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A US guide to Persian Gulf
security
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - What lies ahead for the troubled
Persian Gulf? More conflict and insecurity or,
perhaps, peace and stability? The questions loomed
large at a recent conference on Persian Gulf
security in Bahrain, sponsored by the
International Institute for Strategic Studies,
bringing under one roof the foreign ministers from
the Persian Gulf states, eg Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, as well as high officials from Australia,
Great Britain, Singapore and Yemen; representing
the US were Stephen Hadley, the designated
National Security Advisor and General John
Abizaid, head of US Central Command.
While
there were no direct interactions between the
Iranian and the US speakers, the conference
undoubtedly provided a forum for listening and
exchange of points of views on what is undoubtedly
a serious issue of world peace, namely, how to
overcome the sources of insecurity to the Persian
Gulf, scene to three major wars during the past
quarter of a century.
On this question,
there appeared to be about as many points of views
as there were speakers. Oman's foreign minister,
for instance, proposed a new security arrangement
inclusive of the six Arab members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) as well as Iran, Yemen,
Iraq and Pakistan, prioritizing economic
cooperation as a prelude to a comprehensive
security cooperation in the future.
Saudi
Arabia's foreign minister, on the other hand,
stated that the Persian Gulf required a security
institution built on "four pillars", namely the
GCC states, Yemen, Iraq and India. Prince Saud
al-Feisal went on to criticize the US's
unilateralist policy on Iraq and added that the
"international dimension" of Persian Gulf security
necessitated the "positive participation" of Asian
powers, particularly China and India.
In
contrast, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi
emphasized the importance of regional autonomy and
a system of "collective security" based on the
equal participation of all the Persian Gulf
states. Kharrazi stated, "Collective security is
not something that can be imported from the
outside ... the establishment of a security
arrangement in the Persian Gulf can be pursued
with the participation of all the countries in the
region, based on the principle of independence and
without the necessity of acquiring the consent of
outside powers whose very presence directly or
indirectly threatens the security of all the
region."
As for the US speakers, they were
full in generalities and lacking in specifics with
respect to how to proceed with setting up a new
region-wide security arrangement. This was hardly
surprising seeing how the US actually favors
bilateral security arrangements with each Persian
Gulf state, eg with Kuwait until 2011, over any
multilateral arrangement, even the pro-US GCC; in
fact, the GCC has been at odds with itself
recently over a US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement
(FTA), signed in September 2004, which the other
GCC member states have denounced as violating the
GCC's trade agreement, known as the Custom Union,
which precludes such bilateral deals; the US is
negotiating similar free trade agreements with
Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), somewhat
conjoined with the "Greater Middle East Initiative
(GMEI)". The latter has been denounced by Iran's
spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as an
imperialist design to "control" the trade and
finances of the Middle East.
In a certain
sense, the GMEI is the economic "Trojan" by and
through which the US pushes a network of economic
bilateralism, such as the Millennium Challenge
Account's selective assistance to countries such
as Morocco, to bolster its FTA with the US. Also,
the US government plans to expand the Generalized
System of Preferences (GSP) program to increase
trade linkages to the Middle East. The GSP
provides duty-free entry to the US market for
thousands of products from over 140 developing
economies, including the GCC states; in 2002,
under this system, Americans bought nearly US$300
million worth of products from the region - which
happens to have growing ties to the US's main
economic competitor, the European Union (EU).
The EU, already enjoying strong trade
relations with countries such as Tunisia, Algeria
and the GCC states, has vested its hopes on the
rapid progression of its current FTA negotiations
with, among others, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Oman,
Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE.
The
GCC is the EU's fifth largest export market and it
is the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council's (PGCC's)
number one trading partner. In 2001, combined
EU-PGCC trade exceeded 47 million euros (US$63
million), constituting nearly 50% of the EU's
trade with the entire Arab world.
Unsurprisingly, the EU has been
increasingly interested in playing a role in
Persian Gulf security, both through the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has recently
covered the Persian Gulf area through its
so-called Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, and,
more than that, through the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe. Either way,
the US does not seem particularly pleased to share
the security "pie" of the main hub of the world's
energy with the Europeans or any one else.
So, for both economic and security
reasons, the question is: is the US's intention
really to undermine the GCC or prevent its
evolution, notwithstanding the GCC's own
collective security agreement of 2001, which calls
for a collective rapid deployment force, joint
maneuvers, etc? The Saudi officials both publicly
and more so privately have criticized the US's
security bilateralism, of which the net effect
will be to undermine the GCC's vision and
multilateral principle for security arrangements.
Nor are they optimistic about Iraq's inclusion in
the GCC any time soon. Historically, the GCC was
founded in 1981 in reaction to the twin threats of
Iran and Iraq, as well as the historic opportunity
for cooperation. Today, the latter reason
continues to operate solidly in favor of the GCC's
formation and even expansion, while the former
reason has to a large extent disappeared,
notwithstanding the Iran-Saudi Arabia security
agreement of 2000, emulated by Kuwait and Qatar
with Iran since then. All these agreements call
for expansion of "regional cooperation" with Iran,
as well as cooperation against narcotics,
smuggling, etc.
Still, the lingering
suspicions of Iran's "domineering" approach is a
throwback to the 1980s and 1970s, and, what is
more, should the upcoming Iraqi election later
this month lead to a solid Shi'ite majority in the
Iraqi parliament, as expected, then even more odds
will be piled up against the Saudis' consent to
the inclusion of a Shi'ite-led Iraqi government
within the GCC. But, more than the Shi'ite
coloring of Iraq's new government, it is the
government's indirect control by the US government
that will likely preclude Iraq's inclusion within
the GCC fold for a long time; concerning the
latter, recent news indicates that the US
ambassador in Baghdad has vetoed the Iraqi
government's choice for ambassador to Kuwait,
hardly a sign of improvement from the days of L
Paul Bremer, the "dictator of Baghdad", according
to the United Nations envoy to Iraq.
And
then there is the growing question of Pakistan,
which lies outside the Persian Gulf and is
non-Arab, and yet has burgeoning trade ties with
the GCC states and hundreds of thousands of its
citizens labor in the region. Pakistan is also the
sole nuclear-possessing Muslim state, which has
cordial relations with Saudi Arabia, bankrolling
its religious schools for some 20 years and, per
some reports, even receiving nuclear know-how from
Karachi.
Interestingly, none of the GCC
states bothered to invoke Egypt, or Syria, both of
which were invited to join the GCC under the guise
of "six plus two" in 1991, right after the Kuwait
war. This must be rather unsettling to Cairo,
which even as of late could count on official
statements from the GCC leaders on the importance
of Egypt for the region's security, not to mention
a recent Saudi-Egypt joint maneuver in the Red
Sea.
But those "pan-Arabist" sentiments of
the early 1990s are mostly gone now, replaced by a
"neo-realist" realpolitik that focuses more on
balance of power than collective security, which
in turn raises the prospect for India, Pakistan
and China's role in Persian Gulf security, partly
to counter-balance the US's military
"overpresence" and partly to fill the vacuum of
Iraqi power and, from the GCC's vantage point, to
balance Iranian power. Iran has mixed feelings
about Pakistan's role, which while it could
enhance the non-Arab nature of the region's
security, could also operate against Iran since
the Pakistanis are mostly Sunnis and could align
with the Sunni brethren of the GCC against what is
seen in the Arab world these days as the coming
Shi'ite power stretching from Iran to Iraq to
Bahrain to Lebanon. Given the nature of the
GCC-Iran disputes over the three islands of Abu
Musa, and Little and Big Tunb, Pakistan could be
potentially ensnared in an unwanted dispute
jeopardizing its carefully-cultivated relations
with Iran; any Pakistani overture toward the GCC
on such issues may cause a more pro-India turn in
Iran's relations, and, hence, further complicate
Persian Gulf security issues.
Henceforth,
realistically, little change should be expected in
terms of the present realities of security
interactions and arrangements in the Persian Gulf.
The fact is that the US is the hegemonic
stabilizer in the oil-rich region, disallowing any
non-regional power to access its self-declared
"turf", for now at least. On the other hand, the
US does not entirely call all the shots, nor are
its interests well-served by shouldering the
financial burden of being security protectorate on
a long-term basis. This has given rise to a basis
conundrum for the US, that is, how to maintain the
present military and security hegemony and yet
avoid the rather exorbitant costs, which can be
diminished when and only when it consents to a
broader participation by other states in
maintaining security in the Persian Gulf.
Perhaps a US-Iran dialogue can have
dividends in this regard. After all, no one has
forgotten the pre-revolution mid-1970s, when
through the "Nixon doctrine" the US tolerated a
"twin pillar" security based on Iran and Saudi
Arabia. As this author has argued in his book,
After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's
Foreign Policy, a prudent US policy would be
to explore the option of a "neo-Nixon" doctrine or
strategy based in part on "security parallelism"
and "security dialogue" with the Islamic Republic
of Iran.
As the second Bush administration
completes its transition to a new team, in the
light of the endemic security crisis of the
Persian Gulf, it is important to consider the
value of an on-going security dialogue with Iran
aimed at winnowing the differences and exploring
the shared or parallel interests and the selected
areas where low to medium security cooperation
could commence, perhaps on an experimental basis
initially.
The US could, for instance,
embrace Oman's proposal for pre-security, economic
cooperation among the Persian Gulf states, by
promoting Iran-GCC ties, and thus prove those
Iranians, and others, who look with suspicion at
every US move, wrong. But, alas, as long as the
Bush administration has not formally distanced
itself from the "axis of evil" rhetoric against
Iran, it is bound to be conceptually
self-handicapped with respect to any timely
initiative toward the country that boasts the
longest shorelines of the Persian Gulf.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press, 1994)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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