Iran, Iraq, America

Offering a variant on the remarks he left on my Persian Puzzle thread, Brad Plumer emphasizes that the US and Iran don't really want the exact same thing out of Iraq:

Does Iran want for Iraq what we want for Iraq? In the vague sense that neither of country wants widespread civil war, yes. Still, there are smaller, but crucial, differences. Tehran still remembers the Iraq-Iran war vividly, and its leadership would prefer not to have a strong Iraqi state next door. If I had to guess, I'd say that the present Iranian-backed disruptions in Iraq aim to keep the latter in a state of low-level instability. Nothing chaotic, mind you, but moderately unstable. An Iran analyst once put it to me nicely: the Iraqi Shi'i want a strong Iraq, Iran wants a weak Iraq, and the U.S. wants a pluralistic Iraq. Those are all very different things.

On one level, that's clearly right. On the other hand, the level at which it's right is pretty much the if wishes were horses then beggars would ride level. At this point the trends are so clearly toward a level of chaos that's well-beyond what Iran would want from a "weak Iraq" and Iraqi Shia who might like to see a strong, centralized state are so far from getting it that any disagreement about possible end-goals is rather theoretical. If the US had been having a great deal of success in creating a strong, pluralistic, pro-American Iraq that was eager to play host to large US military facilities (something like this, I take it, was Plan A) then there would be room for a significant conflict of interest. But assuming reasonably rational leadership on both sides, there's a lot more agreement than disagreement here. Of course assuming reasonably rational leadership on either side might be something of a mistake in this context. Optimistically, though, Khamenei and Rafsanjani in Iran have usually been associated with a pragmatic approach to foreign policy (combined, of course, with repression at home) and we can at least hope that Edward Luttwack is right and reality will constrain ideology in the second Bush term. Likely? Probably not. Possible? Certainly. The US and Iran did work together pretty well during the Afghan War in late 2001.