Fraternal Iran-Iraq Ties Frustrate US-Saudi-Zionist Designs

By: S. Nawabzadeh

Although speaking different languages, no two countries in the world are bonded together by such close historical, cultural and religious ties, dating back several centuries, if not millennia, as Iran and Iraq.

As a matter of fact, the fraternity between the peoples of the Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia has withstood the test of time, including almost three-and-a-half intermittent centuries of Ottoman occupation of Iraq followed by the anti-people pseudo nationalist regimes that rose and fell on either side of the joint border.

The rootless Pahlavis in Tehran were a British creation and so was the imported Hashemite dynasty in Baghdad as well as the military dictatorships in its aftermath that indulged in jingoism.

Yet so firm are the age-old ties binding Iranian and Iraqi Muslims, colonialist agents failed in their divisive designs, even when the US imposed the 8-year war on the newly-founded Islamic Republic in the 1980s through Saddam of the repressive Ba’th minority regime of Baghdad.

It means, if such an intricately planned bloodbath failed to create bad blood between the Iranian and Iraqi people, could the recently manufactured crises such as burning down of the Iranian consulate in Basra by thugs on the payroll of the US and Saudi Arabia, or the anti-Iraqi propaganda on the Zionist-controlled social media by dubious elements claiming to be Iranians, drive away the two nations from each other!

Certainly not.

Much to the chagrin of the Americans, the Saudis and the Zionists – all three of whom have failed to take control of Iraq – the arrest of perpetrators of the Basra consulate attack, followed by the unity march staged in that port city by throngs of people carrying the Iraqi and Iranian flags, and the composition of the broad-based representative government that is finally taking shape in Baghdad, are indicative of the joint will in Tehran and Baghdad to further cement the time-honoured brotherhood.

One need not harp on the pre-Islamic era when for eight long centuries Iran and Iraq were one single realm standing like a solid bulwark against the eastward expansion bid of Imperial Rome and then the Christian Byzantine Empire. 

Neither is there any reason to refer to the Islamic era, including the founding of Baghdad as a cultural-academic melting pot by the Abbasid caliphate with the help of their Iranian viziers, and the dynasties that ruled the one single state of Iraq-Iran in the subsequent centuries till the Ottoman occupation of Iraq in the mid16th century – the Buwaihids, the Seljuqs, the Ilkhans, the Jalayarids, the Timurids, the Qara-Qoyunlo and the Safavids.

Nor is there any necessity to mention regular help from Iran and the Iranian people whenever the people of Iraq staged uprisings against Ottoman rule, or the role of the Iranian ulema in transforming holy Najaf into the world renowned seminary of Islamic studies and Arabic culture. 

This is proof of the fact that the strong support provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran to its Iraqi brethren during the reign of terror of Saddam, the brutal American occupation that followed, and the recent US-Saudi abortive bid to take over the country through the Takfiri terrorists, are not some new and unwarranted developments.

In view of these undeniable realities, if the harebrained Americans think they can succeed where the British failed, they are living in a fool’s paradise.

It is but natural for the people of Iraq – both Arabs and Kurds, whether Shi’a or Sunni – to stand beside their brethren in Iran, fully knowing that in addition to their overseas enemy, the US, their chief regional enemy is the Wahhabi cult of the spurious entity called Saudi Arabia, which used to fund to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, the genocide of Shi’a Arab Muslims and the ethnic Kurds. 

In other words, the Iraqi people are too mature to be swayed either by Washington’s propaganda tirade to endorse the illegal sanctions against Iran, or the bribes of Riyadh in building a football stadium in Basra and the doling out of a few million dollars of the stolen oil wealth of the deprived people of Qatif, to some suspicious elements. 

Therefore, senior Iraqi Lawmaker Intisar Hassan al-Musawi is absolutely right when she says the presence of the American consulate in Basra is a threat to Iraq’s security and sovereignty, as borne out by the recent ransacking of government offices and burning of the Iranian consulate in that city by anti-social elements on the payroll of the US and Saudi Arabia. 

So what Iraq’s newly elected Sunni Muslim Parliament Speaker, Mohammad al-Halbusi, said regarding firming of fraternal ties with Islamic Iran and invitation to his Iranian counterpart, Dr. Ali Larijani, to visit Baghdad, should not come as a surprise.

The expected election of veteran Iraqi politician Adel Abdul-Mahdi as the new Prime Minister heading a broad-based representative government of the countries various political, ethnic, and religious groups, will bring more surprises for the US, the Zionists, and reactionary Arab regimes.  

The Death of CENTO’s Ghost: How the US Lost the Four Great Powers of Southwest Asia

MARTIN SIEFF 

CENTO – the Central Treaty Organization launched by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1958 is totally forgotten now. Even most regional experts on the Middle East and South Asia remember nothing about it. But it had a surprisingly long afterlife of 60 years, and its final, complete dissolution happening now before our eyes marks an epochal transformation of the Eurasian-Southwest Asia World Island.

CENTO - originally known as the Baghdad Pact or the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) - was formed in 1955 by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom with the blessing of the United States. The British saw it – farcically as it turned out – as an attempt to retain the phantom, craved after “influence” of their vanishing empire, which had left Pakistan in 1947.

METO did not last long. Within three years, the British –imposed and directed monarchy of the Hashemite dynasty in Baghdad had been literally wiped out in a bloody massacre. Iraq immediately pulled out of METO as fast as it could. METO was renamed CENTO with Eisenhower’s approval in 1958. One of the four “pillars” of the Anglo-American world order in South and Southwest Asia was down: Three to go.

Next to go was Iran in 1979. Its last Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was a megalomaniac egged on by American liberal social engineers who farcically imagined they could recreate President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in Tehran. Millions of people were upended from their homes in enormous industrial and relocation programs while SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police inflicted a reign of torture and terror.

The end result was the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that swept away the Shah and took Iran forever out of the Anglo-American orbit. After that, CENTO was finally officially dissolved. Eisenhower’s dream was dead and gone. But its ghost would endure for another 39 years.

Two down and two to go: For the next 40 years Pakistan and Turkey both remained strong, consistent and important US allies. After 2001, tensions between Washington and Islamabad inexorably grew as the US invasion of Afghanistan and its following endlessly bungled policies to build a so-called modern, democratic and centralized nation backfired in endless war.

This year, Pakistan joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), simultaneously with its next door neighbor India. Both nations turned their back on US claims of global hegemony and opted instead for a future of cooperation and security with Russia and China in the SCO.

That left only Turkey of the original METO or Baghdad Pact four still in the US orbit. Turkey remains a NATO member as it has been since 1955: The same year it also joined METO. However, since the failed Turkish military coup of June 2016, US –Turkish relations have plunged to their worst state ever. The US Congress seems intent on pouring ever more gasoline of the funeral pyre of the relationship.

Yet Turkey is vastly more important to US, European, NATO and Middle East security than all the tiny and ludicrous nation-building schemes Washington has pursued in the region over the past 25 years put together.

US policymakers – Republican and Democrat alike – remain obsessed with “creating” new “showcase,” supposedly “modern” and “democratic” states in Kurdistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. They see the tiny three Baltic States, Georgia and even Ukraine with its neo-Nazi militias as shining examples that are supposed to inspire the rest of the world to follow the same Washington-directed paths.

None of these American visionary “geniuses” ever stops to remember why Iraq and then Iran opted out of METO/CENTO as fast as they possibly could. None of them stops to consider what the consequences of losing the friendship and trust of nuclear-armed Pakistan with its population of 200 million will be. None of them has ever raised publicly the issue of how totally untenable the reckless US forward naval and strategic deployment in the Black Sea will be if Turkey finally turns its back on the US and NATO.

CENTO is gone. The Baghdad Pact is dead. Now even CENTO's ghost is dying: The four great buffer powers that the US and the UK looked upon to dominate the northern tier of Southwest and South Asia have abandoned Washington or are about to do so. The consequences of this development – born of a generation of stupid, heedless and selfish US policy bungles – will reshape the world.

MARTIN SIEFF

During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.