As public protest in Iraq continues to snowball, there is one very good reason why Iranian-backed Iraqi militiamen are shooting demonstrators. The ayatollahs in Iran fear that the contagion of anger and unrest that has erupted in their neighbor could well spread across the border and infect their own long-suffering citizens. Iran has long been a byword for corruption and incompetence. The economic illiteracy of the regime's leaders has been staggering. The patience of ordinary Iranians has already been severely tried, resulting in a series of huge, nationwide protests, the last of which between 2017 and 2018 were only suppressed with extreme brutality by the ayatollahs' enforcers, the Revolutionary Guard. Even without the original sanctions that drove it to the nuclear negotiating table, the regime's plundering of state assets and the sheer inefficiency of those placed in charge of key nationalized sectors, not least the oil and gas industry, were abundantly clear. With the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain, Tehran might have imagined it could press restart on its relations with its once belligerent neighbor. However, when the bone-headed post-war administration of the US-led Coalition plunged the country into chaos, the Iranian regime chose to exploit rather than try to bring an end to the mayhem. The view from Tehran became clear. It wanted a weak and divided Iraq. To that end it armed and paid for friendly militias, suborned Iraqi political leaders and did everything it could to foster and encourage levels of corruption that meant there was little or no chance of Iraq recovering any semblance of unity and stability. But what this cynical and amoral policy overlooked was that in the end, even in the midst of economic meltdown, fear and despair, ordinary people, if driven far enough, could still find a voice. And that is what is being heard so angrily and bloodily on the streets of Baghdad and Basra. Iraqis have had enough. Their fury is not simply against the venal and useless political leadership in the capital. They now recognize that the deadly hand of the Iranian regime has played an overwhelming role in the destruction of their dream for a unified and stable Iraq, able to prosper from its important hydrocarbon revenues. There were many Iraqis who once imagined that Iranian involvement in their country was benevolent and altruistic. They may even have been content that that engagement would inevitably lead to closer links between Baghdad and Tehran. But what they never expected was that Iranian interference in Iraq, as in other Arab states, was entirely malign, predicated on the policy of sowing division and so seeking to dominate Iraq entirely for its own purposes. But in Iraq, as in Lebanon, the smiling mask of the ayatollahs has been ripped off to expose their ugly plans for the wretched and pauperized population. It is, therefore, not simply the plunder of Iraq's treasury by thieving politicians that has produced their white-hot fury. It is also now the recognition that the Iranian regime has played a major role in bringing about their current extreme distress. And ordinary Iranians are clearly watching carefully. If the ayatollahs deadly meddlers are driven from Iraq, might they not now finally also be driven from their corrupt lairs in Iran itself?
