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2 Growing need for US-Iran confidence
steps By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The rising tensions between the United
States and Iran represent a serious threat to
regional and global peace that, if not remedied by
prudent conflict reduction mechanisms, may lead to
war. Those tensions, reflected in the considerable
ratcheting up of Washington's anti-Iran rhetoric,
have been framed by various US officials and
pundits as symptomatic of a "new cold war", giving
the US the necessary alibi for an indefinite
military presence in
Iraq
under the guise of an Iran "containment policy".
Indeed, both US President George W Bush's
policy speech on Iraq last Thursday and the past
week's congressional testimony of the top US
commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the
US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, have made it
abundantly clear that there is a shift in the
strategic outlook for the US military mission in
Iraq pertaining to Iran, couched in the language
of containment and deterrence.
As
expected, Iran has lambasted the reports by
Petraeus and Crocker, and Iran's spiritual leader,
Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has lashed out at
Bush as a "war criminal" who should be put on
trial for the United States' atrocities in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Iranian media are awash
with reports of the United States' "hypocrisy" in
embracing Sunni extremist and terrorist groups in
Iraq, who hate the current Shi'ite-led government.
And Iran's ambassador to Iraq, Hossein Kazemi
Qomi, has told CNN that the US has committed "two
strategic errors ... The first mistake is their
effort to return, to bring back to power, people
accused of murders from the previous regime." And
the second error is "arming some Sunni groups and
terrorist groups that operate against the Iraqi
government".
Both Qomi and National
Security Chief Ali Larijani have reacted to the
anti-Iran tone of Petraeus's testimony by pointing
out that most of the terrorists "come from
countries friendly with America". According to
Qomi, "Not even one Iranian citizen has ever
participated in the terrorist attacks on American
forces."
The Faustian bargain of the US
military with Sunni extremists does not bode well
for the United States' simultaneous pressure on
the Iraqi government to reach the "political
benchmark" of creating a trans-sect government of
national unity. But then again, that is only one
of many inconsistencies and contradictions of the
United States' hitherto disastrous Iraq policy.
Yet somehow that policy, costing the US in
the region of US$300 million a day, [1] as well as
an average of two US casualties and 15 US wounded
per day, per Petraeus's testimony, has been
declared a winning strategy by the White House. It
has reframed the Iraq debate now less in terms of
Iraq's nation-building and more in terms of
anti-terrorism and anti-Iran priorities, thus
setting itself an entirely new benchmark that is
beyond the control of the government in Baghdad.
Or is it?
The United States' nominal lip
service to Iraq's sovereignty means that the Iraqi
government and Parliament must approve
Washington's planned base-building near the
Iran-Iraq border. Yet Iraqi officials were
apparently not even consulted prior to an
announcement on this issue. Larijani predicts that
the Iraqi government will veto the plan, but this
may not be so in light of a recent statement by an
Iraqi government spokesman accusing Iran of
"meddling in Iraq".
In an interview with
Al-Jazeera, Larijani stated that Iran is not in
favor of immediate withdrawal of US forces from
Iraq. This echoes an earlier statement by Deputy
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in his recent
interview with the London Financial Times, that
Iran favors an orderly, gradual withdrawal of US
troops.
Thus President Bush's announcement
- of modest troop withdrawal and the retention of
the bulk of US forces in Iraq for the foreseeable
future - does not necessarily represent an affront
to Iran, which is highly concerned about the
threat of conflict spillover and mass refugees
following a chaos-generating premature departure
of US forces. On the other hand, Washington's new
accent on the Iran threat in Iraq translates into
new Iranian worries about the United States' true
intentions. [2]
Consequently, the troubled
ship of US-Iran diplomacy is deeply anchored in a
sea of mutual suspicion and acrimony, with
numerous potential flash points on the horizon,
ranging from Lebanon to Syria, to Iraq and the
Persian Gulf, that could quickly sink the nascent
tide of "engagement" recommended by the Iraq Study
Group, and feebly adopted by the Bush
administration. The next question is, where does
one go from here?
Former Iranian foreign
minister Kemal Kharazi, now heading a newly formed
Strategic Council on Foreign Relations,
illuminated Iran's thinking in a recent interview
with the Iranian press. According to Kharazi, the
US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's security is "tactical
and not-strategic" and Iran "is not prepared for
comprehensive talks" with the US. Citing "serious
conflicts of interests" between Iran and the US,
Kharazi called for exploring "ways for exiting
this environment", and declaring Iran's
willingness to continue dialogue with the US only
if the US "accepts the principle of mutual
respect".
Iranian Foreign Ministry
spokesman Ali Hosseini, on the other hand, has
stated that if the Iraqi government makes an
official request for a fourth round of US-Iran
dialogue, Iran will participate irrespective of
its misgivings about anti-Iran provocations in
Washington.
But not everyone in Washington
is sold on the idea of upping the ante against
Iran. The New York Times has reported of a growing
rift between the hawks, led by Vice President Dick
Cheney, and
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