Iran and the US exit strategy in
Iraq By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iran may be a member of the "axis of evil"
according to the Bush administration, but
increasingly it has become clear that it also
holds a key to the riddle of a working strategy
for US troop withdrawal from Iraq.
At least, that is the impression
one gets by the recent statement by the
US envoy to Iraq, reflected in Newsweek,
regarding President George W Bush's authorization of
a dialogue with Iran. Consequently, the question
of future detente between Iran and the US has
now gained new currency, as well as urgency.
Zalmay Khalilzad is, of course, no
stranger to dialogue with Iran
and, in
fact, can take credit for making deals with Teheran in
Afghanistan, particularly at the Bonn summit of
Afghan factions, which shaped the nature of
Kabul's government after its liberation from the yoke
of the Taliban in 2001.
Recently, a
revolutionary guard commander in Iran boasted to
this author that he and an American general met in
a tent at Baghram airport outside Kabul and
reached an agreement on the number of Northern
Front forces entering Kabul, thus averting the
much feared bloodbath.
Currently, the US
must map out two exit strategies, one for
Afghanistan and one for Iraq, and in more ways
than one the two are interrelated, not the least
because in both countries, sharing long, porous
borders with Iran, there cannot be durable peace
and stability without input from Iran.
Contrary to the
prevalent, superficial analyses of today's Iran, the foreign
policy of that country toward the "new" Iraq
and "new" Afghanistan features all the
essential ingredients of good neighborly relations
warranting an alternative assessment of the
Islamic Republic as "rogue" and/or "axis of evil".
In view of the steady expansion of trade
and economic cooperation between Iran and its two
neighbors under American occupation, there are
ample grounds for perceiving Iran as a regional
bastion of stability directly benefiting from the
political and geostrategic windfall of the
downfall of two hostile regimes in Kabul and
Baghdad and their replacement with rather benign
alternatives.
Needless to
say, on the con side there are new
national security worries for Iran generated as a
result of the unprecedented Americanization of regional
politics over the past few years, and crafting
a balance between the positive and
negative ramifications of post-September 11, 2001 developments in
Iran's vicinity is difficult, given the fluid and at
times uncertain nature of the political-security
circumstances surrounding Iran.
One
thing is for sure. Compared to the 1990s, when
the fear of Iraq's nuclearization ran rampant in
Iran, especially when Saddam Hussein ceased his
cooperation with the United Nations inspection of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, today Iran has
virtually no such fear and, hence, can recalibrate
its defense strategies and the weapons needs of
those strategies.
Equally certain is
Iran's disdain for a re-Talibanization of
Afghanistan and, similarly, the resurgence of
Ba'athism and anything remotely similar to that
within Iraq. Consequently, the rising chorus for
American withdrawal, affecting the US Congress,
cannot but raise new concerns and anxieties inside
Iran, irrespective of the official, anti-American
ideology that has been somewhat heightened on the
rhetorical level by the new president, Mahmud
Ahmadinejad. This brings us to a consideration of
the nature of Iran's new anti-Americanism, vividly
demonstrated by the marching millions across Iran
chanting "death to America" recently.
The limits of Iran's new
anti-Americanism Iran's new president has
wasted little time in whipping up anti-Americanism
in Iran, accusing the US of committing war crimes
in his latest speech. Ahmadinejad's comments
regarding the US military's extensive use of
depleted uranium in Iraq has hit a raw nerve in
the American media and, interestingly, the CNN
broadcast of his speech carried a little blurb at
the bottom that "natural uranium" is more
dangerous than depleted uranium.
But, of course, most Iraqis or Afghanis are
not in proximity of natural uranium and the
reported 210 tons of uranium-contaminated shells that
the US military has so far fired in Iraq
alone will without the slightest doubt cause
serious health risk to the civilian population for a long
time to come, particularly in the
poor, working-class sections of Baghdad and other towns that
have seen the firing might of the US war machine.
However, beyond such
disturbing developments, the US's destruction of Saddam's
regime and its replacement with a
Tehran-friendly, Shi'ite-led political system constitutes, in fact, manna from
heaven for Iran, thus laying the groundwork for a fresh
start in troubled US-Iran relations.
Curiously, the
rise of a militant anti-American president in Iran
may actually serve this process for two reasons:
(a) Iran is no longer bothered by elite
factionalism hampering its diplomacy, and (b)
Iran's hardline politicians at the helm mirror to
some extent their neo-conservative adversaries in
Washington.
This is not to suggest
that Iran's new surge of anti-Americanism is a
mere ploy for domestic consumption, although there
is an element of truth to that and the emotional
and ideological basis for reinventing Iran's
foreign policy (see Reinventing Iran's Foreign
Policy , Asia Times Online,
October 7); rather, the complexity of this
new anti-Americanism can be best captured by
viewing it through different prisms, ie, the
ideological-religious, national interests, and
regional and international considerations and
proclivities of the Iranian system.
On the one
hand, Iranian hostility toward American "hegemony"
is a legacy of the Islamic revolution of
1979, receiving new shock treatment by the interventionist
policies of the White House since September
11, 2001. The US may be actively engaged in
selling its image in the Middle East as
"Muslim-friendly", but unfortunately the "image
repackaging" can only go so far, notwithstanding
the facts of a sizeable military presence, say
occupation, of two Muslim states, not to mention
the powerful presence of the US military
throughout the Persian Gulf and the Central Asia
region minus Iran.
Hence,
the symptoms of anti-Americanism can be found
aplenty nowadays not simply among the clerical ruling
elites of Iran, but also among a large segment
of the population, which may be fascinated by the
US superpower, yet at the same time resents
its unilateralism and interventionism, as well as
its selectiveness regarding democratization or nuclear proliferation
in the Middle East. For example, Israeli nuclear arms
are tolerated by the US, as is the continued
pattern of pre-modern rule in the oil sheikdoms of
the Persian Gulf.
Nonetheless, the pitiful
excesses of Iran's Americaphobia need
mentioning. For one thing, the recent
congressional calls for American troop withdrawal
from Iraq have unnerved the ruling Iranians,
bringing a strong dose of reality into the very midst
of their public denunciations of the US. The fact
is that a blanket Iranian objection to the US military
presence complicates Iran's Iraq policy, which
has been geared to sustain the new, Shi'ite-led
status quo that is constantly put in grave
danger by the Sunni-dominated insurgency.
With certain Iraqi Shi'ites aligning
themselves with the US power, which has
"liberated" them from decades of Ba'athist
oppression, an Iranian ambivalence toward the US
military presence in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan,
has been manifested at official and semi-official
levels. Consequently, a structural limit of Iran's
anti-Americanism can be seen here, precisely as a
result of fears of Iraq's breakup or descent into
the quagmire of inter-religious fratricide
favoring the anti-Shi'ite extremist Sunnis in Iraq
and elsewhere in the Middle East, overriding the
ideological antipathy toward the "Great Satan".
This means that blind,
diabolical opposition to the US is not really in
Iran's geopolitical interests, at least for the
moment, since neither Iran, nor any other regional power,
can possibly fill the vacuum of departed American power
- power that in any case
has been inadvertently serving Iran's interests.
Functional
or dysfunctional anti-Americanism? A
question worth pondering is whether the new
Iranian anti-Americanism is dysfunctional
when analyzed through the prism of
Iran's national interests. Is it, in other words,
irrational or self-disserving? The answer must
consider a conflated and confusing recent history whose
momentum, toward increasing or decreasing the risks
to Iran's national security interests, is difficult to gauge
in the light of contradictory impulses
that ran in diametrically opposed directions with respect to the
US threats against Iran.
Despite these
contradictions, the fact that the American "enemy"
has sent to history's dustbin two of Iran's
foremost local enemies, replacing them with
Iran-friendly substitutes, impinges on any
concerted efforts in Iran today to make renewed
anti-Americanism a big staple of collective
identity.
Consequently, if left unchecked, the virulent
anti-American political rhetoric in Iran runs the risk
of causing policy rigidities resistant to
pragmatic consideration of shared interests with the Western
superpower that necessitate a partial overlap in
terms of regional politics. Some
of today's anti-Americanism in Iran may be
inevitable, but the character and intensity of
it militates against the logic of detente, given those
shared interests between Tehran and Washington.
Certainly, one clear testing ground for
breakthrough diplomacy between the two countries
is the current negotiation over Iran's nuclear
program, given the renewed willingness of Iran to
engage in nuclear talks with Washington's European
partners.
There is already a soft linkage
between the nuclear and the regional security
issues, prompted most recently by the exchange of
accusations and counteraccusations by Tehran and
London (which has taken the lead in questioning
Iran's nuclear intentions), and this linkage may
grow even more pronounced, depending on the
outcome of the nuclear talks.
Doubtless,
Washington's and London's willingness to
acknowledge Iran's regional clout and its
constructive role in regional peace and stability
would play a catalytic role in changing the
hostile attitudes and stereotypes about the US
within the Islamic Republic. With concerns about
an anti-Shi'ite resurgence in Iraq at its peak,
Iran today can ill afford the side-effects of a
dysfunctional anti-Americanism precluding
meaningful dialogue between the two countries,
especially on the grand topic of America's exit
strategy for Iraq.
Iran's place in the
US exit strategy In contemplating an
exit strategy, the US government must be able to
rely on the stalwart participation by Iran that has
hitherto been lacking, at least publicly.
With the uneven evolution of a
new Iraqi army and police force plagued
by factionalism, desertion and mistrust, not to
mention the deleterious effects of the potent insurgency
defying the might of the US and its
coalition partners, an American withdrawal from Iraq is only
possible when the internal forces of the
country are relatively capable of maintaining
peace and national unification without the benefit
of the American military.
To open
a caveat here, last year at a Persian
Gulf conference on regional security, this author
was surprised to hear from more than one Arab
expert that in their opinion Iran's "rogue behavior"
was meant to stimulate America's continued presence
in Iraq to safeguard Shi'ite political gains, the
argument being that the "Iran threat" would make
it harder for the US to leave.
Whether we
are speaking of a few years or several years from
now, let's say 2008 or 2010 to 2012, a future US
withdrawal from Iraq will most likely not happen
overnight but rather through a logical sequence in
phases, whereby the phased reduction of troops
will eventually culminate in a complete or near
complete exit from the Iraqi theater.
That is why it
is essential that all of Iraq's neighbors, above
all Iran but also Syria, be
incorporated within the exit strategy, otherwise the risk
of an Iranian spoiler role, partly through its
armed influence, such as with Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army in Iraq, may grow larger and larger.
Fortunately, this is a recognized fact by
the old hands in Iraq's new political
infrastructure, including its Kurdish president,
Jalal Talabani, who in his recent visit to Iran
exceeded himself in emphasizing Iran's important
role in regional stability.
The Iraqi Kurds have a vested interest
in maintaining the status quo shaped along
federalist lines, and have to reckon with potential
Turkish intervention to frustrate their ultimate hope of
independence in case of Iraq's breakup, in which
case Iran can be an effective counterweight to
Turkey.
Meanwhile, all of Iraq's
neighbors seem committed to preventing Iraq's
splintering into de facto mini-states warring
among themselves while breeding Islamist
terrorism, which explains Iran's continuous
participation in the various gatherings of Iraq's
neighbors (plus Egypt).
In the end, the paradox of US-Iran
games of strategy, now nearly three decades old, may produce a net result
of simultaneous competition and cooperation in
Iraq and Afghanistan, tantamount to making Iraq a
joint American-Iranian client state.
With several noted politicians,
including Ahmad Chalabi, willing to play the compliant
helper in this rather odd but ultimately
realistic scenario that is dictated less by the political
taste of actors involved than by the cold realities on
the ground, the Iraqi client state will be for the
foreseeable future empowered by two seemingly
hostile forces.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-authored "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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