WASHINGTON - In pushing for a showdown
over Iran's nuclear program in the United Nations
Security Council, the administration of US
President George W Bush has presented the issue as
a matter of global security - an Iranian nuclear
threat in defiance of the international community.
But the history of the conflict and the
private strategic thinking of both sides reveal
that the dispute is really about the Bush
administration's drive for greater dominance in
the Middle East and Iran's demand for recognition
as a regional power.
It is now known that
the Iranian leadership, which was convinced that
Bush was planning to move against Iran after
toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq, proposed in April
2003 to negotiate with
the
United States on the very issues that the US
administration had claimed were the basis for its
hostile posture toward Tehran: its nuclear
program, its support for Hezbollah and other
anti-Israeli armed groups, and its hostility to
Israel's existence.
Tehran offered
concrete, substantive concessions on those issues.
But on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney
and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush
refused to respond to the proposal for
negotiation. Nuclear weapons were not, therefore,
the primary US concern. In the hierarchy of the US
administration's interests, the denial of
legitimacy to the Islamic Republic trumped a deal
that could have provided assurances against an
Iranian nuclear weapon.
For insight into
the real aims of the Bush administration in
pushing the issue of Iranian access to nuclear
technology to a crisis point, one can turn to Tom
Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a
neo-conservative think-tank. Donnelly was the
deputy executive director of the Project for the
New American Century from 1999 to 2002, and was
the main author of "Rebuilding America's
Defenses".
That paper was written for
Cheney and Rumsfeld during the transition
following Bush's election and had the
participation of four prominent figures who later
took positions in the administration: Stephen
Cambone, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John
Bolton.
Donnelly's analysis of the issue
of Iran and nuclear weapons, published last
October in the book Getting Ready for a
Nuclear-Ready Iran, makes it clear that the
real objection to Iran's becoming a nuclear power
is that it would impede the larger US ambitions in
the Middle East - what Donnelly calls the Bush
administration's "project of transforming the
Middle East".
Contrary to the official
line depicting Iran as a radical state threatening
to plunge the region into war, Donnelly refers to
Iran as "more the status quo power" in the region
in relation to the United States. Iran, he
explains, "stands directly athwart this project of
regional transformation". Up to now, he observes,
the Iranian regime has been "incapable of stemming
the seeping US presence in the Persian Gulf and in
the broader region". And the invasion of Iraq
"completed the near-encirclement of Iran by US
military forces".
Donnelly writes that a
"nuclear Iran" is a problem not so much because
Tehran would employ those weapons or pass them on
to terrorist groups, but mainly because of "the
constraining effect it threatens to impose upon US
strategy for the greater Middle East".
The
"greatest danger", according to Donnelly, is that
the "realists" would "pursue a 'balance of power'
approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the
Bush 'liberation strategy'". Although Donnelly
doesn't say so explicitly, it would undercut that
strategy primarily by ruling out a US attack on
Iran as part of a "regime change" strategy.
Instead, in Donnelly's scenario, a nuclear
capability would incline those outside the
neo-conservative priesthood to negotiate a
"detente" with Iran, which would bring the plan
for the extension of US political-military
dominance in the Middle East to a halt.
What is really at stake in the
confrontation with Iran from the Bush
administration's perspective, according to this
authority on neo-conservative strategy, is the
opportunity to reorder the power hierarchy in the
Middle East even further in favor of the United
States by overthrowing the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
Iran's position Meanwhile,
Iran has not acknowledged its real interest in
pushing its position on nuclear-fuel enrichment to
the point of confrontation with the United States,
either. Instead, it has focused in public
pronouncements on the enormously popular position
that Iran will not give up its right to have
civilian nuclear power.
According to
observers familiar with their thinking, senior
Iranian national-security officials have long been
saying privately that Iran should try to reach an
agreement with the United States that would
normalize relations and acknowledge officially
Iran's legitimate role in the security of the
Persian Gulf.
Trita Parsi, a specialist on
Iran's foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School
of Advanced International Studies, who conducted
extensive interviews with senior Iranian
national-security officials in 2004, said Iran "is
now primarily trying to become rehabilitated in
the political order of the region".
Najmeh
Bozorgmehr, an Iranian journalist now at the
Brookings Institution as a visiting scholar,
agrees. Based on several years of covering Iran's
national-security policy, she said, "Iran wants to
bargain with the United States on Iran's regional
role," as well as on removal of sanctions and
assurances against US attack. Tehran has been
looking for any source of leverage with which to
bargain with the United States on those issues,
she said, and "enrichment has become a big
bargaining chip".
Bozorgmehr said the
Iranians have become convinced that they have to
do something to show the United States "we can
give you a hard time" to induce the Bush
administration to negotiate. And Parsi said the
prevailing view among Iranian officials after the
2003 US rejection of diplomacy was that they had
to have the capability to inflict some pain on the
United States to get its attention.
According to Parsi, that rejection
confirmed Iranian suspicions that the US problem
is not with Iran's policies but with its power.
That Iranian conclusion precisely parallels
Donnelly's insider analysis of the Bush
administration's aims.
But what the
Iranians really want, according to these observers
of Iranian national-security thinking, is not
nuclear weapons but the recognition of Iran's
status in the power hierarchy of the Persian Gulf
region. The Iranian demand for regional status can
only be achieved through a broad diplomatic
agreement with the United States.
The Bush
administration's insistence on extending its
dominance in the Middle East even further can only
be achieved, however, by the threat of force and,
if that fails, war against Iran.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
last June.
