Iran contemplates Iraq

Abstract

Iran would have an intramural interest in influencing Iraqi Shiite politics, even if the US military presence on Iran’s border were not a factor. The clerical regime in Tehran promotes an idiosyncratic religio-political doctrine under which clerics are obligated to rule Muslim society directly, rather than through the intermediary of secular authority. None of the leading Shiite clerics in Iraq accepts the validity of this doctrine. For an increasingly beleaguered Iranian religious leadership, the re-emergence of a hugely prestigious Shiite clerical establishment in Najaf is probably seen as a threatening development, insofar as it is likely to undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian clerics’ claim to power. Another unappealing feature of the new dispensation is the primacy of nationalism in Iraqi Shiism.