TABLET MAG
by Lee Smith
June 18, 2014

The State Department now says that the United States has “shared interests” with Iran in Iraq, and talks are apparently ongoing between the two countries about the rapidly deteriorating security situation in the country that once hosted half a million American troops. However, the White House and Pentagon have rushed to make it clear that the administration would never, ever dream of coordinating military strikes with Tehran. So, the Obama Administration leaks when Israel strikes Iranian missile convoys to Hezbollah and negotiates with Iran about its nuclear weapons program, but it would never coordinate with Iran on Iraq, where Iran is the only actor on the ground with any capacity to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Nope. The cat is out of the bag. The Iraq crisis has made it plain that Iran is now the main pillar of President Barack Obama’s Middle East strategy. Sure, America’s traditional regional partners, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, aren’t going to like the White House’s cozy new arrangement with their most threatening foe. But Obama believes that a U.S. alliance with Iran is the best fit for a hobbled and impoverished superpower that is on its way out of the Middle East.

Obama gave our old allies plenty of warning that change was a-coming. “I think that there are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg in March. “I think change is always scary.” Washington Post columnist and White House sounding board David Ignatius thought Obama was set on building a new regional framework that accommodates not just our closest friends, but everyone—“the security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans.” This new architecture, Obama told David Remnick, would create a geopolitical equilibrium “between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran.”

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