'The door we never opened ...'
By M K Bhadrakumar
Relations between the United States and Iran are as delicately poised as at any time in their troubled history since the early 1950s. Robert Fisk, the great chronicler of the Middle East at The Independent, recently wrote that it occurred to him that the final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the US and the "forces of evil" is a "draw".
Yet one cannot be sure. Is that the final score? There may be "extra time" ahead, and if a conclusive win still eludes, a "penalty shootout" may ensue. The trouble is, no one knows the rules of the game anymore.
To be sure, the Iranian leadership has closed ranks - as it always does whenever the revolutionary heritage comes under US siege. Even for reasons of intellectual dilettantism, it becomes difficult to drive a sheet of paper between the various noisy factions and cliques and sub-cliques that usually inhabit the labyrinthine corridors of power in Tehran.
Iran senses that the United Nations Security Council resolution imposing limited sanctions over its nuclear program contains many "menacing" points, testifying to the fact that the "enemies of the Islamic Republic have plans against the country", to quote former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
There is no inclination from any quarter of the collective leadership to exploit the Security Council resolution to score domestic political points, let alone to embarrass President Mahmud Ahmedinejad's government. There is a time for everything. The hurly-burly of the recent elections to the Expediency Council is done. No one seems to care which faction won, which one lost. Once again, the outside world's apocalyptic predictions have been belied.
Former president Mohammad Khatami said: "I think Mr Ali Larijani Iran's chief negotiator on the nuclear issue and his assistants did their best to proceed with the discussions logically." Neither Rafsanjani nor Khatami showed any hesitation in emphasizing that it was Iran's legitimate and national right to pursue a nuclear program. Both leaders pointed out that the Security Council resolution was politically motivated and was at the behest of the US.
And both Rafsanjani and Khatami warned Western countries against making any precipitate moves against Iran. Khatami said the West should adopt the path of "negotiation and consensus" rather than resort to "swift and hasty decisions". Rafsanjani was uncharacteristically blunt. He warned "arrogant powers" (the US and Britain) against triggering a new crisis in the Middle East.
"They are creating problems for themselves and the region that will not be confined to Iran. This is a fire that could burn many others ... They are looking for a pretext ... They should not enter stages which could be dangerous for everyone. They had better think and act wisely," Rafsanjani warned the US.
The powerful Speaker of the Iranian Majlis (parliament), Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, expressed similar views. Senior religious leaders have concurred. The influential head of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Alaeddin Broujerdi, made it clear right at the outset that Ahmedinejad's government would have a free hand to handle the delicate negotiations ahead and to safeguard Iran's national interests.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's message to hajj pilgrims this year was also extraordinary for its political content. Among other things, Khamenei made a point of implicitly endorsing Ahmedinejad's questioning of the Holocaust and Israel's existence. Khamenei pointedly asked how such questioning could become a "punishable offense" when the pope and high-ranking Western officials could indulge in "open defamation of Islam".
However, behind the rhetoric, Iran has signaled flexibility and is showing restraint. There has been no knee-jerk reaction to the Security Council resolution that orders all countries to stop supplying Iran with materials and technology that could contribute to its nuclear and missile programs. It also freezes the assets of related Iranian companies and individuals.
Iran has neither quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty nor terminated its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. At various levels, the Iranian leadership has signaled that the door is open for negotiations. (Larijani left for Beijing on Thursday even as Javier Solana, the European Union's point person on the Iran nuclear issue, headed for Washington.) The Iranian hope remains that the European powers do not want an escalation of tensions, and that the US is in too weak a position in Iraq to crack the whip at Iran.
Tehran sees some of the most recent US decisions - dispatch of more warships to the Persian Gulf and the announcement of a test of the Selective Service System that randomly chooses draftees by birth date - as indicative of Washington hovering on the brink of war with Iran. Tehran's consistent response dating from its large-scale military exercises in early November has been that Iran will not be taken by surprise but, at the same time, Iran will be careful not to give cause for provocation.
Iran's trump card in the coming weeks will be its ability to mediate between the Iraqi Shi'ite leaders Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr and, more important, in intervening over the Sadr bloc's boycott of Parliament and cabinet sessions, which has weakened Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Iran's role can be crucial in tackling the political challenge posed by the unusual tactical alliance between the Sadr bloc and some of the hardline Sunni groups (led by Hareth al-Zari, Adnan al-Dulaimi and Saleh al-Mutlak), which receive financial assistance from Arab countries.
Muqtada has insisted that his supporters, who number 32 out of the United Iraqi Alliance's 128-strong contingent in Parliament, will return to the legislature and attend cabinet sessions only if a timetable can be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
The London Arabic daily Al-Hayat reported that during his meeting with US President George W Bush in Washington last month, Hakim carried a message from the Iranian leadership. Tehran sees that its extremely cordial relations with the Iraqi government have significantly weakened Washington in the Iraqi political arena. Logically, this should prompt US diplomacy to use Iran's influence in Iraq. But as an Iranian commentary put it a few weeks ago, "Indeed, in the light of the legendary arrogance of the Bush team, they could choose to return to demagoguery."
Meanwhile, there is mounting anger in Tehran regarding the possibility that the influence of the Arab allies of the US (supported by Vice President Dick Cheney) on Bush's Middle East strategy may prove decisive. These Arab allies - Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt - have lately been pleased by indications that they may have succeeded in scotching any Bush administration notions of making concessions to Iran.
These Arab conservatives have in essence pushed the US into a contradictory stance on Iraq, which Iran sees as simply not sustainable. Having installed a Shi'ite, pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, Washington is caught in a bind, unable to work with this political reality on a geopolitical level. The great nervousness on the part of the Arab conservatives is evident from their vituperative and often contradictory anti-Iran diatribes. On one hand they minimize Iran's real capacity to influence the ground situation within Iraq (lest that consideration alone prompt Bush to engage Tehran), while on the other hand exaggerating Iran's capacity to overthrow the established political order in the region and putting the blame on Iran for just about all that is going wrong in the Middle East.
The conservative Arab regimes are concerned that despite all the noise about the specter of the "Shi'ite crescent" haunting the region, the non-state actors in the Arab world (including Hamas) have continued to participate on the side of Arab-Iranian Islamism in the confrontation pitting it against the US-Israeli-Arab power elites.
Indeed, a major theme in Khamenei's message to the hajj pilgrims last week was also the "united identity of the Muslim ummah". In an extraordinary passage that harks back to a political idiom of liberation theology that Tehran hasn't used for a long while, Khamenei said: "The suppression of liberation movements in the Islamic countries over the past century since the 1922 Middle East settlement imposed by imperial Britain, success of the colonial powers in establishing their dominance over these countries, creation and strengthening of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, plundering of their natural wealth and destruction of their human resources, and thereby keeping Muslim nations behind the caravan of progress in science and technology - all this has became possible only under the shadow of Muslim disunity that in some cases reached the level of internecine and fratricidal strife."
Iran is naturally pouring scorn on the diatribes of the Arab power elites. A recent commentary said the "ideological base" of international terrorism lay in the "closed traditional tribal systems of the Arab countries in the region". The commentary taunted conservative Arab capitals to do something to jettison their "anachronistic and uncivilized" thinking and instead evolve a workable strategy to change their political systems so as to bring them in line with the contemporary developments "unfolding within the framework of the logic of Western liberal democracy", rather than remaining ossified and viewing politics through the "prism of tribal and sectarian dogmatism".
The real danger for Iran will be if in the coming year Saudi Arabia is persuaded to cooperate with a US-Israeli military strike against Iran. The bitter princely rivalries going on in Riyadh and the tug-of-war over how to conduct foreign policy preclude a reversal of the current downslide in Iran-Saudi relations. Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal is ill. The royal rift over succession apparently touches crucially on the issue of how to handle Iran's rising influence in the Middle East.
The Washington Post recently quoted sources close to the Saudi royal family to report that US-Saudi cooperation for dealing with Iran would be similar to their joint action that "assisted anti-Soviet forces during Moscow's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan".
The daily linked the abrupt resignation of Prince Turki al-Faisal (brother of the foreign minister) after hardly 15 months through his tour as ambassador in Washington with the "waning influence of
the sons of the late King Faisal, who dominated the diplomatic and intelligence services for decades". At any rate, Khamenei reserved some of his harshest words in his hajj message for the pro-Western Arab leaderships that have aligned with the US and Britain (and Israel) in pressuring Iran.
Khamenei said: "Today any divisive action in the Islamic world is a historical sin. Those who maliciously use takfir to declare large
groups of Muslims as unbelievers, those who insult the sanctities of various divisions of Islam, those who betray and put a dagger in the back of the Lebanese youth who are a source of honor for the Muslim ummah, those who speak of the fabricated hostilities and lawlessness in Iraq to defeat its Islamic and popular government, and those who put pressure on the elected Hamas government in Palestine, whether intentionally or unintentionally, will be regarded as culprits, detested by history and future generations, and looked upon as mercenaries of the brutal enemy."
Iran is watching closely the growing coordination of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt with Israel at the operative level in Lebanon and Palestine. Israel, of course, has not hesitated to "leak" from time to time the details of its covert dealings with Riyadh and Cairo. Thus Iran has dismissed out of hand the Arab League special envoy's mission to Beirut last month and his four-point mediation formula for the consideration of Hezbollah.
Supreme Leader Khamenei told the visiting Palestinian prime minister and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in Tehran on December 10 that through "resistance and perseverance", Palestinians would certainly regain control of all their occupied land, and that Hamas could count on Iran's "full support".
Despite such posturing and rhetoric, however, Iran is hoping that the Bush administration doesn't yet have a clear strategy on Iraq, and Washington is still weighing options. Tehran knows also that Washington is left with no political card to play other than resorting to pressure tactics against Iran at the present juncture.
The point is, at a time when Iran has begun openly opposing Anglo-US strategy, it is arguably an admission of defeat for Washington to open direct talks with Tehran. Beyond the pressure tactic at the political-diplomatic level, the feasibility of a military option against Iran also remains an open issue. Equally, it is also necessary for Washington to prevent Iran from becoming an influential country in the region.
Surely, Iran must remain on guard that the current debate in the US about the consequences of defeat in Iraq is still premised on the unilateral use of US power. That, in turn, forces Tehran to reason every possible outcome of each action and counteraction. Tehran cannot have the freedom to suspend its fixated self at will.
T S Eliot's words come to mind while reflecting on the tortuous course that US-Iran relations are destined to take in the year ahead. "Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden ..."
Original article posted here.
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