ISIL Crisis Could Improve U.S.-Iran Relations

Terrorist group the Islamic State, or ISIL,
presents a bleak picture of the future of the Middle East and
America’s involvement there. This week they brutally beheaded an
American journalist. The organization controls oil fields and has a
well-coordinated military force that is growing by the thousands.
It threatens to collapse Iraq and is quickly drawing the United
States into another
ground war in that nation. There may be a silver lining,
though: The effort to stabilize Iraq could improve U.S. relations
with Iran.

“U.S.-Iranian cooperation is quite favorable” and “it is only
natural that the two powers join forces … to meet the common
threat,”
explains the intelligence organization Stratfor. “Tehran and
Washington’s concerns about the Islamic State transcend Iraq’s
borders and include common interests elsewhere in the region.”

“Iran wields considerable influence in Iraq,”
suggests The Guardian, but with a terrorist group
slitting throats just across the border and gaining steam, Iran has
an immediate interest in snuffing out the threat of spreading
instability. Tehran has
already launched several
ground and air attacks. Secretary of State John Kerry and
President Rouhani
have been saying that the two nations could work together to end
the ISIS threat, which is a 360 from typical, antagonistic rhetoric
between America and Iran.

Stratfor notes that both will likely be quiet about whatever
work they do together, due to the domestic unpopularity of the
other. And, military coordination will be limited by both nations’
fear of each other’s intelligence apparatuses. Although the two
nations haven’t had diplomatic relations for decades, their
coordination for a common goal is not unprecedented.

The United
States and Iran have
cooperated against a common jihadist enemy in the past, such as
when they worked together to topple the Taliban regime following
the 9/11 attacks. Relations quickly soured again when U.S.
President George W. Bush’s administration declared the Islamic
republic a part of the “axis of evil” and when controversy over
Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program broke out in 2002.
However, these tensions did not prevent the two sides
from cooperating
again in the U.S. move to effect regime change in Iraq in
2003.

To be sure, Iran has additional aims in the
current situation. “If we agree to do something in Iraq, the other
side of the negotiations should do something in return,” Iranian
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif
said today. “All the sanctions that are related to Iran’s
nuclear program should be lifted.”

AFP notes that this “is the first time that Iran has explicitly
linked its readiness to work with the West in Iraq with a lifting
of the crippling EU and U.S. sanctions imposed over its nuclear
program.” But, as Reason
contributor Sheldon Richman has
detailed, Iran
doesn’t pose a
real nuclear threat, this request is not
unreasonable.