Iran, US divide stands in Iraq's
way By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - A two-day conference with Iraq's
neighbors plus Egypt and Bahrain ended in Tehran this
week with mixed results. The conference, attended by a
United Nations envoy, Iraq's deputy prime minister,
Saudi Arabia's interior minister, and others, was
supposed to reflect the spirit of unanimity and
consensus on a host of issues ranging from the upcoming
January elections in Iraq to border control, terrorism
and Iraq's economic reconstruction. Yet the overall
impression that emerged after intense, and often
divisive discussions, was the depth and significance of
divergent perspectives barely glued together in a final
communique.
The latter, consisting of nine
items, mentions that the next meeting will take place in
Turkey, a previous host of the group. One must wonder
about the role of Egypt, which has already hosted the
group's meetings twice, since it has no border with Iraq
and is considered as "out of area" by Iranian
policy-makers.
With less than two months to the
general elections in Iraq, all eyes are focussed on the
thorny question of Shi'ite-Sunni relations and, in the
light of the recent request by some 17 Sunni and Kurdish
groups from the Iraqi interim government of Iyad Allawi,
a postponement of the elections. Although the Kurds have
backtracked somewhat, it is hardly surprising to see
that the Sunni Arab governments have officially or
semi-officially backed this request, hoping that time
will somehow turn the tides back in favor of the Sunni
minority that ruled Iraq for so long.
Still,
perhaps realizing that the momentum for the January
elections is at this point irreversible, the Arab
participants at the Tehran conference finally relented
and signed on to item number 2 of the final communique,
referring to the January elections "under the UN's
auspices". Yet, given the token presence of UN workers,
ie, less than 50, the communique's singular emphasis on
the central role of the UN may have been a misnomer
aimed to give the impression of greater unity than
actually exists among the participant countries.
In the tumult of the pre-elections in Iraq, the
Sunni world encompassing Iraq's Sunni population has yet
to come to grips with the post-invasion change of
political fortunes laying the foundations for a
Shi'ite-led regime in Iraq, which in turn will
undoubtedly change in times to come the very nature and
makeup of the Shi'ite-Sunni calculus in the Persian
Gulf. Perhaps Iran's willingness to allow Egypt to
participate in this group is an implicit sign of a
quid pro quo, namely, a return of favors by
permitting a more muscular form of Arab politics in the
Persian Gulf at a time when the Shi'ite wave is riding
relatively high.
Of course, this is not to say
that everything is fine and dandy between Iran and Iraqi
Shi'ites, many of whom fought against Iran during the
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, notwithstanding the fact
that even Saddam Hussein's government included many
Shi'ites in the civil and military bureaucracy. In fact,
the Iraqi defense minister, Hamza Shaalan, has quite
unnerved the Iranians with his recent blistering
criticisms and even threats against Iran's "meddlings"
inside Iraq. Hence, it is really not the question of
Shi'ites, per se, in the Iraqi government, but which
kind of Shi'ites, pro or anti-Iran, that matters most
from Iran's point of view.
Presently, Iran has
vested its hopes on a gradual process whereby the
specifically Shi'ite identity of Iraq's ruling
politicians will thicken as time goes on, with the
current prime minister and his Shi'ite deputies
representing only the beginning points of departure for
a more substantive process. Whether or not this is
wishful thinking or a tissue of future reality is
unclear, but it is important to keep in mind that the
leading Iraqi Shi'ite figure, namely, Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, has his own agenda not always commensurate
with Iran.
Concerning Sistani, he has appointed
a small council that is busy nowadays apportioning seats
in the upcoming assembly among the several dozen Shi'ite
groups and parties, some of whom have protested their
small share of the pie. A case in point, the ayatollah's
committee has designated fewer than 30 seats for the
group(s) supporting the rebel Shi'ite, Muqtada al-Sadr,
and this may not satisfy him.
As the bargaining
among Shi'ites continues, a larger bargaining between
the Shi'ites and Sunnis appears to be even more
problematic. The Sunnis are complaining of a "tacit"
approval of Iraqi Shi'ites for the recent American
assault on Fallujah, and certain Arab commentators have
even gone further and painted gloomy pictures of a
coming civil war along sectarian lines. The mere threat
of such a dreadful prospect, while many Muslims are
convinced Israel is actively sowing the seeds of
division in order to exploit the instability of Iraq for
its own purposes, has been sufficient for the moment to
accentuate the points of coinciding interests among
Iraq's Sunni and Shi'ite neighbors, none of whom want to
see the troubled region face any more crisis than it has
already experienced.
But the prospect of a Sunni
boycott of the upcoming elections remains strong and
unless a deal is worked out for a mutually satisfactory
distribution of power between the two sides, such a
boycott will undoubtedly diminish the legitimacy, if not
the legality, of the post-election polity. The Kurds, on
the other hand, with their eyes set on Kirkuk, ideally
hope that with delayed elections they can manage a
comfortable Kurdish majority in the Kurdish areas, but
at the same time they have not thrown their lot in with
the Sunnis, who are at the moment the political losers
of the invasion. By adopting a flexible, pragmatic
attitude meant to extract more political capital from
Baghdad and the American authorities, the Kurds remain
largely optimistic that no matter when the elections
take place, they will gain politically.
Iran's
worry, on the other hand, is that a stable Iraq will be
used against it, that the new Iraq may be added to the
Gulf Cooperation Council thus enhancing the hands of
United Arab Emirates, which is in dispute with Iran over
three Persian Gulf islands, and that the regional
security framework will be reshaped to the detriment of
Tehran's interests, not to mention the insecurity over
US military bases near Iran's borders and the occasional
US-Israel threats of surgical strikes inside Iran
against its nuclear facilities.
Thus, an Iranian
conundrum: its participation and cooperation for stable
borders and Iraqi stability may not pay off in the end
and, instead, cause a bigger problem down the line,
suggesting the protean value of multiple strategies
inclusive of the threat card meant to maintain hostility
toward the US presence in the region and increasing
fears of the US Western power self-entrenching in a
crucial corner of the abode of Islam.
Yet,
simultaneously, just about every salient feature of
Iran's Iraq policy today is in tandem with US policy,
which is why at the Sharm el-Shaikh conference in Egypt
two weeks ago, Iran followed the US's policy toward
Iraq, ie, with respect to the elections, and this was
partly to disallow the US to paint Iran as
non-cooperative at a delicate time when Iran was
negotiating with Europe over the nuclear issue.
There are, however, serious side effects to
Iran's Iraq policy in tandem with the US approach, given
the second George W Bush administration's stubborn
resistance to acknowledging any positive role played by
Iran in regional crises, depicting Iran instead as a
"rogue" power that, in the words of Kenneth Pollack in
his new book, Persian Puzzle, aims to overthrow
its neighbors. Such caricatures of Iran's regional
foreign policy are not helpful and the Bush
administration must sooner or later reckon with the fact
that Iran is a major regional player with a
sophisticated, multilayered foreign policy, featuring
certain shared or parallel interests with the US.
Until and unless the US comes to this new
realization, or new threshold, any chance of even a
mini-breakthrough in US-Iran relations remains remote.
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. He teaches political science at
Tehran University.
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