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More talk, less
action
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Amid rising tensions over Iran's nuclear program and
renewed charges that it is sheltering senior al-Qaeda
leaders, including the son of Osama bin Laden, a major
international think tank is calling on the
administration of President George W Bush to seriously
engage Tehran rather than to seek confrontation with it.
In a new report entitled "Iran: Discontent and
Disarray", the Brussels-based International Crisis Group
(ICG) concludes that, despite continuing growth in
popular unhappiness with Iran's conservative leadership,
swift political change, let alone a popular insurrection
as some US neo-conservatives have predicted, is highly
unlikely.
Much more probable, on the other hand,
is the rise of "conservative pragmatists", such as
former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,
who have supported opening up to the West for economic
reasons while continuing to resist far-reaching
political reform.
"There should be no let-up in
the world support for political reform and greater
respect for human rights," said Robert Malley, ICG's
Middle East program director who served as Middle East
specialist on the National Security Council staff under
former president Bill Clinton. In that respect, the
report notes that the decision to award this year's
Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi, a human-rights
lawyer, could be considered particularly helpful.
"But the regime is not likely to collapse soon,
so there is no serious alternative to engaging it on
urgent security matters," Malley went on. "And that
engagement is going to have address, as well as
everybody else's anxieties, Iran's own sense of
strategic encirclement and nuclear disadvantage," he
said.
Iran policy has been a major point of
contention with the Bush administration virtually since
it took power almost three years ago. On the one hand,
the State Department, under Secretary of State Colin
Powell, has supported continuing with the gradual
detente policy promoted under Clinton. On the other,
hawks based primarily in Vice President Dick Cheney's
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's offices have
opposed engagement, arguing instead for a policy of
isolation and confrontation.
The September 11
terrorist attacks marked the hawks' ascendancy within
the administration. While contacts between Washington
and Tehran - which haven't had direct diplomatic ties
since the embassy hostage crisis 23 years ago - picked
up sharply during Washington's military campaign in
Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Iran's inclusion in the
"axis of evil" described by Bush in his state of the
union address in January 2002 resulted in an instant
cooling of relations.
Still, the State
Department maintained discreet contacts with the Iranian
government until mid-May when US intelligence concluded
that a series of al-Qaeda attacks carried out in Saudi
Arabia that left some 35 people dead, including eight US
nationals, were planned and possibly ordered in Iran by
senior leaders of the group. As a result, the contacts
were put on ice.
At the same time, tensions were
rising over Iran's nuclear program which, according to
Tehran itself, is designed exclusively for civilian use.
The US, on the other hand, believes that Tehran intends
to build a nuclear weapon and has accelerated its
efforts to do so. The issue has moved quickly to the top
of the agenda of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
which has given Tehran until the end of this month to
explain a number of inconsistencies which its inspectors
have recently discovered.
At the same time, the
Pentagon has declined to disarm and dissolve a
heavily-armed Iranian rebel group, the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), that is based in Iraq and was
closely allied to the ousted regime of former president
Saddam Hussein. Its failure to do so, despite the MEK's
inclusion on the State Department's list of
international terrorist groups, is seen in Tehran as
evidence that Washington may be willing to use the group
as a source of pressure against the Islamic Republic.
Meanwhile, a number of prominent
neo-conservative thinkers close to the administration
hawks have become increasingly outspoken in favor of
providing covert aid to student opposition and exile
movements, including one led by the son of the former
shah, in hopes of setting off a popular insurrection.
Several of them, including Michael Ledeen of the
American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that enjoys
strong influence in Rumsfeld's and Cheney's offices,
have formed a "Coalition for Democracy in Iran", which
is pressing Congress to approve a bill that would, among
other things, provide some US$50 million in aid to
opposition forces in Iran.
"We are now engaged
in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the
Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network,"
he wrote shortly after US troops took Baghdad in spring.
"Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the
defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in
Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous
blow to the terrorists."
The new ICG report
confirms that students and others are indeed unhappy
about the prospects for political change in light of the
refusal of the conservative clerical establishment, led
by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, to support the
reform program sponsored by the twice-elected president,
Mohamed Khatami, and his allies in the Iranian
parliament, the majlis.
Popular frustrations are
being taken out primarily on the reformers, who have
been unable to carry out their programs, according to
the report, which pointed to the huge drop in turnout in
municipal elections earlier this year, which actually
resulted in major gains by conservative politicians.
The problem, however, is that this frustration
is turning more to political apathy. "Student protests
persist, but they remain contained; most of the public
is reluctant to challenge the state security services
directly, sensing both that the regime would not
hesitate to resort to violence and that, for the time
being at least, there is no readily available credible
political alternative."
Thus, "international
policy-makers need to recognize that internal paralysis
is a far more probable outcome than radical change," the
report concludes.
In this context, according to
the ICG, it makes sense for the West to take advantage
of any opening by the regime to economic reform, as well
as engage directly, as Europe has for some time, in
critical issues, including security. "Such contacts need
to be encouraged and expanded," the report says, "as
they ultimately help to open up Iran's political space."
"The need is to strengthen Iran's civil society,
and that can best be done not by isolating the country
but by maximizing economic and cultural contacts while
continuing to urge political reform and more respect for
human rights," according to ICG analyst Karim
Sadjadpour.
(Copyright OneWorld)
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