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2 Hardliners, hard
options By Massoud Khodabandeh
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei sanctioned the meeting set for May 28
between Iran and the United States in Baghdad over
the security of Iraq "to relieve the pain of the
Iraqi people, to support the government and to
reinforce security in Iraq".
The
administration of US President George W Bush also
cites the reason for the meeting as exclusively
about security in Iraq. White
House
spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters, "The
president authorized this channel because we must
take every step possible to stabilize Iraq and
reduce the risk to our troops even as our military
continues to act against hostile Iranian-backed
activity in Iraq."
The emphasis from both
sides that Iraq and only Iraq will be discussed is
evidence of their deep mutual mistrust and enmity.
Keeping each other at arm's length, each side is
skirting carefully around the elephant in the
room, that is, the deeply divisive issues that
have poisoned Iran-US relations for nearly three
decades. Clearly neither side would have agreed to
meet unless forced by necessity. But has that
necessity forced the beginning of a new phase in
relations, or should we accept that the talks will
start and end with Iraq?
So intractable
are the divisions that many are already predicting
devastating fallout just from the talks on Iraq.
This is because President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
flaunts Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas in
the face of US fury; the United States is accused
by Iran of providing support for seedy terrorist
groups - Jondolah in the south of Iran, Pejak in
Kurdistan and the Mujahideen Khalq Organization
(MKO), which the US protects in the unlikely
circumstances of Iraq.
"The talks may
backfire if Iraq's Sunnis and the region's Arab
states perceive that the US is conceding Iraq to
Iran's sphere of influence," said Mustafa al-Ani
of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. "It's
going to be civil war, and not just an Iraqi civil
war - a regional civil war."
The show of
teeth and claws just before the start of serious
dialogue may seem surprising but it is arguable
that this is what has made the meeting possible at
all.
Democracy - especially in the Middle
East - does not come about through democrats
lecturing the antagonistic heads of state and
other parties. The histories of such countries as
Sudan, Algeria and Turkey show that while
democrats are the ones who advocate "dialogue,
negotiation and treaties", it is only when the
most extremely opposed forces sit down to talk
that true negotiations toward disengagement can be
achieved. India and Pakistan and Northern Ireland
are examples of such political disengagement
through - albeit protracted - dialogue.
In
these cases, democracy is born painfully from
desperation in which every other alternative has
been tried by both sides and has failed. Such
failure inevitably wakes up the warring parties to
the conclusion that the slogan "winner takes all"
can also be interpreted as "all or nothing", and
that if they are not the winner they will get
nothing. Even worse, both sides - in this case the
hardliners in Iran and the neo-conservatives in
the US - may conclude that because of external
factors - in this case Iraq - both sides will lose
everything and there will be no winner.
To
avoid losing everything, both sides have no
alternative but to reach out to the other from the
precipice of looming disaster in a bid to find a
compromise solution: a summit, an agreement, a
deal, or even a preliminary ceasefire - anything
to stop the collapse of both sides.
Neither Iran nor the United States can be
considered to have had a change of heart. But
having tried and failed for 30 years, every other
possible scenario and theory except to recognize
each other and engage in dialogue, both sides have
been forced to give negotiation and dialogue a
limited chance. Both sides want this to be as
limited as possible and finish as soon as
possible. Both sides perhaps see in it a
short-term opportunity to save their rapidly
sinking ships and buy time to prepare for a new
game of "winner takes all".
Curiously, so
open is the antagonism on both sides that many
question whether there is a deliberate effort to
gift the other side with political ammunition.
In Iran, a recent crackdown on
journalists, female activists and students as well
as the imposition of political hardliners into
society under the pretext of a "dress code for
women" are being openly legitimized by the fact
that the US Congress has approved a further US$75
million for America's "democracy fund". This is
to
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