In an interview with Chotiner on Iran’s role in the Iraq crisis, Vali Nasr argues that Iraq now has a stake in the Iranian nuclear negotiations:
[I]t could hurt Iraq first of all if the U.S. and Iran stop talking to each other altogether and there’s no more positive momentum in the process. It’s much more difficult to say, “ok let’s forget about this gargantuan issue on which we failed, let’s focus on this other issue.” So you’re gonna make it much more difficult. The nuclear issue has now become the pivot of U.S.-Iran relations: It either creates an environment in which they can have constructive engagement more broadly, or not. Iran is going to follow its own policy, completely separate from the United States. But the irony is, unlike Syria, in Iraq, Iran’s independent policy is much more in line with the United States’, whereas in Syria they were clearly on opposite sides. …
But Nader Hashemi argues that there is “no connection whatsoever” between the nuclear and Iraq/Syria tracks when it comes to American-Iranian relations:
For 35 years, the two sides have been so distant. Getting to a nuclear deal—if we can actually get there—will be a huge accomplishment. I don’t think it necessarily means that there is going to be an agreement on any other regional issues.
Now it’s pretty clear that because of what’s happening in Iraq today there is a convergence of interests between the US position and the Iranian position. They both want to see ISIS defeated. You’re even seeing, for the first time, American senators saying, “Look, during World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin to defeat Hitler, maybe we can do the same thing in the context of Iraq.”
I don’t see anything coming of that. The United States may, at most, just look the other way while Iran’s Revolutionary Guards play a role.
That’s my hope as well. It seems blindingly obvious to me that, if the president wants ISIS to fail, the last thing on earth he should be doing is funding or training their “moderate” allies. What he should be doing is shifting toward Assad in the Syrian civil war by not arming the rebels. Assad, after all, is the main force taking on the Jihadist loons. Les Gelb is as smart as ever on this:
Instead of capitalizing on Mr. Assad’s anti-jihadi instincts, the Obama team now proposes to do what it has resisted doing for almost three years — to send hundreds of millions of dollars in arms aid for the Sunni rebels battling the Assad government. This move has American priorities backward. It will turn Mr. Assad away from the jihadis in Iraq, and back to fighting American-backed rebels in Syria.
The greatest threat to American interests in the region is ISIS, not Mr. Assad. To fight this enemy, Mr. Obama needs to call on others similarly threatened: Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shiites and Kurds, Jordan, Turkey — and above all, the political leader with the best-armed forces in the region, Mr. Assad. Part of the deal would need to be that the Syrian regime and the rebels largely leave each other alone.
Hashemi’s colleague Danny Postel adds that the nuclear talks actually hindered Washington from engaging Iran more actively on Syria:
Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has argued that the United States might have been able to work with Iran and Russia to nudge the Assad regime at least on humanitarian issues—allowing food and medicine in to besieged areas, for example. But because of the nuclear negotiations, the U.S. was not willing to push either Russia or Iran on anything related to Syria, because getting that nuclear deal done is so precarious, it faces such opposition in both the US Congress and among the hardliners in Iran, and this might be the only chance, with a reformist in Tehran, and a liberal in Washington, maybe in a generation, when this could happen.
One of the senior Iranian foreign policy leaders, a former nuclear negotiator, said that had the United States bombed Assad last summer after he used sarin gas in Damascus, that Iran would have broken off the secret nuclear negotiations that were taking place in Oman.
In a wide-ranging interview the Dish linked to last week, Tom Ricks expressed doubts about US-Iran cooperation on Iraq, because Iran has already gotten pretty much everything it wants out of its neighbor:
I think Iran has played the long game very well and in 2002 and 2003, they faced the ugly prospect of having American surrogate states, American supported states, on their western border and eastern border. And they have managed, through diplomacy and through the Revolutionary Guard’s actions, to ensure that that didn’t happen. I’m told that they basically went around and threatened a lot of Iraqi politicians in recent years. “You mess with us, and you may leave with an accident.” I’m told that they paid a lot of people a lot of money to ensure that the Status of Forces Agreement would never pass the Iraqi parliament. And I think Iran has achieved its goals. It doesn’t want to control Iraq. And if it winds up with control of a Shiite rump state and all of Iraq’s—or most of Iraq’s—non-Kurdish oil, that’s not a bad deal for Iran.
The Dish 