The Political Landscape of Iraq and Iran Post-Saddam : หน้า 14/52

It is out of this reality of conflicting and changing political agendas that a political agreement would have to be forged to transform Iraq once again from a failed state into a functioning one. It would be a tall order under any circumstances. It is even more daunting, since all the important players, without exception, are armed, are not afraid to use violence, and appear incapable of looking beyond short-term expediency and the protection of their own interests to the country as a whole. These contradictions also affect the United States, which wants a strong state but also arms tribal militias. IRAN. Iran has emerged as a more powerful actor in the region since the elimination of Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state. This was, of course, not the intention of the architects of the Iraq war, who saw the decision to end the Baathist regime in Baghdad as a first step toward reordering the region and removing the clerical leadership in Tehran. They believed that Iraq’s burgeoning secular democracy would inspire Iranians to rise up against their theocratic regime, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld predicted; or that Baghdad’s fall and the subsequent envelopment of Iran by U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf would frighten the Iranian regime into changing its policies. Some even predicted that Iran’s most respected Shi’i scholars and clerics—the majority of whom were thought to be opposed to Khomeini-style theocratic rule—would take flight from the religious center of Qom in Iran to that of Najaf in Iraq; from there they would freely question the Islamic Republic’s religious legitimacy and potentially incite the Iranian masses to rebel. Further, there were certainly some in the U.S. government who thought that once Iraq was conquered, the United States should take the fight to Tehran as well. But events did not follow any of those scenarios. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, domestic political currents in Iran have markedly shifted rightward, away from reformers and toward hard-liners. A parliamentary election in 2004, marked by heavy government interference, swept away the reformist majority in the parliament and ushered in a group of conservative lawmakers, who began their first day in office with chants of “Death to America.” This was followed by the highly unexpected and momentous June 2005 election to the presidency of hard-line Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who ran on a populist economic platform of fighting corruption and “putting the oil money on people’s dinner tables.” The first reality of Iran today is that the domestic environment has become much more repressive. Though Iran was not truly free or democratic during the Khatami era, during the Ahmadinejad era it is markedly less free and less democratic. Hard-liners have attempted to reverse the advances in political and social freedoms made in the Khatami period by arresting and intimidating students, NGO activists, journalists, and intellectuals, often under the pretext of “protecting national security.” Draconian punishments for nonviolent crimes, such as stoning to death for adultery, amputations for theft, and public executions for homosexuals, have also been reinstated. The second reality is that Iran is a more powerful regional player than ever before, controlled by a more radical administration and anxious to exert its influence in a way it was never able to do when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. The costly 1980–88 war between Iraq and Iran,