Page 2 of 3 'The door we never opened
...' By M K Bhadrakumar
bloc's boycott of Parliament and cabinet
sessions, which has weakened Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki. Iran's role can be crucial in tackling
the political challenge posed by the unusual
tactical alliance between the Sadr bloc and some
of the hardline Sunni groups (led by Hareth
al-Zari, Adnan al-Dulaimi and Saleh al-Mutlak),
which receive financial assistance from Arab
countries.
Muqtada has insisted that his
supporters, who number 32 out of the United Iraqi
Alliance's 128-strong contingent in Parliament, will
return
to the legislature and attend cabinet sessions
only if a timetable can be set for the withdrawal
of foreign troops.
The London Arabic daily
Al-Hayat reported that during his meeting with US
President George W Bush in Washington last month,
Hakim carried a message from the Iranian
leadership. Tehran sees that its extremely cordial
relations with the Iraqi government have
significantly weakened Washington in the Iraqi
political arena. Logically, this should prompt US
diplomacy to use Iran's influence in Iraq. But as
an Iranian commentary put it a few weeks ago,
"Indeed, in the light of the legendary arrogance
of the Bush team, they could choose to return to
demagoguery."
Meanwhile, there
is mounting anger in Tehran regarding the possibility
that the influence of the Arab allies of the
US (supported by Vice President Dick Cheney) on
Bush's Middle East strategy may prove decisive.
These Arab allies - Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt
- have lately been pleased by indications that
they may have succeeded in scotching any Bush administration
notions of making concessions to Iran.
These Arab conservatives have
in essence pushed the US into a contradictory stance
on Iraq, which Iran sees as simply not sustainable.
Having installed a Shi'ite, pro-Iranian government
in Baghdad, Washington is caught in a bind, unable
to work with this political reality on a
geopolitical level. The great nervousness on the part of
the Arab conservatives is evident from
their vituperative and often contradictory
anti-Iran diatribes. On one hand they minimize Iran's
real capacity to influence the ground situation
within Iraq (lest that consideration alone prompt
Bush to engage Tehran), while on the other hand
exaggerating Iran's capacity to overthrow the
established political order in the region and
putting the blame on Iran for just about all that
is going wrong in the Middle East.
The conservative Arab regimes are
concerned that despite all the noise about the specter of
the "Shi'ite crescent" haunting the region, the
non-state actors in the Arab world (including
Hamas) have continued to participate on the side
of Arab-Iranian Islamism in the confrontation
pitting it against the US-Israeli-Arab power
elites.
Indeed, a major theme in
Khamenei's message to the hajj pilgrims
last week was also the "united identity of the
Muslim ummah". In an extraordinary passage
that harks back to a political idiom of liberation
theology that Tehran hasn't used for a long while,
Khamenei said: "The suppression of liberation
movements in the Islamic countries over the past
century [since the 1922 Middle East settlement
imposed by imperial Britain], success of the
colonial powers in establishing their dominance
over these countries, creation and strengthening
of authoritarian regimes [in the Middle East and
the Persian Gulf], plundering of their natural
wealth and destruction of their human resources,
and thereby keeping Muslim nations behind the
caravan of progress in science and technology -
all this has became possible only under the shadow
of [Muslim] disunity that in some cases reached
the level of internecine and fratricidal strife."
Iran is naturally pouring scorn on the
diatribes of the Arab power elites. A recent
commentary said the "ideological base" of
international terrorism lay in the "closed
traditional tribal systems of the Arab countries
in the region". The commentary taunted
conservative Arab capitals to do something to
jettison their "anachronistic and uncivilized"
thinking and instead evolve a workable strategy to
change their political systems so as to bring them
in line with the contemporary developments
"unfolding within the framework of the logic of
Western liberal democracy", rather than remaining
ossified and viewing politics through the "prism
of tribal and sectarian dogmatism".
The
real danger for Iran will be if in the coming year
Saudi Arabia is persuaded to cooperate with a
US-Israeli military strike against Iran. The
bitter princely rivalries going on in Riyadh and
the tug-of-war over how to conduct foreign policy
preclude a reversal of the current downslide in
Iran-Saudi relations. Foreign Minister Prince Saud
al-Faisal is ill. The royal rift over succession
apparently touches crucially on the issue of how
to handle Iran's rising influence in the Middle
East.
The Washington Post recently quoted
sources close to the Saudi royal family to report
that US-Saudi cooperation for dealing with Iran
would be similar to their joint action that
"assisted anti-Soviet forces during Moscow's
1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan".
The
daily linked the abrupt resignation of Prince
Turki al-Faisal (brother of the foreign minister)
after hardly 15 months through his tour as
ambassador in Washington with the "waning
influence of
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