Iraq's fate hanging on a new
axis By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
While the US is actively exploring
alternative options to salvage its intervention in
Iraq, regional realities are dictating their own
dynamic, not necessarily in tune with the United
States' objectives. Slowly but surely, a new
realignment is shaping up that is making
Washington nervous - a Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus
axis.
The possibility of such a "strategic
alliance" being formed, to quote a headline in
Tehran's conservative daily, Kayhan, is
high, given this
weekend's summit in Tehran that brings together
the presidents of Iran, Iraq and Syria. (That's
two out of three of the United States' "axis of
evil" - Iran and Iraq, with the third being North Korea.)
This comes at a volatile and uncertain time marked
with the continuing bloodbath in Iraq, growing
tension in Lebanon and the stalemated Arab-Israeli
conflict.
On Tuesday, Iraq announced that
it was restoring full diplomatic relations with
Syria after a 26-year break, saying the move would
increase cooperation on security.
The
Kayhan editorial said, "America's fear of the
trilateral meeting is very natural, since this
alliance can translate into a new crisis for the
United States at a time of the breakdown of the
system of decision-making in that country." It
further stated that while Iraq's deadly
instability was the immediate reason for the
Tehran summit, the issue of "strategic alliance"
among the three countries went well beyond that.
Predictably, the US, which has been
prodding both Syria and Iran to play a more
constructive role in Iraq, has been lukewarm to
Tehran's initiative for the trilateral meeting.
Various US government spokespersons have repeated
the old accusations of Iran's and Syria's
"meddlings" in Iraq, with a Pentagon official
claiming that some 70 to 100 foreign fighters
crossed into Iraq from Syria each month.
This coincides with new reports in the
Israeli and Western press on Iran's alleged
al-Qaeda connections, vigorously denied by Tehran,
which insists that it has itself been a victim of
al-Qaeda terrorism in the past and that the
Wahhabi terrorists are vehemently anti-Shi'ite.
Meanwhile, on the eve of the summit, the assassination of
Pierre Gemayel, a fierce Christian and
anti-Syria leader in Lebanon, has been seized
on by US President George W Bush, who has pointed
the finger of blame toward both Iran and Syria.
This adds to the complexity of the Middle East
scene wrought with multiple, simultaneous crises.
There is now a growing and realistic fear
of the "Iraqization" of Lebanon and the
"Lebanonization" of Iraq, with both countries
descending to the depth of a bloody civil war far
worse than anything now.
From the prisms
of Tehran and Damascus, Israel is the only country
that potentially benefits from such a nightmare
scenario that they believe must be avoided at all
costs. Yet the fragile truce in Lebanon may work
in the United States' favor as a lever with regard
to Syria and Iran with respect to Iraq, given the
fact that unlike Tehran and Damascus, Washington
has no intrinsic interests at stake in Lebanon.
Thus it could be that Lebanon will prove
to be the Achilles' heel of the emerging axis.
Clearly, the complex inter-relationships between
Iraq and Lebanon require further scrutiny by
strategists in both Tehran and Damascus, nowadays
pressured by Washington as if they have identical
interests.
Not so, and recently in his
major foreign-policy speech, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair made a point of referring to
the divergent interests of Iran and Syria in the
region. This resonates with the view of some
political analysts in Tehran, such as Professor
Kamran Taromi of Tehran University. He has
written: "Iran may very much prefer to have
stronger links to the Arabs which are neither at
the mercy of the [Syrian Bashar al-]Assad regime
nor constrained by Syrian interests. Iraq could
provide just that."
The issue, then, is
about Damascus' preparedness to enter a new
strategic alliance with Iran and the
Shi'ite-dominated new Iraq that would tilt the
regional balance primarily in Iran's favor and
likely diminish the influence of Saudi Arabia and,
to a lesser extent, Syria's former ally, Egypt.
The driving forces Tehran and
Damascus agree on the hegemonic intentions behind
the United States' invasion of Iraq and share
fears of the US leviathan putting itself at the
disposal of Israel, which pushed vigorously for
the 2003 invasion through its vast network of
influence-peddlers in the US. However, there are
solid grounds for their present initiative toward
setting new patterns in inter-regional relations,
instead of passively observing the US-Israel
machinations for a "greater Middle East" dominated
by their particular geostrategic interests.
Doubtless, another common fear is the
political and security meltdown inside Iraq,
aggravating Iranian and Syrian fears of spill-over
insecurity, given their porous borders with the
"new Iraq" - which increasingly looks like a
stateless country partitioned into the competing
fiefdoms of armed factions.
In fact,
Iraq's insecurity is a double-edged sword,
simultaneously affording the US a weapon with
which to threaten Iran and Syria, both of which,
in turn, use the same insecurity and the potential
for even greater insecurity against the US-led
coalition forces.
Concerning the latter,
the Kayhan editorial cited above poignantly states
that there is little terrorism in the "nine
Shi'ite provinces and five Kurdish provinces" of
Iraq today, and that Muqtada al-Sadr's Medhi Army
has succeeded in creating a protective ring for
Baghdad's million and a half population. Another
important point raised by Kayhan is: "Americans
are strongly in favor of separating Iran's nuclear
dossier from Iraq's security dossier, so that they
can pressure Iran at one point and yet take
advantage of Iran's support elsewhere. But this is
not possible." This, in turn, raises another
question: Does Damascus entirely share Iran's
interest in linking the two issues?
The
answer to this question touches on the
Syria-Israel conflict and the desirability of
Iranian (nuclear) support or even deterrence for
Syria against Israel, which has shown absolutely
no tangible sign of movement toward peace with
Syria. This assumes, for the sake of argument,
that one day Tehran decides to go nuclear
full-force based on strategic calculations.
Consequently, irrespective of much talk of
"strategic uncertainties" in the Middle East,
Syria and Iran are convinced about Israel's
warmongering and sub-imperialist intentions and
its successful "rent-a-superpower" manipulation of
the US. This drives Syria's and Iran's proactive
search for new tools of deterrence and regime
survival, including, but by no means limited to,
their common "spoiler role" in Iraq.
But
there are limits to that role for both Tehran and
Damascus, which must calculate the intended and
unintended consequences of runaway insecurity in
Iraq spreading beyond Iraq's long borders with
both neighbors.
After all, the bottom line
is that Syria and Iran are of one mind with
respect to the twin pillars of their Iraq policy,
that is, Iraq's national unity and territorial
integrity. Syria is fearful of Iraq's
disintegration impacting its nearly 2 million
Kurds, in light of the Syrian government's
crackdown on Kurdish protesters in March 2004.
This could erupt again if Iraq's Kurds reach full
autonomy.
Iran, on the other hand, is
rattled by the Americans' and Israelis' open
support for Kurdish irredentism inside Iran, and
this forms yet another common bond among Tehran,
Damascus and the central government in Iraq, which
has a Kurdish president (Jalal Talabani) who is
due to visit Tehran shortly.
Challenges
and opportunities for Tehran As far as
Tehran is concerned, the Iraq crisis is both a
regional and an international crisis representing
a multi-dimensional policy challenge. The visible
intensification of chaos in Iraq poses a major
threat to Iran's national-security interests that
requires from Iran a multi-layered response at
both regional and international levels.
No
wonder Tehran's leaders are pushing for a
multilateral approach toward the Iraq crisis as a
key "damage control" measure that will, it is
hoped, minimize the potential for damage and
attain a better regional situation in the (near)
future, instead of the currently growing quagmire.
In his recent Friday-prayers speech,
Iran's former president, Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, pointed at the irony of the US
seeking Iran's support to "tow them out of the
bottom" of Iraq's morass, openly wondering what
incentives Iran would have to do so. A response to
this question was given by James Baker, the former
US secretary of state and now head of the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG). In a recent
meeting with Iran's ambassador to the United
Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, he reminded Iran
that Iraq's crisis is also a crisis for
neighboring Iran.
Reportedly the ISG will
recommend direct US dialogue with Iran and Syria
over Iraq, and Baker and his colleagues must now
be encouraged that both countries are showing
serious signs of improving relations with Iraq,
reflected most vividly in Syria's initiative to
normalize diplomatic relations with Baghdad after
24 years.
Thus the weekend's summit in
Tehran may prove a prelude to dialogue with the
US, which continues to occupy Iraq at exorbitant
price and yet without any prospect of "military
victory", to paraphrase US statesman Henry
Kissinger.
Turning the challenge of Iraq's
(in)security into an opportunity for Tehran and
Damascus, a modus vivendi with the US is
now a distinct possibility, although opposition
will come as stern objections from Israel and the
pro-Israel forces encircling the White House.
Yet irrespective of the latter, and the
relentless Israeli disinformation campaign aimed
at torpedoing any Western policy shift on Iran,
eg, by spreading the rumors of an Iranian nuclear
test per a report in the Jerusalem Post, Iran
continues to push for its revised and invigorated
Iraq policy based primarily on its highly
intertwined Iraq and US policies.
What the
US invasion of Iraq managed to do almost overnight
was to turn the long-standing Iran-Iraq dispute
into an extension of Iran-US relations, as a
result of which today it is nearly impossible to
disentangle the two issues. This is at least so as
long as Iran perceives the "new Iraq" less as an
independent state and more as a continuously
occupied state that it must penetrate and create
zones of influence both to deter the US threat and
to enhance its regional standing.
"Let us
not forget that the Iraq crisis today is also a
crisis of American hegemony," a Tehran political
analyst told this author recently, adding that a
net benefit of this "double crisis" for Iran has
been the absence of an invasion by the US - the
augment being that in all probability the US would
have invaded Iran by now had it succeeded in Iraq.
Iran's dilemma, however, is that a
complete failure of the US in Iraq is not in
Iran's interests either, given Iran's fear of
terrorism, mass refugees and irredentism from
behind its vast western borders with Iraq. Tehran
and the occupying powers may have their own
interests in mind, but their common fear of Iraq's
collapse is what could ultimately heal their great
divide.
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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