Americans and Iranians are equally “paranoid” about the other country’s influence in Iraq.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday, Maliki said that after US troops leave Iraq at the end of 2011, he will not allow his nation to be pulled into alignment with Iran.
“For Iraq to be dragged into an axis or an orbit, that’s impossible, and we reject it whether this comes from Iran, Turkey or the Arabs,” he said.
He observed that a kind of “paranoia” about a Tehran-Baghdad alliance in the United States is matched by a fear in Iran about US influence. “An Iranian official visited me in the past and told me, ‘I thought the Americans were standing at the door of your office,’ “ he said, without naming the Iranian official.
In an interview in Washington, however, Vice President Joe Biden didn’t express any fear about Iranian penetration of Iraq. He said Iran had failed to buy influence during the election or to co-opt Maliki, who briefly took refuge in Iran during the reign of Saddam Hussein, but then moved to London, seemingly unhappy with the Iranian government.
While many in the US media express concerns about Iranian influence in Iraq, US government officials, under both the Bush and Obama Administrations, have routinely played down such talk, repeatedly saying that far more Iraqis distrust Iran than trust it.
Maliki’s new government majority, however, depends partly on followers of the anti-American cleric, Moqtada as-Sadr, who resides in Qom. But Biden credited Maliki for denying Sadr’s bloc any control of Iraqi security, while forming a government backed by Iraq’s main factions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
US military commanders still accuse Iran of funding, training and providing sanctuary to Shiite militias, like Sadr’s Promised Day Brigades, which they say are responsible for attacks on US forces and gangster-style assassinations that continue to plague the country.
Maliki suggested his government had co-opted militias like the one associated with Sadr. “The militias are now part of the government and have entered the political process,” Maliki told the Journal. The Sadr contingent, he said, “is moving in a satisfactory direction of taking part in the government, renouncing violence and abandoning military activity, and that’s why we welcome it.”
