Omar over at Iraq the Model trans­lates an arti­cle from az-Zamman that claims Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards are sup­ply­ing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with advanced weaponry, with Lebanese Hizbol­lah as the inter­me­di­ary.
Here’s what you should know about this: Zar­qawi _hates_ the Shi’a com­mu­nity, with the fiery pas­sion of the Sun’s core. When I was with TIME, we mon­i­tored al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) pro­nounce­ments through the Web, mar­ket DVDs and audio tapes. If the stack of Zar­qawi ful­mi­na­tions against the Amer­i­cans and Jews were a foot high, for exam­ple, his tirades and ser­mons against the Shi’a were 10 times that. He hates ‘em, which is pretty much in tune with hard-core Wah­habi doc­trine.
On the other hand, he never said a word against Iran. Instead, it’s the Ba’athists who see the Per­sians as the bogey­man to the east. Thanks to an 8-year war with Iran, the Ba’athists are fight­ing an insur­gency against the Iraqi gov­ern­ment, which they con­sider an Iran­ian plot. Zarqawi’s aims are much big­ger than that, and focus more on the Amer­i­can pres­ence.
Now, one of my old sources — who I hear has since been picked up by the Iraqi Inte­rior min­istry, the poor guy — told me once that Iran _was_ sup­ply­ing Sunni insur­gents in Iraq in a bid to keep the Amer­i­cans bogged down to the tune of $100 mil­lion to $200 mil­lion a year. The Ira­ni­ans were act­ing through what the CIA would call “cut-out” groups and the Sunni insur­gents often didn’t know who their ulti­mate bankrollers were. My source was nei­ther insur­gent, nor Amer­i­can, nor tied to the Shi’ite par­ties. He moved between all the par­ties because of his appar­ent neu­tral­ity and his infor­ma­tion was always top-notch. He told me about the shaped charges of IEDs months before they started becom­ing main­stream knowl­edge.
Back to Zar­qawi. Thanks to Zarqawi’s vir­u­lent anti-Shi’ism, it is highly unlikely that he would deal with Lebanese Hizbol­lah, or that Hizbol­lah would want to deal with him any­way, unless they’re com­plete lap­dogs to Tehran. I don’t believe they are, despite such accu­sa­tions from right-wingers in Wash­ing­ton and Tel Aviv Israel.
So what are we are to make of all this?
# Prob­a­bly, the story is fun­da­men­tally true, in that Iran is send­ing advanced weaponry, includ­ing Strela-7 mis­siles and lots of Kalash­nikovs, to Sunni insur­gents. Some of these weapons will inevitably find their way to Zarqawi’s boys. Iran is also lend­ing sup­port to the Shi’ite mili­tias such as the Badr Orga­ni­za­tion and Muq­tada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. A cer­tain amount of chaos next door ben­e­fits Tehran.
# Thanks to a net­work of mid­dle­men, it is unlikely the Sun­nis fight­ers know the ulti­mate source of the weapons, and if they do, they pos­si­bly don’t care. The Ba’athists, mainly, are fight­ing along­side Zar­qawi now because their ene­mies are more or less the same, but Ba’athist com­man­ders know that should they dis­lodge the Shi’ites from power — a highly unlikely event, in my opin­ion — Zar­qawi will turn his guns on them. They (mostly) coop­er­ate with AQI any­way, because he’s got the money.
# Iran is will­ing to fund guys to blow up Shi’ites if their larger aims — keep­ing Amer­ica off-balance and bogged down, and cement­ing their hold on Iraq’s gov­ern­ment — are met.
No. 3 is a con­tro­ver­sial claim, I know, and some peo­ple (*cough, cough* Juan Cole) refuse to enter­tain the idea that Iran would sac­ri­fice Iraqi Shi’ites for their plans.
That kind of think­ing works well in log­i­cal, alge­braic for­mu­la­tions of the issue, but it doesn’t work well with the hard, geopo­lit­i­cal facts on the ground in Iran and Iraq. Iran was _quite_ will­ing to send 15-year-old Shi’ites to their deaths on the front-line with Iraq in that 1980 – 88 war because they’d be mar­tyrs, which has a long tra­di­tion in Shi’ism. Plus, they’re deal­ing with Iraqi _Arab_ Shi’ites. A lot of Iraqi Shi’ites died so that Iran wouldn’t break out of the Fao dur­ing the Iran-Iraq War, and it’s unlikely Tehran has for­got­ten that. Iraqi Shi’ites may share a faith, but they don’t always see eye to eye.
So, the mul­lahs in Tehran could regard the Shi’ite losses in Iraq as a) regret­table but accept­able losses and b) a con­ve­nient rea­son to expand their influ­ence next door, in much the same way that Turkey regards vio­lence against Turko­mans as a rea­son to keep their fin­gers in Kur­dish affairs. (“We must pro­tect our Shi’ite broth­ers!”)
Hard-nosed power pol­i­tics makes for strange bed­fel­lows indeed.