By Nir Rosen

With the U.S. withdrawal [...]]]> Nir Rosen, unembedded journalist and author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, graciously permits Lobe Log to publish some of his preliminary thoughts on the fears being raised about Iran ahead of the U.S.’s impending withdrawal from Iraq.

By Nir Rosen

With the U.S. withdrawal coming up we are going to be subjected to an assault of alarmist articles about the role of Iran in Iraq. It makes me hope I won’t have an Internet connection for the next two months. There is this silly fear that there is a “vacuum” in Iraq that will result from an U.S. departure, but there is no vacuum because the Iraqis are there.

The real U.S. withdrawal, the real test, took place in 2009 when they largely withdrew from cities, towns and streets and stayed in U.S. bases. That’s when Iraq became in essence occupied by Iraqi security forces and most Iraqis didn’t see Americans anymore.

Then, last year before the pretend withdrawal of “combat” troops, there were similar alarmist concerns about Iran. But nothing changed. The same Iraqi security forces manned checkpoints around the country and conducted operations, and nothing will change now. That’s because the U.S. was not doing much on the ground in Iraq.

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was mainly running the show so there was neither a political nor a security vacuum, nor will there be one now. When the Americans were in Iraq they posed an existential threat to Iran. Regime change in Iran was practically an open U.S. policy, so the Iranians were given a perfectly good reason to blow up the occasional American soldier or undermine U.S. ambitions. The Iranians are also paranoid about an openly anti-Iranian government in Iraq because they remember what Saddam Hussein did to them. They therefore have an interest in preventing the likes of Ayad Allawi from taking power, something which is unlikely to happen anyway.

One real mistake is thinking that the Badr and Mahdi militias still exist. That hasn’t been an issue since 2008. We don’t see militias on the ground, but we see the Iraqi security forces everywhere. The militia phase of Iraq is long over and the Badr militia has long been incorporated into the state, so it’s wrong to think of them as a militia anymore. Likewise, there is no real Mahdi army to speak of. Militias in Iraq can no longer hold a neighborhood, a street, or even a checkpoint. We have more gang-like violence and assassination squads of course, but not militias.

Why would the Iranians have to wait for this final U.S. departure to deepen their influence? Who was stopping them until now? What were the Americans doing to prevent anybody from influencing things in Iraq since 2009? Not much, and what about al-Maliki? He is no Iranian pawn. He doesn’t even like Iran (nor do most Iraqis) and al-Maliki is in control of a very powerful state.

What about Turkish influence which is very significant? Why is Iranian influence worse than U.S. influence? The Americans have caused far more damage in Iraq than the Iranians have.

I urge that, given the example of the campaign for the Iraq War and the reliance [...]]]> My new piece just went up at the website of the Columbia Journalism Review. It covers some of the Iran hawks conclusions about the revelations, from the Wikileaks document dumps, about the alleged Iranian support for Iraqi militias.

I urge that, given the example of the campaign for the Iraq War and the reliance on faulty single-source intelligence reports, the United States ought to be more cautious when looking at what amounts to the same sort of documentation coming out of Iraq.

Here’s an excerpt (I encourage you to read the whole thing):

A source provides details to the American government about the nefarious activities of a Middle Eastern country. That information ends up in scores of secret U.S. government documents. Subsequently, the information winds up on the front pages of major newspapers, and is heralded by war hawks in Washington as a casus belli.

Sound familiar? It should, but perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. Here’s a hint: It’s not 2003, but 2010. This is the story of what happened recently to Iran in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document release, where U.S military field reports from Iraq made their way into major national newspapers and painted the Islamic Republic as a force out to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

While the WikiLeaks document dump provided a useful way to glean historic details of the seven-year-old occupation, much of the prominent media coverage focused closely on the extent of Iranian support for anti-U.S. forces in Iraq and Iran’s alleged role.

“Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias,” blared the headline on a front page story in The New York Times, which went on to report on several incidents recounted in WikiLeaks documents that journalist Michael Gordon called “the shadow war between the United States and Iraqi militias backed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.”

“The field reports also provide a detailed account of what American military officials on the ground in Iraq saw as Iran’s shadowy role training and equipping Iraqi Shiite militias to fight the U.S.,” wrote Julian Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. “American intelligence believed the training was provided not only by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, but also by Hezbollah, their Lebanese ally.”

And the hawks went wild.

Iraq war supporter and Newsweek Middle East regional editor Christopher Dickey wondered about the inevitability of the U.S. getting ready to “strike back with a vengeance.” Neoconservative journalist Jamie Kirchick wrote a piece on his Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty blog headlined “How WikiLeaks Makes Confrontation With Iran More Likely.” He went on to say that “what is now beyond dispute is that it clearly sees itself as engaged in a war against the United States.”

But, despite Kirchick’s assertions, the details in the WikiLeaks document dump were not actually “beyond dispute.”

The Journal’s take hinted at the problem, and the Times mentioned that the reports were based on events “as seen by American units in the field and the United States’ military intelligence.” These reports are accounts—and often single-source accounts—by U.S. military officials, based largely on unnamed sources whose motivations cannot even be guessed at, let alone their version of events confirmed.

“What the documents reflect is the American military’s view of what was happening,” NYU Center on Law and Security fellow Nir Rosen told the radio show Democracy Now! “If they record a death, if they record a torture incident, then that’s a factual incident that occurred and we know it’s true historically.”

“But a lot of the other allegations about Iranian involvement or various plots, people have been giving them too much credence,” he continued. “The New York Times, for example, has been really celebrating the alleged role of Iran simply because American guys on the ground have been reporting the role of Iran.”

“This is the same American intelligence that thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and thought that Saddam had connections to September 11,” said Rosen, who just finished a second book chronicling his time in Iraq. “We need to be skeptical about some of the allegations.”

Indeed, if one amended the above opening paragraph to say, ‘the U.S. launched an invasion of said nefarious Middle Eastern country,’ this tale would obviously be the story of Curveball, the famously fraudulent defector source who provided details of Iraq’s alleged biological weapons program to German intelligence, which passed it on to their U.S. counterparts.