Washington sticks to softer line on
Tehran By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Despite the sweeping victory of
staunchly anti-United States conservatives in Iran's
elections last month, analysts believe the tentative
detente between the two countries that began late last
year will continue, at least through the November US
elections.
Since January, a series of
developments have suggested that neither country is
seeking confrontation with the other, in major part
because they are both pre-occupied with other, more
pressing issues.
This notion gained particular
force when the US dispatched half a dozen planeloads of
emergency aid after a devastating earthquake in Bam in
Iran in late December, then followed that with an offer
to send a high-level delegation to inspect the damage.
While Washington was highly critical of last
month's elections and the disqualification by the
conservative-dominated Guardians Council of hundreds of
reformist candidates, it did not mount a major campaign
to discredit them.
Similarly, while expressing
"disappointment" over the conclusion in mid-February of
a major oil deal between Japan and Tehran that had long
been delayed due to Washington's strong opposition, the
approval itself signaled to experts that the
administration of President George W Bush had
effectively backed down, perhaps due in part to the
deployment of Japanese forces to Iraq. (See Japan, Iran sign major oil deal, US
dismayed, Asia Times Online, Feb 20.)
The latest indication of detente came last week
when the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) in occupied Iraq approved plans for the
construction of an oil pipeline across the Shatt al-Arab
waterway to the Iranian port of Abadan, a project
expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Washington went along with the recommendation by Iraq's
oil ministry as a way to increase Baghdad's exports -
hence its export earnings - which have been held up by
bottlenecks at Basra and sabotage in the northern part
of the country.
While US officials withheld
comment on the proposal, Iraq's oil minister Ibrahim
Bahr al-Uloum told the Financial Times that CPA
administrator L Paul Bremer "says he realizes [the
Iraqis] have to have good relations with all their
neighbors".
Several days later, US officials
told reporters that Washington does not plan to press
the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) to refer Iran's nuclear program to the United
Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
Instead, they said, the Bush administration will
align itself more closely with its Western European
allies, Britain, France and Germany, who took the lead
last October in engaging Iran on its nuclear ambitions
and who prefer a go-slow approach through the IAEA,
which has been steadily uncovering previously secret
components of Iran's nuclear program.
Both moves
marked setbacks to hawks in the administration who last
May succeeded in cutting off a quiet dialogue between
the US State Department and Iran after intelligence
agencies traced bombings against Western residential
compounds in Riyadh to telephone calls from officials of
the al-Qaeda terrorist group inside Iranian territory.
The hawks, led by neo-conservatives and other
hardliners around Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Vice President Dick Cheney, have charged that Iran has
"harbored" senior al-Qaeda officials since the former
ruling Taliban was ousted in neighboring Afghanistan at
the end of 2001. Iran, which has said it has detained a
number of al-Qaeda militants found on its territory, has
strongly denied it supports the group in any way.
Tehran has also hinted it is prepared to turn
over the detainees if Washington repatriates several
thousand members of the Mojahadin-e-Khalq (MeK), an
armed Iranian rebel group based in Iraq that is
officially under the detention and control of US
occupation troops. In January, Washington shut down the
MeK's Iraq-based radio station.
The hawks have
also charged that Iran is turning a blind eye to, if not
actively helping, Islamist militants allegedly
infiltrating into Iraq to join up with the insurgency or
terrorist movements there. While Tehran has admitted it
cannot entirely control its border with Iraq, it has
strongly denied any complicity in efforts to destabilize
its neighbor, a denial most independent experts here
find credible.
"Many of the hardliners [in
Tehran] would love to see us fail [in Iraq], but failure
would mean civil war, which they don't want," said
Daniel Brumberg, an Iran specialist who teaches at
Georgetown University here. "Mainstream conservatives,"
he added at a forum sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, "don't want us to fail."
Hadi Semati, a visiting scholar at Carnegie who
also teaches at Tehran University and is identified with
the reformist movement there, agreed, asserting there is
a broad consensus among conservative and reformist
foreign policy makers favoring Iraqi democratization.
"Any option in Iraq is favorable to Iran, with the
exception of chaos or partition," he said.
Ironically, according to Semati, Iranian
conservatives have emerged as big winners as a result of
the Bush administration's "war on terrorism". Not only
have two of their most dangerous enemies - the Taliban
and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein - been
eliminated, but Bush's own rhetoric against Iran as part
of the "axis of evil" weakened pro-democratic and
reformist forces.
"Democracy-building is going
to be dead to the extent it is seen as coming from
external influences," he said. "The US has a huge
credibility gap on democracy in the region."
Moreover, Tehran's ability to make things more
difficult for the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan - if
it chose to do so - a notion that is conceded even by
administration hardliners, has also given the resurgent
conservatives greater confidence vis-a-vis Washington,
say analysts.
This confidence was on display
last month when former Iranian president and power
broker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told a prominent
Tehran newspaper that Washington is "stuck in the mud in
Iraq, and they know that if Iran wanted to, it could
make their problems even worse". Rafsanjani suggested
that dialogue might even now be possible. "For me,
talking is not a problem."
According to Gary
Sick, a veteran Iran expert at Columbia University who
worked on the National Security Council staff of former
president Jimmy Carter (1977-81): "They were initially
worried that the US would turn on them next [after
Iraq], but the conservatives see what a mess we've made
there, and they're quite confident, especially with the
conservatives preparing to take over the legislative and
executive branches."
Sick told IPS that
Rafsanjani's statement was a "signal", but cautioned
that it remains to be seen if he will emerge as the
strongest power, or whether a hardline group led by
Iran's highest cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, will be the stronger force in the new majlis
(parliament). Either way, he argued, dramatic changes in
Iranian foreign policy are unlikely until the political
situation is more clearly defined there, possibly not
until after next year's presidential elections.
Similarly, say Sick and other analysts, it would
be premature to consider the Bush administration's
recent conciliatory steps as part of a larger overall
strategy for detente. "As far as I can tell, the US
really still doesn't have any policy or broad strategy
toward Iran," he said. "The reality of the situation is
the US right now is not looking for a fight with Iran.
We're suspicious of what they're up to, but, on the
other hand, we have no reason to antagonize them. But
whether this is more than a temporary thing is
doubtful," he added, noting that the split on Iran
between administration hawks and more realist officials
in the State Department and elsewhere in the bureaucracy
remains "very deep".
Indeed, in a much-remarked
article, "Going Soft on Iran", this week in the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard, Iran specialist Reuel
Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute warned
that any "realist" strategy of engagement was doomed to
failure and that "in the end, only democracy in Iran
will finally solve the nuclear and terrorist problems".
