WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush
and Condoleezza Rice, his peripatetic secretary of
state, may believe they have broken with 60 years
of US policy in order to "transform" the Middle
East, but to longtime regional observers, their
latest initiatives look painfully familiar.
Not only does Washington's current
courtship of Sunni-led authoritarian states - most
notably Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt - raise new
and very troubling questions about its
self-proclaimed commitment to democratizing the
region, but its new
effort to forge a de facto
alliance between those states and Israel against a
supposedly common external threat - currently Iran
- also eerily recalls the Cold War period in
general, and the first year and a half in
particular, of the administration of US president
Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago.
Back
then - as during the "Baghdad Pact" era of the
1950s - the aim was to achieve a "strategic
consensus" between Israel and its "moderate" Arab
neighbors, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia
and the Arab states on the Persian Gulf, in
opposition to Soviet "troublemaking", particularly
through its main regional ally, Syria.
A
secondary aim of such a consensus was to contain a
revolutionary Iran and an Iran-Iraq War that, in
the words of the most prominent advocate of
"strategic consensus", then-secretary of state
Alexander Haig, had exposed "deeply rooted
rivalries and historic animosities".
He
was referring, in particular, to what the New York
Times then called "the dangers of the Iran-Iraq
War's broadening into a clash between Shi'ite
Muslims in Iran, Syria and parts of Iraq and Sunni
Muslims who rule Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and
the Persian Gulf states".
The assumption
behind "strategic consensus" was that Arab states,
including even Iraq, would be more concerned about
the supposed threats posed by Moscow or Tehran
than by Israel's refusal to recognize Palestinian
rights and return to its 1967 borders.
In
words that sound uncannily familiar today, New
York Times columnist William Safire observed in
May 1982, when Iran appeared to have turned the
tide in the war, that "the very Arab states who
snickered loudest at our urging to set aside
Arab-Israeli hatred in the face of a Soviet threat
are now panic-stricken at the Iranian threat,
especially since they know that the ayatollahs are
dangerously close to alliance with the Soviets".
"They fear that a Soviet-Iranian-Syrian
axis could grab Kuwait, topple the king of Jordan
and encourage subversion in the Saudi oilfields,"
he wrote.
Like his neo-conservative
descendants today, Safire argued that Arab fears
of Iran should be used as leverage to get them
either to put aside or compromise their demands
for the United States to put serious pressure on
Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
That argument proved ill-founded,
especially after Israel launched a full-scale
invasion of Lebanon the following month and,
backed by the Reagan administration, subsequently
rejected out of hand the so-called Fahd Plan. A
Saudi initiative endorsed by the Arab League in
September 1982, the plan offered Israel peace with
its Arab neighbors in exchange for its dismantling
of Jewish settlements, its return to its 1967
borders, and the recognition of Palestinian
national rights.
"The holy grail of US
policy in the region has always been to get the
Arabs to forget about the Arab-Israeli conflict
and to focus instead on some other threat," noted
Gary Sick, an expert on Iran and the Gulf states
at Columbia University. "If you don't think you
can or are not prepared to deal with the
Arab-Israel dispute, then trying to convince the
Arabs that they should subordinate it to other
strategic concerns is really a very attractive
thought."
Nonetheless, that appears to be
precisely the current administration's thought
today, as Rice tours the capitals of "moderate"
Arab states to rally support for its demands that
Iran unconditionally freeze its nuclear program,
which, according to Washington, poses a serious
threat not only to Israel but to the Arab states
themselves.
While speaking vaguely about a
renewed US effort to restart peace talks between
Israel and the Palestinians, Rice and the Bush
administration apparently believe that the Arabs
are sufficiently frightened of Iran and the
emergence of a so-called "Shi'a Crescent" that
they will not press their demands - most recently
packaged in another Saudi initiative adopted by
the Arab League at the 2002 Beirut summit - for
Washington to exert serious pressure on Israel on
the Palestinian front.
US officials point
to the denunciation by Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Egypt of Lebanon's Hezbollah in the early days of
this summer's war between Israel and the
Iran-backed Shi'ite group, as well as reports of
unprecedented meetings between Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and at least one top Saudi
official, as indications that an anti-Iranian
"strategic consensus" embracing Israel and Arab
"moderates" is at hand.
While it appears
clear that the Arabs are indeed concerned about
Iran's increased influence in the region, most
experts here believe that Washington is
exaggerating their willingness to confront Iran,
particularly in conjunction with the US and
Israel.
"They know they have to live with
Iran; it's not going to go away," said Robert
Hunter, a Middle East expert at the RAND
Corporation. "It's not like the early 1980s when
the mullahs tried and failed to spread their
revolution; the concern is more geopolitical than
ideological. Aside from [their backing of]
Hezbollah and a few minor scrapes here and there,
Iran has not been particularly assertive toward
these countries."
While Iran's
revolutionary ambitions may have moderated since
the early 1980s, one thing that hasn't changed is
Washington's underestimation of the importance the
Arab leaders attach to real progress on the
Israeli-Palestinian front, particularly in the
wake of the recent conflict in Lebanon, according
to other analysts.
"There is no doubt that
there are people in the Gulf, especially, who are
very worried about Iran, but the idea that they
would be enlisted in an alliance with the US and
Israel is just not a politically inviting
prospect," said Michael Hudson, a Middle East
specialist at Georgetown University. He said the
Bush administration's current policy, like
"strategic consensus" 25 years ago, was
"misbegotten" and evidence of a "serious
disconnect with the political realities of the
region itself".
"Until the US starts
getting actively and even-handedly involved in
bringing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an
end," he noted, "it's really politically
impossible for the so-called moderate Arab leaders
to sign on to the [anti-Iran] project."
Indeed, that appears to be the message
Rice has been getting from Arab leaders on her
most recent visit, according to published reports
stressing that her hosts have repeatedly
emphasized the centrality of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict and, in the words of
the Washington Post's well-connected Middle East
specialist, Robin Wright, "expressed frustration
that the United States seems far more focused on
the issue of Iran's program".
Joe Stork, a
specialist on Middle East foreign policy
specialist who works for Human Rights Watch,
noted: "Palestine has been the deal-breaker in
forming a 'strategic consensus' from the Baghdad
Pact period of the 1950s through the '70s, '80s,
'90s and now into the 21st century.
"Unless Washington decides to get serious
about that, the Arab states they want to enlist in
these efforts - whether against the Soviet Union
in the early 1980s or the Iranians today - can't
and won't go along," Stork said. "As authoritarian
as they are, they still have domestic
constituencies, and they've been burned on this
for too many years."
