By Hannes Artens

On the day five years ago, the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad's Firdos Square. Five years, 4,000+ American dead soldiers and about $500 billion spent later, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker at least have the decency to tell Congress a half-truth: while they cling to the generally-accepted-by-the-media-
and-the-Republican-Party mantra that the surge is working - this claim is subjected to a rigorous fact check for the umpteenth time by Salon.com's Mark Benjamin, and yet I doubt I'll live to see this record ever being put straight - they admit the doubtable progress being fragile and reversible. Hence, any cuts in troop size below 140,000 after June will be frozen until the next president takes over, and the Democratic-controlled Congress missed its perhaps last opportunity to publicly challenge President Bush's Iraq narrative (extending the Democrats' current self-destructive mode from the nomination battle to the one issue they could claim an edge on).

Not the evaluation of the surge in detail but another increasingly accepted narrative will predetermine the next president's Iraq policy: that, in truth, the U.S. is fighting a proxy-war against Iran in Iraq, that Iran is the shadowy puppeteer pulling the strings of all insurgencies in Iraq (with self-proclaimed foreign policy expert John McCain again confusing Shiites with Sunnis), and that if it were not for Iran's "malign influence" the occupation of Iraq would have turned out the cakewalk we were promised and all U.S. soldiers being home and peacefully dandling their toddlers on their laps by now.

To be honest, it didn't go as bad as expected by some, but Petreaus/Crocker nonetheless took no chances to drive home their message as forcefully as they could:

PETRAEUS: "Together with the Iraqi security forces we have also focused on the special groups. These elements are funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran's Quds Force with help from Lebanese Hezbollah. It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds at Iraq's seat of government two weeks ago, causing loss of innocent life and fear in the capital, and requiring Iraqi and coalition actions in response. Iraqi and coalition leaders have repeatedly noted their desire that Iran live up to the promises made by President Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian leaders to stop their support for the special groups. However, nefarious activities by the Quds Force have continued and Iraqi leaders now clearly recognize the threat they pose to Iraq. We should all watch Iranian actions closely in the weeks and months ahead as they will show the kind of relationship Iran wishes to have with its neighbor and the character of future Iranian involvement in Iraq."

CROCKER: "Iran continues to undermine the efforts of the Iraqi government to establish a stable, secure state through the authority -- through the training of criminal militia elements engaged in violence against Iraqi security forces, coalition forces, and Iraqi civilians. The extent of Iran's malign influence was dramatically demonstrated when militia elements armed and trained by Iran clashed with Iraqi government forces in Basra and Baghdad."

Let's digest this for a moment:

First, as I see it, an attack on Iran definitely is off the table now until the U.S. presidential elections in November. Like any other policy a war requires a PR campaign to rally the public behind one's cause. As experience from Kosovo and Iraq demonstrates, such a PR campaign requires at least a four to six months, 24/7 media blitz; there simply isn't enough time left to prepare the ground for it till November. If such an aggression were in the works, Petraeus/Crocker would have accused Iran more combatively and would have made a stronger appeal to consider all necessary means to rescind Iran's influence. How to deal with Iran will, as anything else concerning Iraq, be inherited by the next president. That's the good news. The only, though.

Second, Petreaus/Crocker indirectly acknowledge Iran's sway over all branches and aspects of Iraq's politics. While this might be hailed as a welcome facing up to facts, it serves the proxy-war narrative official Washington has adopted since early 2006, and inevitably sets the U.S. and Iran on collision course. There's no doubt, the proxy-war in Iraq has replaced the threat resulting from Iran's nuclear enrichment program - an ancillary casus belli, at best - as the all-defining issue in the U.S.-Iranian antagonism. In a perfect replication of the Reagan Doctrine during the Cold War, the proxy-war narrative is used to justify America's ongoing presence in Iraq and the costs in blood and greenbacks this fight against the new "empire of evil" will require the American people to bear in years to come. The weak al-Maliki government has become the "Tacho" Somozas, Ferdinand Marcos and Suhartos of our times, whose fall will trigger a domino effect of Iran rolling over the entire Middle East. Expect this narrative to be expanded and exploited with great gusto by McCain during the campaign, and it becoming the all-defining approach of his presidency. The "war on terror" will be amended by a new "cold war" between the U.S. and Iran in Iraq; a cold war, though, that could more easily escalate into a hot one than its historic namesake, whenever a McCain administration deems it opportune.

Third, matters are not as simple as Petraeus/Crocker and McCain (although I start doubting his capacity to intellectually grasp these intricacies) want us to believe. As Gareth Porter points out, the split within the Jaish al-Mahdi, Muqtada al-Sadr's movement, which Crocker claims to be highlighted by the fighting in Basra, is bogus. There are no "special groups", trained, financed, equipped and even assisted in manpower by Iran's Quds Forces. What happened in Basra is an-inter Shiite feud between al-Maliki, who is right to fear that he's losing ground, and al-Sadr's militias, and they both as a whole, not only splinter groups that broke away from them, have been procured in arms, dollars and logistics by Tehran. The fact is that Iran tries to have a finger in every pie in Iraq by backing all Shiite parties and groups to varying degrees, with al-Maliki and ISCI their declared favorites, and al-Sadr the hard-to-take nuisance, though. As Gary Kamiya tries to sum up on Salon.com:

"In a larger sense, both [Juan] Cole and [Gregory] Gause said it would make no sense for the Iranians to try to destabilize the Maliki regime. 'The status quo is in their interest,' Gause said. Iran supports all the Shiite parties and militias, including Sadr's, for obvious reasons: They want to retain influence. 'The only strategic logic they might have for aiding the Mahdi Army against their own allies is that the Mahdi Army remains very anti-American and will make life difficult for American forces and perhaps hasten their departure,' Gause said. But he pointed out that the Iranians are wary of Sadr. 'I've always thought that the Sadrists are actually the least reliable of Iran's Shia relations in Iraq. They're indigenous, homegrown. And Sadr has a reputation for being much more nationalist. He's also always opposed these extreme federalist plans that ISCI have put forward for this Shia super-province.'"

As matters stand now, Iran most likely has greenlighted al-Maliki's ill-fated blow against al-Sadr in Basra in order to weaken him before the provincial and municipal elections in October and has brokered a cease-fire when the Sadristas proved more recalcitrant than expected.

Yet, things get even more complicated.

"In short, the truth about Iraq, which the Bush administration has withheld from the American people, is that Iran and the United States have an alliance of convenience in Iraq. Both support ISCI and Maliki. Iran does give limited support to the nationalist firebrand Sadr, but the significance of that pales in comparison to the two countries' shared interests.

The Bush administration has concealed that inconvenient truth and pushed its good guys-bad guys narrative on the American people because that narrative is needed to sell the war. The Basra battle made it uncomfortably clear just how much Iraq resembles Lebanon -- a Byzantine place of shifting alliances where there are no heroes and villains, and where you can't even tell the players without a scorecard. If that truth sinks in, public support for the war will dry up. Which is why Iran, the convenient boogeyman, is suddenly coming up again."

At the end of the day, U.S.-Iranian relations in Iraq are a multi-layer game, in which both sides keep the al-Maliki government alive, yet refuse to build on this common interest for individual shortsighted egoisms, and in which the proxy-war narrative serves as a justification for America to keep up its presence in Iraq and, if Iran becomes too powerful one day, to strike out against Tehran. Welcome to Mission-Accomplished-Iraq in its fifth year of occupation, the Lebanon of the twenty-first century, created and nurtured by the U.S., where both America and Iran will continue their game of cat-and-mouse until one of them brakes the stalemate with a big bang.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel