A scramble for friends over
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The Arab world has been subjected to a
whole new campaign of disinformation about Iran's
nuclear program. The principal aim is to
perpetuate the felt need for US protectorate power
against what is billed as Iran's coming nuclear
menace. The latest manifestation of this is a
multinational naval exercise led by the United
States off Iran's west coast.
Thus a
prominent article in the New York Times on Sunday
titled "Islam, terror and the second nuclear age"
claims that the Arab
world is today more concerned
about Iran's nuclear ambitions than Israel's
nuclear arsenal. To substantiate this claim, the
author, Noah Feldman, writes: "When the Arab
League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for
'a Middle East free of nuclear weapons' this past
May, it wasn't Israel that prompted his remarks.
He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared
ambition to become a nuclear power has been
steadily approaching realization."
A
careful scrutiny of Moussa's statements reveals a
completely different picture. In May, in an
interview with China's official Xinhua News
Agency, Moussa clarified that "it is not a nuclear
issue of Iran but a nuclear issue of the Middle
East". And the Jerusalem Post, dated May 30,
quoting Moussa, rightly concluded: "Moussa's
remarks appeared to be targeted at Israel, which
is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but
refuses to acknowledge or deny it."
What
is more, in January at a meeting in Cairo, Moussa
was quoted by the Arab and Turkish press as
stating that "he welcomed Iran's proposal for
declaring the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free
zone".
Thus the New York Times' apparent
distortion of Moussa's position on Iran raises a
curious question: What exactly is behind such
concerted efforts to scare the Arab world away
from Iran precisely at a time when the US military
is conducting joint maneuvers in the Persian Gulf
with the participation of some Arab states, such
as Bahrain?
The answer becomes clear when
we notice that Israel, along with Kuwait, Qatar
and the United Arab Emirates, has been invited as
an observer at these maneuvers, imitated under the
rubric "Proliferation Security Initiative". This
coincides with a four-day international conference
in Qatar on "new democracies" to which Israel has
also been invited.
Ideally, Israel may
wish to complement the United States' protectorate
role by offering a conventional and nuclear
deterrence to the rich oil sheikhdoms allegedly
rattled by Iran's "nuclear ambitions". For some
time, Israel has been trying to insert itself into
the security calculus of both Central Asia and the
Persian Gulf, with its agents playing an
increasingly active role in, among other places,
Azerbaijan and Iraq.
This may be wishful
thinking as long as Israel fails to resolve its
long-standing problem with the displaced and
much-repressed Palestinian people. At best it will
have marginal influence in the Arab and Muslim
world.
In a recent statement to the United
Nations General Assembly, Jan Ziegler, special UN
rapporteur on the right to food, stated that there
was mass starvation in the occupied territories
and in Lebanon. "Much farmland" has been destroyed
and Israel's "unexploded cluster bombs" littering
southern Lebanon have made it nearly impossible to
grow food. Obviously, none of this bears
positively on Israel's image in the Arab world.
Israel's much-touted "strategic relations"
with Turkey are principally due to Turkey's
economic, rather than strategic, interests and are
unlikely to be replicated in the Persian Gulf
region, no matter how hard Israel, the US and the
media blow the horns of Iran's nuclear threat.
Recent statements by the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) have expressed the need to respect
Iran's right to possess peaceful nuclear
technology, and even certain Saudi leaders,
including Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal,
have echoed this sentiment, in sharp contrast to
the views of the new Saudi ambassador to the US,
Prince Turki al-Faisal.
The GCC's
ambivalent, and one may even say contradictory,
stance with respect to Iran's nuclear program is
partly fed by the avalanche of systematic
disinformation, such as the article cited above,
and less by any empirical evidence of
proliferation on Iran's part.
To counter
this, on Sunday Iran proposed that the six member
states of the GCC - Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait,
Bahrain, Qatar and Oman - plus Iran and Iraq sign
a security-cooperation treaty. Tehran said this
would be the best way to defend security in the
Persian Gulf.
It has not escaped the
attention of the Arab world that Israel, which has
defied repeated UN Security Council resolutions
calling for its withdrawal from occupied Arab
lands, is now championing the cause of the
Security Council. It is pushing vigorously for the
implementation of the resolutions on Iran and
Lebanon, the latter including Hezbollah's
disarmament. Israel's and the United States'
selectiveness regarding UN resolutions cannot
possibly help their common cause against Iran.
Already, a number of Iran's neighbors have
stated categorically that they will not allow
their territory to be used as launching pads for
any military strikes against Iran. In his latest
press conference, Azerbaijani President Ilham
Aliyev stated that his country would oppose any
international sanctions on Iran.
The
success of even "mild sanctions" depends to some
extent on the cooperation of Iran's neighbors,
which might not be forthcoming as long as the US
and its European allies fail to convince the world
that Iran is proliferating nuclear weapons.
For its part, Iran's public diplomacy - of
trying to convince the world that it is being
penalized for standing up to US power in the
Middle East - has not altogether fallen on deaf
ears, as can be seen in recent commentaries in the
Arab press. These include an article in Beirut's
Daily Star making the case that it is Iran's
"growing power" that is behind the present Western
hostilities.
As for the implications of
Shi'ite-Sunni troubles in Iraq and elsewhere in
the Muslim world, contrary to the assertion of
certain pundits, the centrality of outside
interventionism continues to act as the
geopolitical glue transcending sectarian
hostilities.
Of course, that is not to say
that all is well when it comes to Iran-Arab
relations. Iran needs to redouble its efforts,
particularly through the Organization of Islamic
Conference, to play a constructive role in
conflict management in Iraq. A great deal more
Iran-Arab confidence-building measures are
required to counter the view of Iran-Arab rivalry,
as disseminated by much of the Western press.
A full normalization of relations with
Egypt, for instance, is long overdue, and yet this
is held back by marginal misgivings and mutual
suspicions, as if diplomatic relations required a
full resolution of all points of tensions between
Tehran and Cairo.
Clearly, that is not the
case, as the United States' relations with China
demonstrate, and a major breakthrough in
Iran-Egypt relations would undoubtedly go a long
way in neutralizing the systematic disinformation
about Iran's intentions and actions aimed at
wresting Arab sympathy away from Iran in the
latter's quest to develop its nuclear program.
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", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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