COMMENTARY The Iran-Israel
misconception By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
Iran's Israel policy is a
sub-set of its US policy, not the other way
around. Given the current war of words between
Iran and Israel, this is an important distinction
seemingly missed by many of the media and
pro-Israel lawmakers in Washington, including
Senator Hillary Clinton, who has lambasted the
Bush administration for
being
soft on Iran and "outsourcing" the United States'
Iran policy to the Europeans.
Ever since
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad made his
statements about "wiping Israel off the Middle
East map" and the "myth of Holocaust", all
hesitations about an Iranian "existential threat"
to the State of Israel have been cast aside,
culminating in growing congressional initiatives
to forestall the "Hitler of the Middle East" from
acquiring nuclear weapons aimed at the Jewish
state, to quote a leading Republican lawmaker in
the US.
According to New York Times
columnist David Brook, there are divergent
opinions in the US Congress on how to deal with
Iran, with three out of four camps counseling
tough action.
In comparison, the Israeli
press indicates a growing public consensus about
the necessity of military action to stop Iran's
perceived march toward nuclear weapons, some
hinting a strike will happen as early as March, as
a prelude to Israel's coming elections.
So, as the drumbeats for yet another
military confrontation in the turbulent Persian
Gulf region get louder almost by the minute,
dimming hopes for a diplomatic solution, a
reflective pause is called for.
Interestingly, it is difficult to find any
expert on Iran's foreign affairs who actually
shares the view of a strategic conflict between
Iran and Israel. A case in point is Shahram
Chubin, who has penned, "Iran and Israel have no
differences or occasions for getting into active
hostilities, let alone a nuclear exchange."
This view is shared by, among others,
political-science professor Nader Entessar, who
has written: "There are no significant strategic
conflicts between Iran and Israel that would force
these two countries to go to war against each
other."
History plays a role here and
Iran's legacy of liberating the Jews and allowing
them to return to their "homeland" in Cyrus the
Great's edict forms an irrefutable dimension of
Iran's outward outlook.
Briefly, the
reasons put forth by such policy experts are as
follows: Iran and Israel do not share a common
border and their respective national interests are
not in fundamental collision with each other. Iran
is not an Arab country, like Iraq under Saddam
Hussein, which would be considered a "frontline"
state against Israel, and it has other
national-security threats, eg, the asymmetrical
power of the US in the Persian Gulf, more pressing
than the "out of area" Israel.
Certainly,
the extent to which Israel complements the US
power projection in the Middle East, given the
"forward base" stockpiling of US military hardware
in Israel, Iran's counter-hegemonic aspirations
collide with Israel, but only as a sub-set of the
US-Iran games of strategy that have been ongoing
for more than two decades.
Notwithstanding
the United States' overwhelming military
superiority and the asymmetry of warfighting
capabilities between Iran and the US, it makes
perfect sense, strategically speaking, for Iran to
resort to the remedial targeting of Israel, the
United States' strategic partner in the region.
In other words, Iran's current expressions
of hostilities toward Israel are better understood
from the prism of the US and Iran and how Tehran
benefits in its incessant search for regional
allies to offset US power. This it does through
its anti-Israel posturing, using threats against
Israel as the United States' Achilles' heel.
This brings us to the notion that Tehran's
road to Washington, that is detente between the
two countries, goes through Tel Aviv, and that
Iran's cessation of hostilities toward Israel is
the sine qua non for Washington's
willingness to normalize ties with Tehran.
This is wrong, and the sooner US
politicians realize it the better. Iran's US
policy goes first: its Israel policy is a
component of this. Put simply, Tehran's road to
Washington does not travel through Jerusalem;
rather, indulging in metaphors for a moment, it is
a straight highway with several exit lanes, one of
which is Israel.
Consequently, should a
war break out between Iran and Israel in the
(near) future, retrospectively it will most likely
be interpreted by future historians as yet another
example of how misperceptions cause war. Robert
Jervis, in his important book Perception and
Misperception in International Politics, has
aptly detailed how the 1967 war was instigated by
an Israeli misperception of the intentions of
Egypt's leader, Gemal Abdul Nasser, who was
vilified then as an "Arab Hitler" out to destroy
Israel.
It turns out that Nasser's fiery
anti-Zionist rhetoric was mostly for domestic
consumption and his decision to remove the United
Nations buffer forces from the Sinai and the like
were not in preparation for war but simply
maneuvers meant to bolster Syria's position.
Sadly, it appears that the same
misperceptions are sowing the seeds of yet another
bloody conflict in the Middle East, and one only
hopes that learning from the past can make a
difference, much as it is currently difficult to
distinguish facts from misperceptions, public
postures from policies and intentions.
At
this point a question: What about Iran's alleged
drive to build nuclear weapons, and doesn't that
pose a strategic threat to Israel? Again, most
Iran experts are unanimous that Iran's
nuclearization must be traced first and foremost
to Iraq's nuclear threat during the 1980s and
1990s, which no Iranian, secular or religious,
could afford to ignore.
To elaborate, we
know now that in 1987 Iraq had experimented with a
radiation bomb that it had planned to use against
Iran had the war with that country not ended a
year later. In 1994, Khidhir Hamza, a former
high-ranking Iraqi official who defected to the
US, revealed that Saddam was pursuing a nuclear
weapon. Such news fueled Iran's national-security
anxieties and the fear of being dwarfed by a
nuclear-armed Saddam, which revitalized Iran's
nuclear program.
In the two years since
Saddam's downfall, the strategic environment
around Iran has improved dramatically and Iran's
fear of an Arab bomb has been put to rest,
although there is a residual fear of Saudi
Arabia's or Egypt's proliferation in the future,
and this, in turn, has seeped into Iranian
strategic thinking.
But it has been held
back by the twin fear of US power and its
"satanic" intentions against Iran, given President
George W Bush's inclusion of Iran as part of an
"axis of evil", along with Iraq and North Korea.
Bush's self-declared new American manifest
destiny, to bring democratic civilization to the
Middle East by regime change if need be, has not
sat well with the proud Iranians, who have reacted
angrily via the militant Ahmadinejad, whom the US
sees as an affront to its (geo) political
engineering in the Middle East.
At the
same time, the well of shared interests between
Tehran and Washington in Afghanistan and Iraq runs
deep and it would be another misperception to
think that conflicting interests overwhelm
coinciding ones. On the contrary, Iran's and the
United States' interests, eg, against the threat
of the Taliban and in favor of the current regimes
in Kabul and Baghdad, potentially set the stage
for a meaningful security talk oriented toward
rapprochement.
For the moment, however,
such potential is deeply buried by the piles of
hostile rhetoric threatening to cause a mutual
policy screen blinding both sides to their shared
or parallel interests. Here, a US pledge of
non-intervention in Iran's domestic affairs and a
promise of Iran's inclusion in the security
infrastructure of the Persian Gulf could go a long
mile in assuaging Iran's national-security
paranoia.
To conclude, as Jervis has
competently shown in his book, prudent decisions
on war and peace can only be made when
policymakers successfully separate images from
reality, perceptions from misperceptions, and this
insight alone makes reading his book a must
priority by folks in Tehran, Washington and Tel
Aviv.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is
the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu.
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