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• Related Materials

  • Leverett: A ‘Formula’ for Lifting America’s Standing in the Middle East
    Interview
    October 12, 2007

  • The New Yorker: Shifting Targets
    By Seymour M. Hersh
    Must Read
    October 8, 2007

  • Sects Maniac
    By Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy
    Op-Ed
    January 22, 2007

  • Prepared Testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
    By Vali R. Nasr, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
    Testimony
    January 17, 2007

  • The Problem is Still the Insurgency
    By Vali R. Nasr, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
    Op-Ed
    November 21, 2006

  See Also

  Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Defense Strategy

  Stop Obsessing About Iran

  Author:	Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy

  January 22, 2007
  Time Magazine

  Distinguishing Iraqis from Iranians can be hard. Iraq’s most revered cleric, Grand Ayatullah Husaini Sistani, speaks Arabic with a thick Persian accent. (Sistan-Baluchestan is the name of a province in southeastern Iran.) Meanwhile, across the border, Iran’s top judge, Ayatullah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, struggles with Persian, the residue of an Iraqi birth. Theological cross-pollination and political exile have created deep ties between the two Shi’ite communities—and that’s exactly what the U.S. is afraid of. In his speech last week announcing plans to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, President Bush warned that if the U.S. left, “Iran would be emboldened.” Hours later, U.S. troops raided an Iranian office in Iraq’s north. The thrust of Bush’s strategy now appears less to build democracy in Iraq than to prevent it from becoming a client state of Tehran.

  The Administration should relax. Iraq poses big problems, but becoming Iran’s flunky probably isn’t one of them. There are three main reasons: Iraq’s Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds.

  Sunni Iraqis have feared Persian domination since before there was an Iraq. That fear reached fever pitch after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Sunni politicians regularly call their Shi’ite rivals tools of Tehran. If Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders want the Sunnis to end their insurgency, they’ll have to seriously distance themselves from the mullahs next door. If they don’t, the Baghdad government will lack influence over large chunks of the country, since even with Iran’s help, Iraq’s Shi’ite militias won’t easily defeat a Sunni insurgency stocked with Saddam’s former officers and bankrolled by oil money from the gulf.

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• 

  New CFR Books

  

  In Termites in the Trading System, Jagdish Bhagwati reveals how the rapid spread of preferential trade agreements endangers the world trading system.

  

  America Between the Wars explores how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today.

  

  In The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

  Complete list of CFR Books.

  

  

  New Independent Task Force Reports

  Confronting Climate Change

  This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.

  U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality

  This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.

  About Independent Task Forces at the Council.

  

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