Iran+and+US+talking,+M+K+Bhadrakhumar,+Asia+Times+Online

Asia Times Online, Mar 10, 2007
=Iran and the US: At least they're talking=


 * By M K Bhadrakumar**

This year's great //shamal//, al-Haffar ("the Driller"), which will appear over the Arabian Desert hardly weeks from now, caressing the sand dunes to wild ecstasy and bathing the land with its hot, dry dust storms, cannot substantially add to the turbulence in the region.

Even such a calm, reflective observer of the political landscape around him as Rami Khouri agrees that these are extraordinary times in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. He wrote last week, "We are in the midst of a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling.

"Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of an Arab state system that had held together rather well for nearly four generations. It is only the most dramatic case of an Arab country that wrestles with its own coherence, legitimacy and viability."

Foreign interventions in the domestic affairs of the region and foreign support for local proxies have touched audacious levels. More than at any time, political elites in the region are seeking out foreign patrons.

This is despite the Arabs not seeing the United States as an honest broker in settling the current problems besetting their region. This is also despite the oft-proclaimed interest in the Arab world for a "Look East" outlook. Arab leaders such as Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan have repeatedly underlined that Asia might offer useful models for resolving social and political imbalances in West Asia and North Africa.

He wrote recently, "Much as the region's history and modern development are tied to Europe and the United States. It is time to start diversifying ... Powers of today and tomorrow concentrated in Asia would do well to invest in the people of West Asia." Yet the ground reality is that the Asian powers' political profile in the Arab world has been declining in recent years while their economic profile might have enhanced. This holds good for China and India in particular.


 * The great Arab arms bazaar**

The most visible sign of the Western dominance is the latest shopping spree for new Western weapons by Arab states across the Persian Gulf region. The United States greatly benefits from the Gulf arms bazaar. Patriot missiles capable of intercepting ballistic missiles have been positioned in several Gulf countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar - in a strong signal to the region to rally against Iran, and that Washington will not be found wanting if only the small, vulnerable monarchies and sheikhdoms allow themselves to gather within the fold of US protection.

The 6th Fleet is based in Bahrain; US Central Command is in Qatar; the US Navy has docking facilities in the United Arab Emirates; a second US aircraft-carrier group is now in the Persian Gulf. The Gulf monarchies nonetheless see themselves as the likely first targets of an Iranian attack. They seek a military deterrent of their own. US weapon-makers and arms merchants are having a field day.

The prospect of a potential US-Iran military confrontation touches raw nerves in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, while the Persians themselves remain disdainful. It is estimated that the Gulf monarchies will spend up to US$60 billion this year on arms purchases. They are buying up the US state-of-the-art combat jets, helicopters, cruise missiles, attack helicopters, tanks, air tankers, missile-defense batteries, airborne early-warning systems, anti-tank rocket launchers and so on. Some among them are contemplating a naval overhaul.

They are allowing themselves to be locked into old, hackneyed security paradigms - like sacrificial lambs on the altar of Western geostrategy. But the paradox is that the "threat" of instability facing the region doesn't have a military solution. Khouri ventured to describe the actual threat as a "resumption of history".

Indeed, the current narrative of historical change in the Middle East is noteworthy because of the insistence of the people of the region to be participants in the political process, rather than remain as mute, passive recipients of foreign dictates. The self-assertion by Middle Eastern "non-state actors" has no precedent in the history of the region. People are not only restless, they are determined to play a role in shaping the new drama that is their destiny. That suffuses the political landscape with a //fin de regime// pall.

Any conspiracy to ignore or to sideline "non-state actors" - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Badr and Mehdi militias in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia - will only postpone the crisis.

Arguably, a balance of power that is stable can be negotiated with them, given political courage and imagination. It is futile to place the blame for this dilemma on Iran's doorstep. For example, it is needless to take a Manichaean view of the Lebanon issue from a completely sectarian or tribal perspective, whereas it is possible to view the developments as unfolding within the framework of democratic aspirations.

In fact, it is highly doubtful that even if Iran and Syria attempt to control the Islamist militant and resistance groups, they will succeed. This is because these are in essence "neighborhood" groups that derive their legitimacy from being the defenders of their native soil and their people's rights rather than as movements that gained strength by virtue of being surrogates of foreign powers.


 * Limits to demonizing Iran**

Besides, the driving force behind the anti-American forces in the region is precisely US and Israeli policies in the region. No amount of demonizing Iran can obfuscate this reality. All indications are that the US is concluding that realistically it has no military options against Iran and it must, therefore, somehow make a fairly good fist of things.

Washington will, understandably, play down the significance of its decision to participate in the regional conference on Iraq taking place in Baghdad on Saturday. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the decision almost as an afterthought at the end of her testimony on February 27 to the US Senate's Appropriations Committee.

Conceivably, the decision by the US administration would have been made several weeks before her public statement. And Tehran would have been discreetly consulted on its likely reaction to such a conference. Curiously, the leader of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has often played the role of a go-between, paid an unscheduled visit to Tehran on February 5, during which he said, "All Iraqi statesmen support talks [between Iran and the US] and we believe negotiations will bear many results."

In all probability, the Baghdad conference will generate its own dynamic for a more broad-based US-Iran dialogue. On the eve of Rice's announcement on the meeting, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made a forecast, "The time has come to begin preparing for an international conference to define the political outcome of the Iraq war. Whatever happens, a diplomatic phase is necessary ... The international conference should be the occasion, as well, to go beyond the warring factions in Iraq to moving toward a stable energy supply. It would be the best framework for a transition from American military occupation. Paradoxically, it may also prove the best framework for bilateral discussions with Syria and Iran."

Chinese commentaries have lately advocated an expansion of the "five plus one" format to a new format of "five plus two" that willinclude Iran for discussing the Iran nuclear issue, on the pattern of the six-party talks on North Korea. (The five are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China, plus Germany.)

To be sure, multiple pressures are working on the US administration to change tack on Iran. The war in Iraq is not going well. The "surge" in troop strength doesn't seem to work. There is apparently no "plan B". At the same time, as The Economist magazine summed up, "Anything short of a substantial improvement in Iraq's security will mean that the Democrats are well placed to sweep the board in 2008."

Meanwhile, domestic opposition within the United States and international criticism of any US military strike against Iran is becoming vociferous. Two new factors also come in: the Afghan situation is worsening, and the impending British drawdown virtually blows the lid off whatever pretense remains of the "coalition" fighting the Iraq war. Again, the so-called "moderate" Arab states are not prepared to give anything more than conditional support to the US strategy in Iraq; they are openly critical about the threats to long-term regional stability stemming from the US failures.

An important "extraneous factor" is also influencing Washington's thinking on the Middle East and Iran. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is entering his last months in office. As the Washington Times reminded its readers, "Decades of alliance and the [George W] Bush-Blair era notwithstanding, Great Britain's support for an aggressive anti-terrorism policy in close cooperation with the United States is actually quite fragile. It does not extend very far beyond the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his allies, which is highly salient now that the Blair era is drawing to a close ...

"Large swaths of British society and government are lukewarm or even hostile to an aggressive policy on radical Islamist terrorists and have grown unhappier with the US - which fact Washington must now come to grips with ... Today, anti-Americanism is up and weariness of US policy in the Middle East is high."

Equally, the time is approaching for Washington to accept that the Iranian regime is here to stay and even if it is an enemy for the present, it needs to be constructively engaged. The United States' much-touted strategies to get the Iranian regime to implode through internal subversion look farcical. The politics of dividing the Iranian ruling elite hasn't worked, either. Preparations for President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's visit to Riyadh last Saturday were painstakingly undertaken by the chief of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani, while Ahmadinejad was accompanied on the visit by the adviser to the Supreme Leader on international affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati. Tehran has explicitly underlined that US-Israeli propaganda apart, the leadership in Tehran speaks with one mind.

In other words, Washington visualizes the need for Iran to be accommodated as a regional power. As Ray Takeyh, an acknowledged expert on Iran at the New York Council on Foreign Relations wrote in an essay for the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, "It [Washington] should open talks with Iran, not in order to limit its growing power - an impossibility - but with a view toward regulating it and curbing potential excesses. In other words, Washington should embrace a policy of detente, just as it did in the past with such seemingly intractable enemies as China and the Soviet Union."


 * Need for Arab-Iranian dialogue**

Now, where does that leave the "pro-American" Arab regimes? The challenge for them is that in the new era, the traditional Arab players such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan may not be able to retain the initiative in the creation and management of their own security order so long as they remain transfixed on a strategy of containment of Iran and see the threat primarily as a Shi'ite-Iranian one.

They will realize that the threat is more of a home-grown variety, emanating from their own governance values. The collective self-assertion of the majority of people living in a state of deep discontent is breeding Islamist, ethnic, sectarian and tribal movements specially for want of finding expression through any means of participative democracy.

There has been without doubt a tremendous accretion of wealth due to the continuous rise of oil prices, but the majority of people live with enormous economic and social dissatisfaction. Besides, there is deep and genuine frustration among the people over the impasse in the Palestinian issue. This has led to the ascendancy of the Islamic over the secular nationalist stream in Arab political thought and practice.

To compound difficulties, the Arabs have seldom been as divided as they are today. In sum, the real danger is that prescriptions for their problems are likely to be dictated from outside the region and these could well go against the ethos of the region. Clearly, the US and Israeli agenda is to create a division between the Arab states and Iran and to divide the region in terms of "moderate" and "hardline" blocs. The Iran nuclear issue provides a convenient facade for generating new crises in the region.

Despite the crippling caution characteristic of the "moderate" Arab regimes, they must take note that the way forward begins with the realization that Iran's new role in the region was neither due to any shift in the locus of ideology of the Iranian state after the election of Ahmadinejad two years ago nor as a result of a sudden spurt in the country's political and economic capabilities.

Simply put, Iran's phenomenal surge forward in the geopolitics of the region in the recent past has come out of disastrous failures of US policies, especially the defeat in Iraq. The US invasion of Iraq transformed that country from an inveterate enemy to Iran's most important ally in the region. Iran's emergence as the most powerful country in the region is a direct outcome of the US war on Iraq and its comprehensive destruction.

That is why the visit of Ahmadinejad to Riyadh last Saturday assumed such great importance. If the present trajectory of the US-Israeli game plan to forge an axis of "moderate" Arab states makes headway, the big losers will be the incumbent Arab regimes, as they get incrementally squeezed between the indigenous militancy of their own people and the aggressive militarism of their foreign allies.

Last weekend's Saudi-Iranian consultations in Riyadh didn't aim at floating any specific ideas regarding Lebanon or Iraq, but rather aspired to create a matrix of broad understanding between the two countries for creating a political and regional atmosphere within which, first and foremost, the festering wound of Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian strife could be healed and, then, the Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi crises could be addressed within their local and regional framework.

The Tehran Times commented with cautious optimism that "although the two countries have differing views in their foreign policies ... Ahmadinejad's visit to Saudi Arabia at this critical juncture can clear up many ambiguities that the foreign powers have created and can give a boost to efforts to establish comprehensive regional convergence."

//M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).//

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 * From: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IC10Ak05.html**

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