At the Foggy Bottom of the Iraq Story

By Michael A. Ledeen

December 28, 2007

The Washington Post provided a luminously clear picture last week of the ongoing, enormously important, battle over the "meaning" of events in the Middle East war, including its own efforts.

On Wednesday, December 19 tucked away on the fourteenth page of the front sections, the Post reported the Pentagon's analysis of the recent stunning decrease in attacks against Coalition Forces and Iraqis. Did it mean that Iran--widely viewed as a prime mover in support of terrorist groups in Iraq--had voluntarily cut back on its aggressive role in the war? Or did it mean that security forces in Iraq had put the terrorists on the defensive, made their lives more difficult, and thus blocked many of their efforts?

A new Pentagon report has concluded that Iran continues to provide money, training, and weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, although U.S. commanders previously stated that attacks using lethal bombs linked to Iran have fallen in recent months.

"There has been no identified decrease in Iranian training and funding of illegal Shi'a militias in Iraq," the report, released yesterday, said.

"Tehran's support for Shi'a militant groups who attack Coalition and Iraq forces remains a significant impediment to progress," it said, adding that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps provides "many of the explosives and ammunition used by these groups."

The Pentagon's report could hardly have been more specific: there is no convincing evidence of an Iranian cutback in support for terrorists in Iraq. So why have the attacks, and the lethality of those attacks, been reduced?

It's because security forces, both the Coalition's and the Iraqis', are more effective than they were a few months ago. Most casualties have been caused by Iranian-made explosives known as explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, and we've gotten better at stopping them. As the Pentagon report puts it:

"This reduction may be attributed to effective interdiction of EFP networks, death or capture of EFP facilitators, seizure of caches and other factors."

In short, things are getting better in Iraq, but no thanks to the mullahs, who continue to do their damnedest to kill us and our allies. Later on, Defense Secretary Gates moderated the language of the report saying "the jury is out" on whether or not Iran has done anything helpful.

This apparently did not sit well, either at Foggy Bottom or over on 15th Street, where the Postniks conduct their operations. They struck back on the front page on Sunday with an interview with the State Department's senior top official on Iraq, David Satterfield:

"The Iranian government has decided 'at the most senior levels' to rein in the violent Shiite militias it supports in Iraq, a move reflected in a sharp decrease in sophisticated roadside bomb attacks over the past several months ?

"Tehran's decision does not necessarily mean the flow of those weapons from Iran has stopped, but the decline in their use and in overall attacks 'has to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision,' Mr. Satterfield said in an interview."

Mr. Satterfield's argument seems to be based on logical inference rather than on hard evidence, which in this case would be hard to come by, and which our ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, doesn't seem to share. "I am real modest about what I think I understand on Iranian actions, decisions and motivations," Mr. Crocker told the Post, which is pretty much what Mr. Gates said as well.

Mr. Satterfield's argument might be more convincing if our intelligence community and diplomatic corps had been consistently accurate in evaluating Iran's actions over the course of the war. But, in practice, they have often been surprised. During the fighting in Afghanistan, they thought the Iranians were being helpful, only to learn that at the same time the mullahs were making nice at the conference table, they were training and arming assassins operating against us on the battlefield.

When we went into Iraq, the spooks and diplomats argued repeatedly that the Iranians were not acting against us, only to discover that they were in fact up to their necks in Coalition blood. And the best that can be said about their assessments of Iran's nuclear program is that they expressed high confidence in 2005 that Iran was trying to make nukes, and two years later expressed high confidence that Iran had stopped trying.

Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have no doubt about Iran's campaign against NATO forces in Afghanistan. During a Christmas visit to Canadian troops, Canada's defense minister, Peter MacKay said that weapons are flowing from Iran into the hands of Afghan insurgents, and he doesn't like it. Those Iranian-made weapons account for the bulk of Canadian deaths and casualties.

The one case in which we can be reasonably certain that Iran has reined in killers in that part of the world is the Mahdi Army of Moqtadah al Sadr. A good four months ago, Mr. Sadr called on his followers to stand down during the American surge. Not everyone heeded his call--his movement has splintered over the past year--but there was a significant falloff in the tempo of their attacks. It's hard to imagine this could have happened without Tehran's approval as Mr. Sadr's weapons and funding come in large part from Iran. That's pretty easy to see, but the sort of case Mr. Satterfield is trying to make, in the teeth of statements to the contrary from the men and women actually fighting this war, sounds more like wish fulfillment than serious analysis.

And as luck would have it, the Post/Satterfield page one story fits perfectly with the desires of the secretary of state, who keeps on saying she wants to negotiate a happy ending to our longstanding troubles with Iran.

It won't work. And it's no accident that the soldiers--who have begun to bring decent security to most of Iraq--understand the situation far better than the diplomats and spooks who have nothing to show for years of negotiations.

Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar at AEI.

Source: American Enterprise Institute