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Will Naval "Incident" Undermine Bush's Iran Message?
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
IPS - Jan 9, 2008
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40731
Will Naval Incident Undermine Bush's Iran Message?
Analysis by Trita Parsi, Ph.D.
WA****NGTON, Jan 9 (IPS) - It is by now almost routine. With recurring
frequency, U.S. leaders tour the Middle East depicting Iran as the
region's greatest threat.
As such, President George W. Bush's visit to the Middle East this week
has historic precedent. But while the message often fell on receptive
ears in the past, regional players today have misgivings about
Wa****ngton's ability -- and perhaps more im****tantly -- its competence
in handling Iran's rise.
So while President Bush beats an old drum during his Mideast tour,
repeating the claim that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons at a press
conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Wednesday, regional
actors are hearing a different tune. Regardless of Bush's message, the
writing many see on the wall reads that Wa****ngton's Iran strategy is
bound to fail.
Though the U.S. embarked on a policy of isolating Iran during the 1979
hostage crisis, the policy was significantly intensified after the end
of the Cold War and the initiation of the Middle East peace process.
Israel, who only a few years earlier had lobbied Wa****ngton to open up
to Iran, insisted that it could not pursue peace with the Arabs unless
the U.S. adopted a tougher line on Iran.
The Bill Clinton administration's commitment to the peace process gave
birth to the Dual Containment policy in 1994, which was "designed to
reassure Israel that the U.S. would keep Iran in check while Jerusalem
embarked on the risky process of peacemaking," according to Kenneth
Pollack, who served as an Iran analyst with the CIA at the time.
In the words of Martin Indyk, assistant secretary of state under
Clinton, Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and the isolation of Iran were
symbiotic. "The more we succeeded in making peace, the more isolated
[the Iranians] would become. The more we succeeded in containing them,
the more possible it would be to make peace," Indyk said.
Consequently, Israeli and U.S. rhetoric on Iran climaxed during this
period. While Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin accused Iran of
"fanning all the flames in the Middle East," U.S. Secretary of State
Warren Christopher told re****ters in March 1995 that "Wherever you
look, you find the evil hand of Iran in this region." Iran's own
actions did little to cast much doubt on these accusations.
Similarly, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair blasted Tehran in
December 2006 as he toured the region and sought to shore up Arab
sup****t against Iran. Much like Rabin and Christopher before him, Blair
wanted to form an "arc of moderation" consisting of Israel and
pro-Western Arab dictator****ps to isolate Iran.
Yet after a decade of making Iran's isolation a central tenet of
Wa****ngton's Mideast policy, the track record is clear: In spite of all
the rhetoric and all the political capital invested in this approach,
the policy of containing Iran has failed miserably. Though a
significant cost has been imposed on Iran, the isolation policy has
neither prevented Iran's rise nor has it compelled Tehran to moderate
its foreign policy.
As President Bush tours the region, he will seek to give the impression
that the U.S. is not deserting this policy and that increased sup****t
from regional actors can succeed in containing Iran. Yet his message
will likely be met with great scepticism. Now, more than ever before,
Wa****ngton seems to have little choice but make a ****ft on Iran.
First, Iran has continued its nuclear programme in spite of both U.N.
sanctions and Wa****ngton's unilateral financial sanctions. The strategy
of incrementally tightening the U.N. sanctions has been derailed by the
December National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which ascertained that
Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapons programme.
Consequently, the much anticipated third U.N. resolution seems nowhere
in sight. Russia and China have signaled greater resistance to it in
response to the NIE and the Iranian U.N. ambassador has taken a month's
vacation, reflecting Tehran's lack of worry. And in a great blow to the
effort of forcing Iran to face a united Security Council, Russia has
begun delivering nuclear fuel to Iran's Bushehr reactor after years of
procrastination.
Second, U.S. commanders in Iraq have toned down accusations of Iranian
meddling and indicated that Iran is pressuring its ****a allies to cease
hostilities. Col. Steven Boylan, spokesperson for David Petraeus, told
the Wa****ngton Times earlier in January that the U.S. is "ready to
confirm the excellence of the senior Iranian leader****p in the pledge
to stop the funding, training, equipment and resourcing of the militia
special groups."
The statement stood in stark contrast to earlier *****sments by the
Pentagon about Iran's intimate involvement in Iraqi violence.
Third, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, sent a significant signal
to Wa****ngton only days later during a speech to students at Yazd
University. Declaring that the conditions the U.S. has put forth for
establi****ng relations between the two countries currently make it
disadvantageous for Iran, he nevertheless made the unprecedented
announcement that "nobody said that these relations have to be severed
forever" and that "the day when having relations with the U.S. is in
our interest, surely I will be the first to approve of such relations."
Khamenei's statement passed largely unnoticed in the Western media, but
its significance is undeniable.
Fourth, and perhaps more im****tantly, U.S. domestic politics has turned
against the current course on Iran. The top three Democratic
Presidential candidates -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John
Edwards -- are all on the record favouring unconditional diplomacy with
Tehran. Furthermore, the winner of the Iowa Republican primary, Mike
Huckabee, also favors dialogue. Never before has sup****t for diplomacy
with Iran -- particularly in the middle of an election season -- been
so strong in the U.S.
These developments have all contributed to a perception in the region
that not only can the U.S. not sustain its isolation policy, but that
some dealings between the U.S. and Iran may already be taking place
behind the scenes. Consequently, Arab states have initiated their own
diplomatic overtures towards Tehran in order to avoid ending up
appearing more hawkish on Iran than Wa****ngton. Improving ties with
Tehran in the wake of a likely U.S.-Iran thaw is the strategically wise
thing to do, the Arabs calculate.
In December 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to
address the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Doha. Not to be outdone
by Qatar, the Saudis invited the firebrand Iranian president to Hajj as
the King's special guest. Both invitations were unprecedented. Moreover,
diplomacy between Egypt and Iran has intensified in the last few weeks
with several high-level visits.
This Arab outreach to Iran -- which largely is a response to a
perception of the likely failure of Wa****ngton's Iran policy -- has
made the U.S. effort to contain Tehran all the more unfeasible.
Against this backdrop, the idea of an U.S.- Arab-Israeli alliance being
formed to counter Iran's rise -- a key impetus for President Bush's
Mideast tour -- seems more farfetched than ever.
In this context, the incident between five Iranian vessels and three
U.S. Naval ****ps in the Strait of Hormuz this past Sunday may not, as
the Bush administration may have hoped, clarify the threat Iran poses
to the region.
Rather, the read of regional players may be that the most dangerous
source of tension is the current state of no-war no-peace between the
U.S. and Iran, which has created an atmosphere in which incidents at
sea -- whether intentional or accidental -- can escalate into
full-fledged wars with unpredictable regional repercussions. As a
result, instead of making the Arabs more receptive to President Bush's
message, the naval episode may prompt them to further lose faith in the
policy of isolation.
[Trita Parsi, author of the newly released "Treacherous
Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S." (Yale
University Press, 2007), is president of the National Iranian American
Council. The book deals with Israeli-Iranian relations in the last 50
years and their impact on US policies and Americas standing in the
Middle East. Based on more than 130 interviews with high-level
Israeli, Iranian and American officials, the book discusses many
Iranian-Israeli behind-the-scene dealings that have never been revealed
before.
Israels former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami calls the book a
brilliant interpretation of one of todays most enigmatic conflicts,
Francis Fukuyama says it is extremely im****tant, John Mearsheimer
calls it outstanding and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski writes that "Treacherous Alliance" is a penetrating,
provocative, and very timely study.
Dr. Parsi's websites are at http://www.tritaparsi.com
and
http://www.treacherousalliance.com
]
*
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