A door opens for US-Iran
cooperation By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
Political realism or naive
idealism and "surrealism"? In light of the report
by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG)
advocating the United States' diplomatic
engagement of Iran and Syria with respect to
Iraq's growing crisis, the battle lines between
the proponents and opponents of this policy
approach are increasingly couched in terms of
modern political theory, with each side soliciting
help from the realm of international-relations
paradigms to bolster its
position.
Thus, to give an example, Barry
Rubin, an ardent opponent of the Islamic Republic,
has dubbed as "surrealism" rather than realism the
growing calls by the ISG members and the likes of
British Prime Minister Tony Blair for getting
Iran's cooperation on stability in Iraq. He wrote
in the Jerusalem Post: "To be so deluded as to
believe one can profitably 'engage' these forces
[Iran and Syria] is not realism, but surrealism."
According to Rubin, who is highly critical of the
ISG as a whole, the term "political realism" has
been "hijacked" and must be restored by drawing
the right conclusion from its metatheoretical
import, namely, the futility of any engagement
with the Islamic Republic.
A recent
editorial in the Wall Street Journal, "Realism and
Iran", echoes Rubin's sentiment by pointing at
various instances of the Iranian regime's external
and internal behavior, which discounts the
prospect of a fruitful US diplomatic "offensive",
as recommended by the ISG, co-headed by veteran US
diplomat and former secretary of state James
Baker, who has repeatedly stated that "talking to
one's enemies is not appeasement".
Following Baker's realpolitik, the US must
take lessons from the Cold War, when for some half
a century the US never stopped talking to the
Soviets, irrespective of their perpetual nuclear
threat "to wipe out the US" and their power and
ideological rivalry. Baker's point is well taken,
and one only hopes that his call for a new,
multilateralist US policy in the Middle East does
not fall on deaf ears in Washington.
Looking at the debates in international
relations today, they clearly lean toward
endorsing the "Baker approach". Hardly any
international-relations theorist of any stature
would concur with Rubin's, and the Wall Street
Journal's, dichotomization of "material interests"
and "values" and, in fact, most would tend to
consider "values" or "ideological principles" as
the twin of "interests", albeit intangible
interests.
But theory aside, there are
sufficient empirical signals coming from Iran to
back the new approach advocated by Baker and the
former ISG member-turned new defense secretary,
Robert Gates. Last week, Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad told Iraqi television that his country
was willing to engage in direct dialogue "with all
nations except Israel" as long as it was based on
"mutual respect" and the United States'
willingness to "prepare the right climate for
dialogue".
This was echoed by Ali
Larijani, the head of Iran's Supreme National
Security Council, at a regional conference in
Dubai this week. While calling on the Arab states
of the Persian Gulf to seek Iran's security
"umbrella" and to jettison US forces from their
bases in the region, Larijani also stated that if
the US administration agreed to a gradual
withdrawal from Iraq, Iran would agree to join
discussions on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the ISG report has a
contradictory attitude toward the question of
"timetable". On the one hand it states: "The point
is not for the US to set timetables or deadlines
for withdrawal, an approach that we oppose." Yet
on the other hand, it tempers this stance by
calling for the withdrawal of all US combat forces
by early 2008 and simultaneously opposes any
"open-ended" US force commitment in Iraq.
Clearly, the ISG's underlying "consensus"
approach has a lot to do with this contradiction,
yet what matters most is the report's closing of
the cognitive gap with Iran and that country's
national-security considerations. This is an
important prerequisite for fruitful US-Iran
diplomacy in the near future, as both sides need
to explore the areas of shared "threat
perceptions".
Irrespective of the ISG's
rejection of a timetable, the report's willingness
to put the issue forward merits attention: "The
question of the future US force presence must be
on the table for discussion." This, and another of
the report's recommendations, for a more overt US
overture toward Iraq's Shi'ite leaders and the
appointment of a "high-level American Shi'ite
Muslim to serve as an emissary" to Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani, should be welcomed by Tehran. A
good candidate as emissary would be the
Iranian-American scholar, professor emeritus and
author of numerous works on Islam, Seyed Hussain
Nasr.
The nuclear Gordian knot Until now the administration of US President
George W Bush has predicated any dialogue with
Iran on the latter's suspension of
uranium-enrichment activities. But the ISG report
somewhat disentangles the two issues. At a press
conference, President Bush and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair indicated that this approach
has won the day, as both leaders omitted the
nuclear demand and self-limited to Iran's behavior
on Iraq. Bush stated that proposed talks could
happen if Iran stopped supporting extremist groups
and supported the government in Baghdad.
In turn, this raises the question of what
impact impending United Nations sanctions,
spearheaded by a new draft resolution led by
France, will have on prospective US-Iran talks on
Iraq and the region. From Iran's vantage point,
even mild sanctions imposed over its nuclear
program could sour relations and dim the
likelihood of any tangible cooperation on Iraq.
Instead, Iran's hardliners might retaliate
in Iraq, which would only aggravate the situation
on both the nuclear and non-nuclear fronts.
Therefore, the more prudent course of action at
the Security Council is to defer action on Iran
and vest its hopes on indirect benefits from the
proposed talks on Iraq. This is in light of an
international incentive package to Iran that
promises "security" for the country and its
inclusion in regional security.
But the
present attempts to delink the nuclear issue from
the Iraq issue have a limited time to succeed, and
both sides will likely resort to the previous
linkage diplomacy if the window of opportunity
afforded by the ISG report and its likely embrace
by the White House, in whole or main parts, is not
taken advantage of.
'Incentives and
disincentives' The ISG report offers a mix
of incentives and disincentives toward Iran,
echoing the incentive package's basic approach
that, among other things, promises Iran's
accession to the World Trade Organization. The
report takes this one step further by shyly
calling for a change of US policy away from
"regime change" in Iran, the argument being that
Iran's leaders are "reluctant" to cooperate as
long as they see the US devoted to regime change.
Another incentive is, in fact, a veiled
disincentive should Iran continue its
"rejectionism", to paraphrase Baker, that "Iraq
does not disintegrate and destabilize its
neighbors and the region". This is coupled with
the warning: "The worst-case scenario is that Iraq
could influence sectarian tensions within Iran,
with serious consequences for Iran's national
security."
This is the first time in a
long time that anyone in Washington has tried to
address Iran's national-security interests, and a
definite sign of maturing political realism,
particularly in the section that reads: "Although
Iran sees it in its interest to have the US bogged
down in Iraq, Iran's interests would not be served
in a failure of US policy in Iraq that led to
chaos and the territorial disintegration of the
Iraqi state."
Of course, "managed chaos"
and "disintegration" are not exactly the same
thing, and yet this line of reasoning resonates
with the growing Iranian concern about the runaway
chaos in Iraq. At the same time, the report's
other reference to a long-term US force presence
in Iraq to "deter" Iran's and Syria's "destructive
influence" reminds Iran of the status quo
proclivity of the whole ISG enterprise, formed to
salvage the sinking ship of the US gambit in Iraq.
The connection between the short-term and
long-term needs, interests and force projections
of the US in Iraq and the region requires revision
as well if there is to be a real convincing of
Iranians and Syrians that there is going to be a
real change in the "primary mission", as claimed
in the report's introduction.
This is an
important point, given the serious misgivings in
Iran and other parts of the Muslim Middle East
about the real purpose of the United States'
invasion of Iraq, which is, in the words of Iran's
foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, establishing
hegemony in the region and aimed at controlling an
oil state in a crucial part of the world.
The ISG report candidly states: "Even
after the US has moved all combat brigades out of
Iraq, we would maintain a considerable military
presence in the region, with our still-significant
force in Iraq, and with our powerful air, ground
and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain and
Qatar, as well as an increased presence in
Afghanistan."
Given this, an Iranian
political scientist put it this way to this
author: "Why should we join a support group for a
US hegemonic policy and its new 'soft power'
approach aimed at providing delayed legitimacy to
US intervention and creating the badly needed
domestic support in the US for a failed and
illegitimate adventure?" The ISG's answer is: "No
country in the region will benefit in the long
term from a chaotic Iraq."
Another answer,
drawn from international-relations literature, is
that following the logic of "stable deterrence",
Iran and US can and should cooperate over Iraq to
bring a measure of stability to their ongoing
power rivalries. In other words, it is not the
resolution of their long-standing clashing
interests, but the durability of their "managed
competition" that dictates cooperation on Iraq.
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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