Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
Research a bit about the history of ISCI - they were originally a splitoff of al-Dawa, the "original" Shia religious party in Iraq, who were heavily influenced by the Iranian Revolution and went with Khomeini's theory of vilayet-i-fiqh rather than the more standard "quietist" school propagated by Najaf at the time. The IRGC, much as it formed the core of Hizbullah originally, formed ISCI's Badr Brigade out of ISCI volunteers and later on Shia POWs from the Iran-Iraq War. Thus Badr's core principally consists of those Iraqi Shia who turned traitor and fought on Iran's side during the war - you can see where the antipathy towards them in Iraq might come from.

Thus ISCI has historically aligned with Iran for both practical and philosophical reasons. Visser agrees that it is simplistic to call them simply Iranian patsies, just as it is also quite simplistic and inaccurate (IMO far more so in the Lebanese case) to call Lebanese Hizbullah simply Iranian patsies. Both movements have their own motives and political objectives. But on a concrete basis, ISCI's political goals in Iraq mirror those of Iran's (a crippled central government combined with a very strong Shia-dominated southern federal region, thus assuring Iraq's perpetual weakness) far more than any other group, other than perhaps the Kurds (who also favor a weak center dominated by federal regions).
Considering that this is as you infer a well known fact in the area doesn't it seem somewhat unusual to assume that our leaders there are unaware let alone necessarily complicit in its fruition. I realize it may seem naive of me but somehow I just don't think it's gonna be quite as easy as for ISCI as it may look on the surface.