Opinion | Israel is trying to uproot Iran’s influence. Iraq shows how hard that is.

It’s a cautionary tale for any thoughts of remaking the Middle East.

By Max Boot

Having killed two of its leading enemies — Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah — Israel is expanding its military ambitions in the multifront struggle against Iranian proxies.

Israel is not only trying to stop Hezbollah from rocketing northern Israel, it is also bombing the group’s financial institutions all over Lebanon to undermine the terrorist organization’s grip on the Lebanese state. Hope is growing, at least in some quarters, that Israel can ultimately defeat Iran and, as a former Mossad chief recently said, “reshape the Middle East.”

For a reality check — and a reminder of how difficult it is to reshape the region or uproot Iranian influence — shift your focus away from Israel’s immediate vicinity.

Look, instead, at Iraq, which in 2003 was supposed to be a showcase of U.S. hopes of transforming the Middle East in a more democratic and moderate direction. I once shared that vision, promulgated by the George W. Bush administration. In hindsight, I can’t believe how naive I was — and I hope Israel doesn’t fall prey to the same hubris that led U.S. troops into the Iraqi quagmire.

Turns out the opponents of the Iraq invasion who warned that, by toppling the Saddam Hussein regime, it would advance Iran’s hopes of regional domination were absolutely right.

“The Iraq war destabilized the region by removing the Arab bulwark that kept the Islamic Republic in check, enabling Iran’s resurgence and projection of power,” Emma Sky, a former political adviser to U.S. military commanders in Iraq, told me recently. “We are living with the consequences of the war today as conflict in the Middle East escalates and expands — and the U.S. proves unable to contain and broker an end to the violence.”

I still recall dreams among some supporters of the 2003 invasion that Iraq could be transformed from a foe into an ally not only of the United States but also of Israel. How delusional that turned out to be. Far from recognizing Israel, Iraq has become a staging ground for missile and drone attacks against Israel undertaken by Iranian-backed militias.

Just as Iran exerts influence over Lebanon via Hezbollah and over Yemen via the Houthis, so Tehran holds sway over Iraq by backing a host of extremist militias. The most prominent are the Badr Organization, Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

Though rivals, they also work together under the rubric of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — a state-funded security service that effectively answers to Iranian, not Iraqi, leaders. In 2023, the PMF had an estimated 200,000 fighters and a budget of $2.6 billion.

The PMF is too powerful for Iraq’s own security services to challenge, and it can tap directly into state oil revenue. The PMF has even created a conglomerate, modeled on the holding company of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to finance its operations with commercial activities such as agriculture, vehicle imports, textile manufacturing and animal slaughterhouses.

“The kleptocratic militia run system in Iraq is glutting itself on the biggest trough of oil money that the axis of resistance has ever encountered outside Iran,” Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told me.

Knights went on to note that there is plenty of “infighting” among different Shiite militias over the oil windfall. Iraq, he pointed out, has “a lot of little Hezbollahs instead of one big one,” and that makes it harder for the Iranians to “snuff out resistance entirely” to Iranian dominance over the country, which is unpopular even with many Iraqi Shiites.

Yet, whenever Iraq faces a major foreign or domestic issue, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani flies off to Tehran for guidance — or hosts a visit from a senior Iranian leader. Iran doesn’t try to micromanage every decision of the Iraqi state, but on the big issues it largely gets its way. As a Brookings Institution analysis earlier this year noted, “The Popular Mobilization Force is turning Iraq into an Iranian client state.”

One of the PMF’s prime objectives has been to drive out the 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq; Iran’s proxies don’t like living side by side with the soldiers of the Great Satan. The Iranian-backed militias have been staging attacks against U.S. bases and pressuring Sudani’s compliant government to end the U.S. military presence.

Sure enough, in September, the Biden administration and the Sudani government announced an agreement that would have most U.S. troops leave Iraq proper by 2026 and relocate to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north. That small force might be sufficient to support anti-Islamic State efforts in both Iraq and Syria, but Iran will be left in de facto control of most of Iraq.

Iraq allows Iran to evade international sanctions by buying at least $10 billion of Iranian goods last year. Many Iraqis, even Shiites, are not happy about the level of Iranian influence and the corruption and cronyism that comes with it. There were massive anti-Iran protests across the country from 2019 to 2022. But little seems to have changed.

“There are parts of Iraq that the Iranians don’t control, but their political influence is predominant,” Robert S. Ford, a former U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to Syria and Algeria and served many years in Iraq, told me. “I wouldn’t call Iraq a province of Iran, but they certainly have heavy influence there.”

In short, the Iraq War is over and Iran won.

That experience should cause Israeli leaders (who were always, to be sure, skeptical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq) to exercise a bit of humility and self-restraint, even at a moment when they have inflicted heavy military blows on Iran and its “axis of resistance.”

Unfortunately, the Iranian influence network is so deeply entrenched across the region — particularly, but not exclusively, among Shiite populations — that it cannot be excised by military force alone.

Iranian-backed groups not only project military power, they have also usurped state functions, especially in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Iraq, to provide social services to the population.

That will require a political strategy to replace Iranian influence with something else — but what? The dismal reality remains that, as long as Iran has a malignant, extremist regime bent on regional domination and funded by lucrative oil exports (which go mainly to China), it will continue to exercise considerable sway over its neighbors.

Israel’s tactical, military success against Iranian proxy organizations, welcome as it is, should not blind us to this larger strategic reality.

• Opinion by Max Boot

  Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend.”follow on X MaxBoot