Page 2 of 2 Iran feels the chill in US
cold war tactics By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
soldiers may now find a reprieve
from the suicide bombers focusing on the other,
bigger threat, that is, Shi'ite-run Iran.
The functional utility of the cold-war
terminology thus becomes clearer. It allows the US
to perpetuate its sway over the European
continent, seeing how the Iran missile threat has
translated in new military pacts between the US
and Eastern Europe. It cements the United States'
alliance with the Persian Gulf states
and
lessens their tendency to diversify their arms
sources in view of the need for interoperability
of weapon systems. It provides a long-term
strategic threat perception - about proliferation,
terrorism, etc that binds Washington and the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) capitals. And finally,
it provides a venue for Israel's inclusion in the
security calculus of the GCC states considered
front-line states in the new cold war. These are
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United
Arab Emirates and Oman.
Another advantage
of the cold-war terminology is that it softens the
"military option" openly entertained against Iran
by some in the US and Israel and, learning from
the past, raises the issue of confidence-building
measures and enhanced communication that would
help avoid "accidental war", given the tight
corners of the Persian Gulf crowded with US
warships.
Indirectly, it also enhances
Iran's regional prestige and thus contributes to
the Iranian push for regional cooperation, given
the cognitive synergy between Iran's security
outlook and the GCC's cooperative security
initiative. The "cold" aspect of this war has, in
other words, certain and unmistakable advantages,
and the pertinent question is whether they trump
the disadvantages.
The cold-war virtual
reality Compared with the "systemic"
conflict of the Cold War between two militarily
symmetrical techno-powers along bifurcated
Marxism-versus-capitalism ideological fault lines,
US-Iran competition today lacks the key
ingredients of the superpower rivalry between the
US and the Soviet Union.
Assigning Iran
the functional role of filling the vacuum of the
Soviet enemy may serve some defense subcontractors
lobbying Washington and Riyadh, yet it hardly
makes for sound foreign-policy making on
Washington's part.
For one thing, as
Jane's Defence Weekly aptly put it recently, US
arms sales to the Saudis "open the way for a
further shift in the balance of power and
technology in the region". In 2006, the Saudis
bought 72 European Typhoon aircraft at a cost of
US$18 billion and now they are purchasing
sophisticated F-15E US bombers that can deliver
12-tonne bombs some 1,600 kilometers away, ie, the
Iranian capital city Tehran.
This,
together with other GCC states' purchases of
state-of-the-art weapons, including jet fighters
from the US and Europe, is extremely disconcerting
to Tehran, which already sees itself encircled by
US power. This could turn into a self-fulfilling
prophecy as the more the US continues down this
path, of harvesting the rewards of its
self-declared cold war with Iran, the more it
pushes Iran toward a nuclear survival strategy,
given the growing conventional-arms imbalance.
At present, the Iranians have no nuclear
dimension in their defense strategy, despite what
the US government and media might say to the
contrary. This might change if the US persists on
pushing the Iranians into a corner and
exacerbating their national-security concerns.
The crux is that today Iran feels
strategically threatened by the US and its allies
and, as we know, threat perception has
historically been the real engine of nuclear
proliferation. A non-threatening US Iran policy is
needed, otherwise Tehran will be forced to
maximize the few leverages it has. These include
Iraq, where the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's
security is taking place in the vacuum of the
larger context of US-Iran and Iran-GCC rivalry.
These issues are not separate, and the US cannot
realistically expect Iran to commit security
suicide by helping it stabilize Iraq just as the
US is doing everything possible to isolate and
destabilize Iran.
That is unrealistic, and
Iran has a "forward" defense strategy that extends
into Iraq and it will not forfeit this,
irrespective of the security dialogue in Baghdad.
The insecurity of US forces in Iraq and their
current quagmire serves Iran's security interests
and a fully secure Iraq with US forward bases near
the Iranian borders are inimical to Iran's
national-security interests.
Thus
structural limits or distortions handicap the
US-Iran dialogue on Iraq, which must be expanded
to tackle the larger "strategic issues" between
the intrusive superpower and the assertive
regional power, otherwise any hopes of a major
breakthrough in those talks are misplaced.
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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