Iranophobia in the Mideast

Filling in for Mark while he's on his honeymoon is guest blogger John Brodigan


Mark is more of an expert on what's going on in Iran than I am, but I had found this on commentary and thought it was interesting. Another glaring example of how much of a problem Iran is, how stoogats the Middle East is, and how this adminstrations - for lack of a better word - "foreign policy" has made it that much harder for us to do anything about it.

Sheik Zaidan al-Awad of the Abu Jaber tribe, dressed in a traditional robe and checkered headdress, put on his reading glasses to check a text message. He comes from Iraq’s war-torn Anbar province, but when the sheik met with me in Jordan last week, he was staying in touch with his people by cell phone. We’d been talking about the death of Al Qaeda’s Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who murdered four of the sheikh’s cousins. (The sheik said his men then killed 11 of Zarqawi’s followers.) And we talked about the U.S. occupation forces. (“Now Zarqawi is gone, what is their excuse?” he demanded.) The sheik has plenty of room in his heart to hate both the late Abu Mussab and the Americans.

But now the sheik paused. “What’s coming toward us—our real problem,” he said, “is Iran.” The dark eyes in his sun-lined face searched to see if he’d been understood. “Zarqawi is one person. The Americans are occupiers: they will come in today and leave tomorrow. But the Iranian project for Iraq is annexation.” He sipped a glass of juice. “The occupation of the Americans, the terror of Zarqawi, is better than the ‘bliss’ of Iranian rule.”

Washington needs to keep the sheik’s Iranophobia in mind as it prepares for the first high-level meetings with the mullahs since the overthrow of the Shah more than a quarter of a century ago. No date has been set, but if those talks do take place, they won’t just be about Iranian nukes. The future of the whole Middle East will be under discussion. And it’s not only Iraq’s Sunni sheikhs who worry that Washington will sell out to Iran and the Iraqi Shia factions it supports. Many of Washington’s old allies in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia—who helped the United States isolate Iran in the past—worry that somehow they’ll be sold out, too.

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