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2 US-Iran dialogue on a tortuous
path By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Like a locomotive slowly grinding up a
steep grade, the second round of US-Iran talks on
Iraq's security that began on Tuesday in Baghdad
appears to have made a modicum of headway with an
agreement to set up joint working committees to
steer the talks toward tangible results. This is
despite some heated exchanges over Iran's alleged
arms shipments to Iraq.
But with a major
split on Capitol Hill in Washington over Iran and
pressure by other states to torpedo the talks, it
takes extraordinary effort by Iran and and the
United States to insulate
themselves from the adverse
pressures that have made the dialogue extremely
difficult so far.
Coinciding with a new
low in Iranian-Saudi relations, reflected by
Iran's intense reaction to a religious decree by
two prominent Saudi clergymen sanctioning the
destruction of revered Shi'ite shrines in Iraq,
this second round of US-Iran talks is supposed to
enhance the initial contact between Washington and
Tehran in late May. Yet an important prerequisite
for a successful breakthrough in the talks is
missing: a common recognition of the reasons for
the chaos in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
Increasingly, Iran's officials and media
pundits have focused on the negative role of Saudi
Arabia, wondering aloud why the US government and
US public are quiet about the irrefutable evidence
of the Saudi role in fomenting the instability in
Iraq, this in light of the US military's latest
report that more than 60% of the foreign fighters
are Saudi nationals and several thousand of them
are in US custody in Iraq.
"What would
happen if, instead of Saudis, these suicide
bombers were from Iran?" an Iranian
parliamentarian recently asked reporters when he
accused the US of duplicity and double standards
in turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's
subversive role.
Hence it is expected that
at their meeting with the US diplomats in Baghdad,
Iran's delegation will raise the issue of US
laxity vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the
whole Wahhabi and Salafi movement, which, per a
recent Tehran daily editorial, is "opposed to the
security talks between Iran and the US
government".
Most Iranian political
analysts are in agreement that the Saudis are
afraid of democracy in Iraq and the empowerment of
Iraqi Shi'ites, which they believe would inflame
the situation of the long-oppressed Shi'ite
minority in Saudi Arabia. "It is not just the
Saudi kingdom, the whole Gulf Cooperation Council
[GCC] states run by oil sheikhs are wary of an
Arab democracy blossoming in Iraq," a Tehran
University political scientist recently said.
In fact, there are new signs of trouble
with Iran-GCC relations that require immediate
attention by Iran's foreign-policy
decision-makers. In the aftermath of an opinion
article in the hardline daily Kayhan that
rekindled the debate over Iran's old claim on
Bahrain, the GCC media have gone on the offensive,
describing Iran as an "enemy of God and Islam",
"worse than the infidel West", and an "enemy of
Arabs", and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei as an "innocent dictator".
In
response, the Iranian media have accused the
Kuwaiti leadership of complicity in Iraq's
invasion of Iran in 1980 and the Saudi government
of tacitly endorsing the blistering anti-Shi'ite
fatwa (religious decree) by the Saudi
clergymen. This is not a healthy development in
relations among neighbors in the Persian Gulf
region.
For its part, Iran is attempting
some damage control by, among other methods,
holding a religious conference on the Prophet
Mohammed, which was announced upon the return of
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad from Syria, where he
met with President Bashar al-Assad and a number of
Lebanese and Palestinian leaders.
But
given the radical image of Ahmadinejad and his
subtle warning in Damascus about "rising
temperatures this summer" in the Middle East, the
moderate Arab regimes, including Saudi Arabia, are
increasingly worried about what they perceive as
an Iranian quest to dominate the region. An
editorial in a Kuwait paper close to the royal
family has castigated Tehran for dreaming of the
resurrection of the "defunct Persian Empire". This
was strongly denied by Tehran's leadership, who
rely on the slogan of "Islamic unity", even though
to many Sunni Arabs in GCC states it rings hollow.
Need to improve Iran's peaceful image
Iran's image problem is partly attributed to
the gap between its foreign-policy rhetoric and
its actual behavior. This gap was recently widened
as a result of a misreading of Ayatollah
Khamenei's recent speech in which he labeled
Iran's current foreign policy "offensive". Yet
conspicuously missing in the foreign reports on
Khamenei's speech has been any reference to the
careful explanation about its meaning in the same
speech, ie, that "we do not mean Iran is at war
with the world ... we mean that Iran makes
[social] demands, such as on issues of women,
global inequality."
Irrespective of
Khamenei's clarification, that he was making a
semantic or metaphoric use of the term
"offensive", some hardliners have relied on it to
legitimatize their policy
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