I remain dumbfounded that the Army study of the Iraq War concludes that the Iranians are the only winners of the Iraq War. This fits with the idea espoused by many opponents of the war that we handed Iraq to Iran.
Sadly for the proponents of those views, the Iraqis think otherwise:
Not surprisingly most Iraqis see the Americans as the good guys and the Iranians as the bully next door, and often just down the street because pro-Iran PMF commanders are being more aggressive with the army and any Iraqis who openly oppose Iran. This is especially true of Sunni Arabs and Kurds. The growing number of murdered Iraqi politicians is attributed to Iranian death squads, Iran denies this but it is something the Iranians do everywhere. There are about 150,000 armed members of the PMF who are being paid by the Ministry of Defense (at about half the rate of soldiers and police). The PMF is demanding pay parity with the troops but this would cost about a billion dollars a year and the budget cannot support it. Meanwhile, most pro-Iran PMF units are stationed in areas with lots of Sunni Arabs (Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces) and ISIL activity. This includes Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq is in Nineveh province and still largely ruins and badly served by PMF militiamen.
All this Iranian interference increases the risk of civil war in a country that has a minority of the Shia majority willing to use violence to support Iran. Pro-Iran PMF militias take orders from Iran and that is increasingly unpopular with Shia and Sunni Iraqis. Iraqi leaders have been subjected to a lot of pressure from Iran to ignore the American sanctions. Iran pointed out that complying with the sanctions would hurt the Iraqi economy. That pressure caused Iraqi leaders to comply with the more immediate threat (Iran) even though they realized that most Iraqis preferred the Americans to the Iranians. After all, when Iraq asked the Americans to leave in 2011 they did.
The Sunni Arabs obviously feel no pull from Iran which is Shia- and Persian-dominated. And the Kurds, as Sunnis, aren't vulnerable to Iranian dominance (except for any blackmail Iran might employ to exploit any ties to Iranian Kurds).
While the American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 led directly to the rise of ISIL which gave Iran a major opening to spread influence in Iraq via the PMF, we managed the ISIL threat and can now work on reducing Iranian influence in Iraq justified by the fight against ISIL.
And now we can point to our willingness to leave Iraq in 2011 when the Iraqis asked to counter any Iranian propaganda that we want to control Iraq. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.
But we do have to continue to stand with allies in Iraq who want to reject Iranian influence.
