Israel and Iran chart collision
course By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The United
States and its European allies may be self-indulging in
a Wilsonian "greater Middle East" project or discourse
frowned on by the region's politicians and
intellectuals, yet there is little doubt
about the operation of Israeli power well beyond her
tiny borders pushing for a "greater Israel".
This much can be surmised by studying Israel's
foreign policy toward Central Asia and the Caucasus
since the Soviet Union's breakup, which, in tandem with
Turkey, has allowed Israel to launch its own version of
"sphere of influence" politics in what the late Israeli
prime minister Izhak Rabin termed as "the new Middle
East"; this concept has been viewed rather favorably by
Israeli pundits since it implies the region's jailbreak
from the Arab-dominated sub-system.
Thus, it is
hardly surprising that, per a report in the latest issue
of the New Yorker, Israel is actively involved in
supporting the Iraqi Kurds, who are fast sowing the
seeds of their independence, albeit often under the
convenient guise of a new Iraqi federalism. According to
the article by veteran writer Seymour Hersh, who has
aptly unearthed the secrets of Israel's nuclearization,
not to mention the Abu Ghraib prison torture fiasco,
Israel's secret service, Mossad, is engaged in covert
operations among Iranian and Syrian Kurds, in addition
to training Iraqi Kurd commandos and setting up the
latter as a counterweight to Shi'ite militias.
Raising the ire of Turkey, whose government has
criticized Israel's iron fist approach toward the
Palestinians, the government of Israel has reportedly
denied the allegations in Hersh's article. In Hersh's
"Plan B", Israel's rationale has been described as
purely a response to the fear of militant Shi'ism
emanating from Iran, and the US's inability to contain
this threat.
Maybe so, but what Hersh has missed
is the economic dimension of Israel's push for a Kurdish
state or, at the least, a largely autonomous Kurdish
region in Iraq which could realize the long sought-after
dream of an oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa, echoing
the statement last March in the Israeli paper, Haaretz,
by Minister for National Infrastructures Joseph
Paritzky, that such a pipeline would diversify Israel's
sources of energy and lessen its dependence on expensive
Russian oil. The fact that this pipeline would have to
travel through the "weak" and compliant state of Jordan
does not seem, at least from the prism of Israel's
national (security) interests to be an insurmountable
problem.
Unfortunately, Hersh appears all too
willing in his article to adopt Israel's stated
rationalization, ie, fear of Shi'ite radicalism, without
probing either the geoeconomic factors or Israel's
growing ambitious foreign policy casting a wider and
wider net just as this "regional superpower" grows in
military and economic might in a rather stagnant region.
Equally absent in Hersh's piece is any reference to
Israel's direct assistance to American
counter-insurgency operations, which has been the
subject of investigative journalism by various European
newspapers such as the Guardian in the United Kingdom.
Regardless of the Israeli government's official
denial, Hersh's story is bound to reverberate throughout
the Middle East and fuel the fire of conspiracy
theorists who depict a "proxy war" by the US,
articulated by a largely Jewish group of Washington
policymakers known as "neo-conservatives", in the
interest of Israel. In turn, such news makes it even
harder for the US to win the legitimacy battle in Iraq
as well in the entire Arab world.
Still, it is
noteworthy that in light of the Sunni-Shi'ite divisions,
Israel's self-portrayal as a deterrent force against
Iran-led Shi'ite insurgency may strike a harmonious cord
with some Sunnis, but it is doubtful that with growing
Shi'ite-Sunni cooperation against the US occupation,
Israel's strategy may find too many admirers either in
Iraq or elsewhere in the Muslim world. Rather, news of
Israel's clandestine operations in Kurdish Iraq,
fomenting Kurdish irredentism, will likely cause an
anti-Israel backlash, including in Turkey, which must
reckon with its own volatile Islamists.
Nonetheless, strategically speaking, any
immediate or short-term harm to Israel's strategic
alliance with Turkey may be worth the long-term dividend
of a divided Iraq light years removed from menacing
Israel again and, what is more, featuring a pro-Israel
Kurdish enclave mirror imaging pro-Iran warlords in
Afghanistan. Whether or not Israel can then utilize its
"Kurdish stick" for a quid pro quo with Iran vis-a-vis
the Hizbollah in Lebanon or Hamas and Jihad in the
occupied territories remains to be seen. For the moment,
however, in terms of regional balance of power, the
post-invasion opening of Iraq to foreign influence has
seemingly set up a new, and dangerous, chapter in
Israel-Iran rivalry that in all likelihood will permeate
Iraq and the "new Middle East" indefinitely.
This, in turn, raises serious questions about
the nature and intent of the "Greater Middle East"
project about to be discussed at the upcoming North
Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Istanbul. The
diplomatic niceties of this benign discourse aside,
which components have yet to be disentangled clearly,
the facts on the ground, such as the clashing interests
of two regional powers and their multidimensional games
of strategy spanning the entire region, need to be
explicitly addressed, otherwise the said project will
hardly influence beyond the summit's talking shops and
change the security calculus of the Middle East.
Part of the problem right now is the discursive
battle over Middle East cartography and the lingering
indecision of whether or not the idea of "greater"
Middle East should require re-mapping the region
inclusive of the newly-independent Central Asia
Caucasus? Or is it simply a matter of socio-political
progress and democratization? And, indeed, how are the
local actors expected to trust the noble intentions
behind this "soft power" approach by Washington barely
disguising its current basking in the unipolarist
exercise of its giant military power?
After half
a century of playing "subordinate sub-system" in the
Cold War's architecture, the Middle East is today at the
nodal point of contradictory cross-currents where the
forces of progress, development, peace and stability
compete with the forces of stagnation, irredentism, and
conflict. With the momentum for a Kurdish state gaining
daily, it may be the fulfillment of the Kurdish dream,
and simultaneously a nightmare for Iraq's neighbors with
a Kurdish population, but in the larger scheme of
things, it heralds a new chapter in inter-regional
competition by two diametrically-opposed religious
states, one Jewish the other Shi'ite.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author
of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign
Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy
Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs,
co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas
Maleki, No 2, 2003.
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about the operation of Israeli power well beyond her
tiny borders pushing for a "greater Israel".
