How to Spin it that Iran Caused the Catastrophe in Iraq.

Meir Javedanfar has attempted here in today's edition of The Guardian to draw an equivalence between the US and Iran as regards the Wikileaks reports of the reality of the US occupation.

What he writes is interesting but does not bear out exactly his partisan agenda as an Israeli-Iranian nationalist which is to prove that Iran's interests in creating further chaos was one thwarting the US agenda of bringing beneficial regime change.

Iran's concerns are understandable. There are serious allegations that could damage its image abroad, especially with its allies in Iraq and in the Shia world. One such revelation is the report about Iran supplying new forms of suicide vests for al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida is the sworn enemy of Shias in Iraq. It has been involved in the killing of thousands of Shia civilians, among them many pilgrims in holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala. Iranian co-operation with al-Qaida, even if it was aimed at hurting US forces, is not going to go down well in Shia areas of Iraq.

There is also political damage from this. How can Nouri al-Maliki persuade Iraqis, especially his own Shia constituents, that the government of Iran is a true friend?

Other revelations, such as the revolutionary guard's al Quds force training Iraqi Shia militants on Iranian soil, are also damaging. They could make the idea of tougher sanctions against Iran an easier sell to the public in Europe, since countries such as the UK have suffered numerous casualties in southern Iraq.

The evidence, from the Wikileaks that Iran supported Sunni insurgents and Al Qaida after the collapse of Iraq into bloodshed and chaos, has to take into account the status of the source, a US military document in which the filer might have assumed that what was fact was fact. It was a "threat report".

AL-QAIDA REMAINS THE STRONGEST ORGANIZATION AMONG THE INSURGENT GROUPS IN IRAQ AND DIRECTS THE MAJORITY OF ATTACKS THAT TAKE PLACE IN IRAQ, NFI. INSTRUCTORS AT THE ISLAMIC JIHAD CENTER IN TEHRAN ARE TEACHING A NEW TACTIC FOR SVIED DEPLOYMENT.

Until real evidence can be offered that Iran backed Al Qaida this remains simply an assumption whilst Iranian backing for Shia groups in far more obvious as an established part of exerting Iran's influence there, on that the US has also been prepared to collude in to defeat Sunni insurgents.

That this was done by colluding in the practice of allowing torture by Shi-ite death squads, as well as co-opting Baathists of Saddam's secular dictatorship to kill off opposition to the US client state is hardly diminished by the assumptions of the Threat Reports in the Wikileaks.

Reversals of alliances and doublethink are routine in the New great Game where the main ambition in a pathological struggle to control oil and gas and its transit between exporting nations and the overdependent nations of the West that rely on it to keep its life support machine going.

As Iran borders both Iraq and Afghanistan it has an interest in seeking to avoid encirclement by US client states. In Afghanistan, the Taliban was supported by the US between 1994 and 1996 through its allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because the Taliban was anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western.

Iran objected to this US policy as the Taliban was fanatically anti-Shia which is why it started to back the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and nearly went to war with Afghanistan after Taliban forces seized the Iranian consulate in Mazari Sharif and executed Iranian diplomats in 1998.

Just as in Iraq, where Iran has backed those forces that will serve its interests, so too has it been prepared to do the same in maintaining links with members of the Northern Alliance and even the Taliban who want to block US interests in Afghanistan, most obviously the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

Without any real mention of the geopolitical context, such an article is essentially propaganda which insinuates that had Iran not meddled, then everything would have proceeded a lot better in Iraq and that this shows Iran is a rogue state ( hence the conflation of support for terror with the nuclear issue ).

The Rferl article linked to makes this quite explicit, ( How WikiLeaks Makes Confrontation With Iran More Likely )

... what is now beyond dispute is that ( Tehran ) clearly sees itself as engaged in a war against the United States and those attempting to forge an independent and democratic Iraq.

Yet the scale of US double standards and cynicism in the Persian Gulf and the fact it bears responsibility for triggering off the collapse of Iraq into anarchy in the first place, is hardly going to be linked to a widespread sense of outrage in Iraq or in the Middle East that Iran bears the blame all along for what happened.