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Is Iran Luring Obama Into a Trap in Iraq?
Amir Basiri / American Thinker
Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake and Josh Rogin recently reported that U.S. troops are sharing a base with Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq, where Tehran’s notorious proxies are spying on U.S. operations and personnel at their leisure to prepare the ground for future crimes. This worrying revelation is the latest manifestation of a misconception about the Iranian regime’s nature and its intentions in Iraq — an error that can prove to be fatal if not corrected.
In his interviews with different media outlets, U.S. President Barack Obama has made assertions about the Iranian regime being able to become a successful regional power and help stabilize the Middle East. Also, in his secret missives to the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Obama has promised that in the event of a final accord on Iran’s contested nuclear program, the U.S. is willing to cooperate with Iran in the fight against the Islamic State, an extremist group that is rampaging through the Middle East and has cut itself a caliphate out of territory straddling Iraq and Syria.
The assumption that Tehran can help in the fight to counter the advances of the IS stems from the shortsighted thinking that as a Shiite extremist powerhouse, the Iranian regime is the archenemy of the Sunni extremist Islamic State.
But a quick review of Iran’s actions in recent years proves that Tehran’s foreign policy in the region is not based on ideological tenets, but rather on setting up short-term — and sometimes contradictory — alliances to further its ultimate end: keeping the Middle East in a state of instability in order to remain the main power broker and hegemon of the region.
For instance, in 2001, Iran allegedly helped the U.S. with intelligence in invading Afghanistan and defeating the Taliban, a Sunni extremist government which at the time was a rival to the Iranian regime. But today, Iran is providing training camps to Taliban fighters and is backing it with cash and arms to fight Islamic State and counter U.S. influence in the region.
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