Iraq, Iran Announce Military Cooperation
“We have come to our Iranian brothers to ask them for help,” an Iraqi official announced last week.
Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun al-Duleimi was on a visit with his counterpart in Iran, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, to discuss the beginnings of a robust military cooperation between the two countries. The Iranian minister said that the agreement included Iran’s training of Iraqi armed forces. (July 11, a few days later, the Iraqi minister denied that specific arrangement, but mentioned that Dulaimi Iran had agreed to contribute $1 billion in reconstruction aid to the Iraqi government, and that the Defense Ministry would get a slice of that.)
This budding relationship is deeply significant.
Duleimi’s trip was the first such visit since 1980, the year the two countries began a bitter, eight-year-long war. While apologizing for the war, Duleimi put the blame squarely on Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein. “We’ve come here to open a new page in our relations against the painful page of the past,” he told reporters.
A new page indeed—especially considering the fact that Iraq’s biggest military partner at present is the United States, Iran’s number-one enemy, which has about 140,000 troops camped out in Iraq. Not only would Iran like to edge the U.S. out of its backyard, it wants to swing Iraq into close alignment with itself. Iran has labored intensively—even before America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003—to infiltrate Iraqi politics in order to achieve this goal. A look at Iraq’s demographics reveals why.
Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Baathist leadership was an anomaly in a country with a majority of Shiite Muslims. With him gone and the people given a political voice, Iraq now has a Shiite prime minister, a Shiite-dominated government and a Shiite-dominated constitution-drafting committee headed by a Shiite. Shiites dominate, and, simply put, many of their hearts still resonate with the spirit of the Iranian Revolution.
Just before Iran’s recent presidential election put hardline candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power, Iraq’s new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, at a news conference with Iran’s foreign minister (May 18), said, “[T]he party that will leave Iraq is the United States, because it will eventually withdraw. But the party that will live with the Iraqis is Iran, because it is a neighbor to Iraq.” Jaafari—who tried to spread the Iranian Revolution to Iraq in 1979 and was subsequently forced into exile in Iran, who maintains strong links with Iran’s ruling clerics, whose party’s official position is that Iraq should be an Islamic state—appears to be more than sympathetic to Iran’s aims. Even with—perhaps especially with—Ahmadinejad at the political helm.
The beginnings of military cooperation between these two neighbors—a stick in the eye to Iraq’s American benefactors, to be sure—is as unsurprising as it is audacious. The Iranian defense minister went so far as to ask Baghdad to prevent the U.S. from establishing a long-term base on its soil. Both defense ministers bristled at the suggestion posed by reporters that American oppostion to their new military arrangement should be considered. “No one can prevent us from reaching an agreement,” Shamkhani said, to which Duleimi chimed in, “Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries.”
The Trumpet continues to watch for the fledgling Iraqi government to cast in its lot with Iran. Why? Because of a striking biblical prophecy that Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has been highlighting for well over a decade regarding Iran’s role in end-time events, as expounded upon here. (For more, see his booklet The King of the South.)
Events are vindicating his prophetic analysis. The situation is about to get a lot more interesting.
