[President
Obama has said that
the United States believes that last fall Iran initially discouraged rather
than directed the Houthi advance toward Yemen ’s capital, Sana . “We watched as this
proceeded. There were moments where Iran was actually urging potential
restraint,” the president said recently during a news conference to promote the
Iran nuclear deal.]
a
An anti-American mural along a
street in
deal notwithstanding.
|
Here in the capital, though, Tehran and Washington still line up on opposite
sides. The United States is urging the Shiite-dominated
Iraqi government to do more to enlist members of the Sunni minority against the
Islamic State. Shiite-led Iran and its proxies are thwarting that
effort.
The dichotomy illustrates the complexities of the relationship
between the United States and Iran in places like Iraq,
where the interests of the two rivals clash and converge. Now, after a deal to
limit Iran’s nuclear programcleared its biggest
congressional hurdle last week, the United States will have to navigate an
increasingly complicated regional maze with an Iran newly empowered by
international legitimacy and relief from economic sanctions.
What is more, there are also indications that the contacts
between the two countries that accompanied the nuclear negotiations have begun
to produce more areas of limited collaboration in Iraq , Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in Yemen , adding to the tangle.
Critics say that the nuclear deal will only embolden Iran to
escalate its myriad proxy campaigns against the United States and its allies:
armingHezbollah and Hamas to fight Israel; deploying
Iranian troops to defend President Bashar
al-Assad of Syria;
backing Houthi rebels in Yemen or more shadowy militants in other Persian Gulf
states; and holding Lebanese politics hostage to its interests.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel has complained that the deal
will enrich his country’s greatest foe. American allies in the Sunni-led
monarchies of the Persian Gulf warn of widening sectarian conflict around the region like the
continuing wars in Syria and Yemen .
But though the United States and Iran each face domestic
pressures against closer relations, some analysts see a more collaborative
relationship as an inevitable if uneasy consequence of the negotiations leading
up to the nuclear deal — despite the insistence of leaders on either side that
the American-brokered agreement would be limited to Iran’s nuclear program.
“Both
the Iranian and American governments are going to approach expanded dialogue
very gingerly,” said James Dobbins, a senior follow at the RAND Corporation. “But there will
still be a gradual increase in at least communication between the two governments
on areas beyond the nuclear issue,” said Mr. Dobbins, a former senior State
Department official who worked directly with Iranian diplomats to establish a
new government in Kabul after the United States invasion of Afghanistan in
2001.
That means the United States will face an awkward balancing act
if, as expected, Iran continues its aggressive
stance toward American allies in the region. “Will the United States scrap the nuclear deal if Iran sends weapons to Hamas or Hezbollah?”
said Michael Stephens, an analyst with the Royal United Services
Institute. “Absolutely not.”
He added: “That is why the Iranians know this is their ticket
back to the big game.”
“The United States and Iran have generally followed a
common line in Afghanistan for years,” so open
cooperation “would be a more public manifestation of what is already going on,”
said Mr. Dobbins, the former diplomat.
Both sides want to prevent the return of the Taliban and to
block Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens.
And Tehran also worries intensely about the heavy flow of
Afghan opium and refugees into Iran , which shares a long border with
Afghanistan , said Michael Kugelman, a
researcher on South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington . “Their interests converge
more in Afghanistan than either side may care to
admit,” Mr. Kugelman said.
In Yemen , meanwhile, the American
balancing act in relations with Iran has also been evident.
The United States has thrown its support behind
a Saudi-led military intervention against a takeover by the Houthi movement in Yemen , but has also dissented from
Saudi claims that Iran is controlling the Houthis.
The Saudis have said they were forced to intervene to prevent Iran from dominating their southern
neighbor. But there is little evidence that the Iranians have provided
significant military support to the Houthis or exercise significant control over
the group, which had its own military experience and domestic weapons, said
April Alley, a researcher with the International Crisis Group.
President
Obama has said that
the United States believes that last fall Iran initially discouraged rather
than directed the Houthi advance toward Yemen ’s capital, Sana . “We watched as this
proceeded. There were moments where Iran was actually urging potential
restraint,” the president said recently during a news conference to promote the
Iran nuclear deal.
After Sana fell, were “they interested in getting arms to
the Houthis and causing problems for the Saudis? Yes,” Mr. Obama added. “But
they weren’t proceeding on the basis of, come hell or high water, we’re moving
on a holy war here.”
Later, when Washington observed a convoy of ships
from Iran moving toward Yemen , Mr. Kerry personally called
his Iranian counterpart in the nuclear talks, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif — a conversation that would have been all but unthinkable before the
negotiations began.
“I was on the phone in an
instant to my counterpart, and made it very, very clear that this could be a
major confrontation, that we were not going to tolerate it,” Mr. Kerry recently
told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And he called me back,
indeed, within a short span of time and said, ‘They will not land, they are not
going to unload anything, they are not going to go out of international waters,’
and then they went home.”
But now the Americans
communicate with the Iranians through an Iraqi military official to be sure
that American-led airstrikes against the Islamic State do not hit the
Iranian-backed militias fighting the same enemy.
Yet it is still a deeply uncomfortable situation for the United States . American officials
acknowledge that the militias are essential to fighting the Islamic State, also
known as ISIS or ISIL . But they worry that the groups, especially in Anbar, are
collecting intelligence on them on behalf of Iran and have pressed the Iraqis —
so far unsuccessfully — to remove Kataib from the base.
The nuclear deal has now raised hopes among Iraqi officials of
closer cooperation between the two rivals, said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq ’s former national security
adviser and a lawmaker from a Shiite faction.
“For the next phase they need to coordinate in a more formal
way,” he said. “I believe the two ambassadors in Baghdad are not far from meeting.”
In practical terms, Iran will regain about $50 billion
of assets from the sanctions relief, according to estimates by United States
Treasury officials. Far more assets held abroad had been frozen under the
sanctions, but most of the rest has been already been committed or cannot be used.
But analysts say that money has never appeared to be a
determining factor in Iranian policies around the region; Tehran appears to
have committed to its support for Mr. Assad in Syria or opposition to the
Islamic State in Iraq as strategic necessities regardless of the cost, while it
has managed to achieve its goals in Yemen and elsewhere on the cheap, with
relatively little investment.
“It is difficult to credit the deal for anything good, and it is
difficult to blame the deal for anything bad,” said Emile Hokayem, a researcher
at theInternational
Institute for Strategic Studies. “In Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon , the drivers of the conflict
are local and regional, not because of the deal.”
Konstantinos Vardakis, a Greek diplomat who is the top European
Union official stationed in Baghdad , said he hoped the nuclear
deal would lead to broader talks with Iran about the future of both Iraq and Syria . “We need the Iranians to
settle the situation,” he said, suggesting that now “the door is open to
address other issues.”
But Iran ’s proxies in Lebanon and Iraq say they see no such
solutions. All applaud the deal as a victory for Iran and maintain that their
hostility to the United States remains undiminished.
Asked about the deal, Naeem al-Aboudi, the spokesman for Asaib
Ahl al-Haq, another Iranian-backed militia in Iraq , brought up a favorite
conspiracy theory of Iranian clients in Iraq : that the United States created the Islamic State and
has little real interest in defeating it.
“The nuclear agreement is a
diplomatic affair that we are not involved in,” Mr. Aboudi said in an
interview. “We’ve had a problem with the United States for a long time.”
Tim
Arango reported from Baghdad , and David D. Kirkpatrick from London . Omar al-Jawoshy contributed
reporting from Baghdad , and Anne Barnard from Beirut , Lebanon .