Reuel Marc Gerecht: How Iran Could Help Fan the Flames of Iraqi Nationalism and Help Us Win the War

[Mr. Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]

... The strongest trump playing in favor of America and against Iran is Iraqi nationalism. Nationalism is easily the most successful European export to the Middle East, rearranging, subordinating, and sometimes eliminating older ties of faith, family and tribe. Iraq's Shiites are the progenitors of modern Iraqi nationalism. They, much more than their Sunni Arab compatriots, who were the driving force behind pan-Arabism in Mesopotamia, have shaped an Iraqi Arab identity which is distinct from the Sunni Arabs to the west and Shiite Iranians to the east.

Iraqi Shiites, especially their clergy, do have a long relationship with Iran. Traditionally, the most promising Iranian religious students and clerics have studied at the seminaries of Najaf and Karbala to perfect their knowledge of Arabic and their exegesis of religious texts. Clerical Iraqi and Iranian families have often intermarried -- though there is much less intermarriage now than there was in the early 20th century before highly nationalist dictatorships in both countries started forming contemporary identities. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's pre-eminent divine, is of Persian birth and early education. Many of his closest, oldest advisers are also of Iranian ancestry and education. Iraq's once-great Shiite merchant families inevitably have Iranian members. As was once typical of the cosmopolitan, Westernized Shiite merchant class, the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmed Chalabi, a product of an Iraqi-Persian family, doesn't recoil from Iranian mullahs, as do most upper-class Sunni Baghdadis.

But association among the Shia should never be viewed as ideological sympathy. The Iraqi Shia retain enormous bitterness toward the U.S. for the failure of President George H.W. Bush to aid them during the great rebellion of '91, when the Shiites and Kurds rose up against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. Tens of thousands of Shiites were slaughtered. But this bitterness also extends to Iran's clerical regime, which did virtually nothing to help their Iraqi "brethren."

There has been a sentiment among many Iraqi Shiites -- and it never has been much more than sentiment even among the most devoutly religious -- that Iran is supposed to look after the Iraqi Shia, to help them in times of trouble as would an uncle. The Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 frayed, if not ended, this sentiment. Rare are the instances of Iraqi Shiite protests at Saddam's war with Iran. The Baathist Orwellian tyranny had much to do with this, but there is also the undeniable truth that neither Shiite party really wanted to bleed for the other. Nationalism and modern Arabism had become the biggest parts of the Iraqi Shiite identity.

And Iranians usually don't waste much time expressing their disappointment in the Iraqi Shia, given the damage the war did to Iran, that Iraq's army was majority Shiite, and that Saddam's elite Sunni Republican Guards were on several occasions near the cracking point. When the Iraqi Shia felt Saddam's wrath in '91, there was more than a little schadenfreude on the Persian side. The truth be told, Tehran's clerical regime didn't mind the status quo in Iraq in the '90s: a weakened Saddam that couldn't invade Iran but could keep Iraq's Shiite community, especially its clergy, quiescent and uncompetitive with the Islamic Republic.

Which brings us to the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Clerical Iran's primary objective is to ensure that Iraq remains destabilized, incapable of coalescing around a democratically elected government. Such a government supported by Iraq's Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Tehran's clerical dictatorship. Intra-Shiite squabbles do matter, and this one between Iraqi clerics who believe in one man, one vote and those who believe in theocracy is an enormous difference of opinion. We should not be fooled by the publicly cordial relations that usually exist between clerics of Najaf and Tehran. Najaf's position on democracy is an explicit negation of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's and his associates' right to rule Iran....