US blame game puts more pressure on
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Forces opposed to the United States'
engagement of Iran are slowly gaining the upper
hand, thanks mainly to the US military suddenly
upping the ante. In the military's first salvo of
its kind, US military spokesman Brigadier-General
Kevin J Bergner accused Iran's Revolutionary
Guards and their special unit, the Quds Force, of
complicity, together with Lebanon's Hezbollah, in
training and arming militant Shi'ites in Iraq. The
allegations include one against a former associate
of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is accused
of murdering US soldiers in Karbala.
The
US military's charges against Iran coincide with
President
George W Bush's seaside
summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and
follow similar accusations made by Bush
administration officials. Together, they have the
potential to derail the nascent US-Iran dialogue
on Iraq.
Representing a timely log in the
furnace of Washington's hawks, who are adamantly
opposed to engaging Iran, as called for by the
Iraq Study Group (ISG), the allegations by the US
military are bound to anger Tehran's leaders, who
may now reassess their expressed desire for a
second round of talks with the United States on
Iraq's security.
The timing of the US
military's announcement is peculiar. Bergner said
a senior Hezbollah operative in Iraq had been in
the United States' custody for some time, yet the
military chose the very day of the Bush-Putin
summit to go public with it.
What is more,
Muqtada's former spokesman, Qais Khazali, who has
also been arrested by the US military, along with
his brother, for an alleged role in the January
assault on US soldiers in Karbala, has reportedly
confessed to having received support from the Quds
Force.
But given Khazali's politics of
opposing cooperation with the current Iraqi
government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which
is supported by Iran, this raises questions about
the veracity of the information: it may have been
solicited by US interrogators aiming to provide
the hawkish anti-Iran elements in the Bush
administration with new material to work with.
From the vantage point of many Iranian
political analysts, this fits a long-standing
pattern of Washington's contradictory behavior
toward Iran, that is, torpedoing the evolution of
any soft Iranian policy toward the US, or signs of
its moderation on nuclear and other foreign-policy
issues.
Just last week, Foreign Minister
Manouchehr Mottaki reiterated Iran's interest in a
new round of talks with the US, and his spokesman
announced Iran's readiness to consider seriously
the "time-out" option put forth by the
International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran's
nuclear program.
"How can Iran take the US
seriously when every time Iran takes one or two
steps forward, the US reciprocates by ratcheting
up the accusations against Iran?" a prominent
Iranian political analyst told the author. "It is
now clear that the US has a Janus-faced approach
toward Iran, taking away with one hand the olive
branch it offers with the other."
Indeed,
it has not escaped Tehran's attention that US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has not echoed
Mottaki's sentiment for a new round of talks, nor
has the Farsi-speaking US ambassador to Baghdad,
Ryan Crocker, given any positive feedback that
would reassure the Iranians. This is despite his
positive assessment of the initial talks in
Baghdad in March.
Yet the US - in writing
- requested the talks in the first place. Now
there is a noticeable change of heart. It could be
that the Iran debate in Washington is being
resolved in favor of the anti-Iran hawks headed by
the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
The White House has made sure that the
Bush-Putin meeting in Maine is correctly pitched
to the international media, as primarily geared
toward "addressing Iran". The US wants Russia on
board with tougher United Nations sanctions on
Iran, and the timely released new allegations
against the Quds Force serve to isolate Tehran
further internationally and make it harder for
Putin to resist US pressure.
But why is
the US shying away from concrete solutions, such
as the "time-out" proposal that might lead to a
peaceful resolution of the nuclear standoff?
The US media have, as expected, adopted as
uncontestable facts the latest US allegations
against Iran, without asking whether this is yet
another example of carefully constructed
disinformation aimed at, among others, the Iranian
public and the traditional Iranian military, which
is favored over the Revolutionary Guards by the US
military. And yet over the past 28 years, the US
military has had more direct interaction with the
Revolutionary Guards, and the Quds Force in
particular, both in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the
1990s and in Afghanistan since 2003.
As a
clue to the selective attention of the US and
international media, none has reported on the
statement from Iran, by General Ahmad Moghadam, in
charge of anti-narcotics operations, that the US
and British governments are assisting the
Pakistan-based Sunni terrorist group Jundallah,
which has conducted several terrorist activities
inside Iran, including blowing up a bus in
Sistan-Balochistan in February, killing 11
Revolutionary Guards.
Regarding
Afghanistan, it was the Quds Force that helped the
Northern Front alliance against the Taliban and
then brokered an agreement with the US military
for a peaceful takeover of Kabul by anti-Taliban
forces in 2001. That experience should not be
forgotten and, instead, should be used in Iraq,
where there is a convergence of interests by
Tehran and Washington with respect to the
post-Saddam Hussein political order and al-Qaeda
and Sunni terrorism. This warrants
military-to-military dialogue as a timely
counterpart to diplomatic and political dialogue.
In the ISG Report by James Baker and Lee
Hamilton, ostensibly adopted by the White House
after a long delay, there is a singular emphasis
on creating the "right environment for dialogue".
Yet the latest anti-Iran claims by the US military
show the exact opposite, that is, a deliberate
poisoning of the environment that is ultimately
both illogical and irrational, given the US-Iran
convergence of interests in Iraq.
A
retired US military officer, Colonel Thomas
Snodgrass, has even openly called for the
destruction of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Writing in the website Family Security
Matters, Snodgrass said, "I would target for death
the Iranian supreme leader." Imagine if an Iranian
officer were to have said this about Bush; no
doubt it would be headline news.
The fact
is that Iran, while favoring a timetable for US
troop withdrawal from Iraq, does not favor an
immediate exit, which might spell doom for the
Shi'ite-led regime in Baghdad. It is therefore a
serious error of judgment on the US military's
part to regard Iran's influence in Iraq as purely
negative.
On the contrary, as confirmed by
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on his recent trip
to Tehran, Iran is a pillar of support for the
government in Baghdad. This is in light of its
US$1 billion credit to Baghdad, its growing
involvement with Iraq's reconstruction, by
building roads, refineries and power generators.
The internal stability and the national unity of
Iraq remain high on Iran's agenda.
In the
big picture, whatever their points of tensions,
the US and Iran have common friends and common
enemies in Iraq, as well as many in between who
may have vested interests in derailing the
evolution of US-Iran relations.
Unfortunately, the latest news from the US
military suggests that the US government is itself
riveted by contradictory policy currents over Iran
and may be on the verge of a pretextual attack on
Iran, to preempt a peaceful resolution of the
nuclear row. That, no doubt, spells disaster not
only for Iran but also for the entire region and
will adversely impact the United States' vital
interests in the Middle East.
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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