By Mark Tran
By invading Iraq, the US has removed a Sunni bulwark against Shia Iran.
It may surprise George Bush and his top commanders to hear that the US military presence in Iraq suits Iran down to the ground.
According to the respected French Middle East expert Oliver Roy, whose new book - The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East - has just been translated into English, Iran is just fine with "managed chaos" over its western border.
Iran’s worst fear is civil war in Iraq and a fight to the death, Roy told an audience at the Chatham House thinktank in London last night.
"Iran has no interest in open war, but likes to see the Americans trapped in Iraq. The situation in Iraq is perfect for them," Roy said.
Roy has little time for the notion that the Bush administration invaded Iraq for oil. He thinks the Bush administration genuinely believed that it could bring democracy to the Middle East by invading Iraq and remove a source of radicalism in the region.
"The main aim of invading Iraq was democratisation not oil," said Roy, who thinks that the invasion may not prove to be a total failure in 10-15 years’ time. But for now, he argues, Iran is the big winner. Shia Iran is seeing the dismemberment of a Sunni state on its western border and it has seen the ousting of the Taliban to the east.
"This is a big victory for Iran without it doing anything," Roy said, although he sees problems for Tehran further down the line.
Once the Americans leave - something Roy considers inevitable - he does not see al-Qaida as the beneficiaries. He foresees instead a proxy war between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for primacy in the region.
In this scenario, al-Qaida is largely irrelevant, it may exacerbate conflicts, but local, national, tribal or sectarian religious allegiances are more durable. While al-Qaida’s strategic irrelevance may come as a comfort to western policymakers, Roy’s vision of the Middle East after Iraq is grim nonetheless.
"What we are witnessing, at least for now, is an increased presence of western troops in the Muslim world (from Afghanistan to Lebanon and Iraq) conflicts which primarily pit Muslims against Muslims, and lastly a growing gulf between Shia and Sunnis depriving Iran of the privilege of appearing as the vanguard of the refusal front against Israel and the west, and profoundly altering the alliances and flashpoints in the Middle East, which is more divided and debilitated than ever."
Roy’s book is all the more pertinent given the current debate in the US over troop levels in Iraq. George Bush has stubbornly resisted pressure for any susbstantial cut, warning that such a move would mean a huge setback for the "war on terror".
Bush last week trotted out a canard all too reminiscent of Vietnam war rhetoric: America was fighting terrorists in Iraq so it would not have to fight them on US soil. Only this week, General David Petraeus announced a pause in troop reductions, ensuring that the next administration will have a force of 100,000-plus more than five years after Bush ordered the invasion.
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