iraq might well come close to meeting such once unimaginable goals. If it were to pump another seven or eight million barrels per day, such a spike in production by the nation with the third largest known oil reserves in the world would work to moderate oil prices for years — and thus especially irk Iran.

To pay for its vast terrorist enterprises and its nuclear program, Iran counts on high oil prices. Thus it desperately needs unrest in other countries in the region, depressing their oil production and ensuring price speculation. Meanwhile, its own oil sector is suffering declining sales from sanctions, incompetence, and the country’s pariah status. So Tehran may soon face the specter of chronically pumping fewer barrels, without much hope of a near-term return to the old sky-high oil prices — all at a time when its Iraqi neighbor is suddenly swimming in petrodollars.

For a year, the Obama administration seems to have failed to appreciate these new realities. It snubbed Iraq’s legitimate prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and instead bragged about its outreach to Iran’s thuggish president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The administration apparently thought that Iraq’s future would entail perpetual civil unrest and combat, declining oil production, and a quagmire for the United States. All that, of course, would have helped Iran, just as its antithesis — a stable, consensual oil-exporting state — is increasingly worrying it.

But now the Obama “reset” policy has itself seemingly been reset. Recently Vice President Biden — of “trisect Iraq” fame — predicted that Iraq would become one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” And soon afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all but confessed that the much-ballyhooed Obama policy of reaching out to the theocracy with diplomacy, videos, and personal letters, while keeping mum about its brutal crackdown on dissidents, was a failure.

Clinton pointed to a military coup by the Revolutionary Guards that had supposedly seized power from more “moderate” Iranian theocrats, and thus apparently unexpectedly thwarted Obama’s otherwise sound policy of American engagement: “We see that the government of Iran — the supreme leader, the president, the parliament — is being supplanted and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.”

It is disturbing that Secretary Clinton did not appreciate the long, pernicious history of the Revolutionary Guards’ influence inside Iran and their cozy relationship with many in the theocratic elite; but at least she can now, at last, cite some “unforeseen” development that may allow her to backtrack on the administration’s disastrous policy of appeasing Iran.

Don’t expect very many observers to accept the heresy that the post-Saddam Iraq is increasingly becoming Iran’s worst nightmare. The Iraq War has left such poisonous antiwar feelings here at home, advocacy for Middle Eastern democracy has been so caricatured as a “neocon” pipe dream, and the cost to America in blood and treasure was so high, that in the current climate it is nearly impossible for most Americans to appreciate the salutary geostrategic effects of the removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement by a consensual government.

As a first step, just look back at the last few months in both countries, as if the roles had been reversed. Imagine a free and open Iran now holding elections marred by only a few radical Islamic terrorist attacks, while an autocracy in Baghdad ran phony plebiscites and then cracked down on a million Iraqis demanding democratic reform.

In such a scenario, one would expect outrage from the American Left, as it praised a democratic Iran while damning a hopelessly corrupt and violent American puppet in Iraq — and always castigating the United States for ignoring the brave Iraqi protesters in the street.

Why, then, when we have before us reality — and not a “what if?” fantasy — do we show so little appreciation for Iraq’s recent successful elections, and even less outrage over the farcical Iranian voting?

In short, the idea of the Iraq War empowering Iran has became as entrenched a myth as “No blood for oil.” Both are now deeply embedded within the liberal antiwar narrative. Yet one need not think that the war to remove Saddam Hussein was primarily motivated by a desire to weaken Iran (it was not) to acknowledge that precisely such a welcome development is fast becoming one of the unforeseen dividends of the surprising continuance of Iraqi democracy.