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2 Growing need for US-Iran confidence
steps By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
the doves, led by Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, over Iran policy. This has
been reflected in the US media, with hawks such as
Max Boot defending the Cheney line by anticipating
a "catastrophic" victory for Iran and al-Qaeda if
the US withdraws from Iraq, and more moderate
voices such as the Washington Post's David
Ignatius, calling for "cooling" US-Iran tensions,
eg by endorsing a growing call by various US
military leaders for an
"incident at sea agreement"
with Iran.
The idea of such an agreement,
like ones the US previously signed with the Soviet
Union and with China, is timely and worth pursuing
in light of the potential collision of the US and
Iranian navies in the Persian Gulf. Already the
two navies are in almost daily contact, alerting
each other to their approaching ships and boats,
but that is not enough and to avoid accidental
warfare - both sides need to deepen their
military-to-military communication.
The
aim of this, which could be formalized through a
working committee that is an offshoot of the
working committees set up as a result of the
US-Iran dialogue in Baghdad, would be to adopt
concrete measures or steps to avoid unwanted
maritime collisions or conflicts in the Persian
Gulf and vicinity waters.
Yet the US is
disinclined to reach such an agreement with Iran
because it may restrict the US Navy's ability to
conduct maneuvers in the heavy traffic areas of
the Persian Gulf. Iran's reservation, on the other
hand, is that any agreement with the US military
may be misread as tacit approval of the United
States' military presence in the region.
But the fact on the ground is that US
forces are there partly as a result of bilateral
agreements with various Arab states that are
members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and
a watered-down version an "incident-at-sea
agreement" is called for. The GCC comprises
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates.
However, an
important prerequisite for such an agreement is an
improved Iran-GCC relationship, principally
between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Regarding the
latter, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has
made this a top priority, and in his latest
telephone conference with King Abdullah, he
reportedly offered to share Iran's nuclear
know-how with the Saudis.
Iran and Saudi
Arabia have a low-security agreement and may need
to upgrade it, for example by an Iran-GCC
multilateral agreement built around a
search-and-rescue agreement. Clearly,
confidence-building measures between Iran and its
Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf go hand-in-hand
with similar measures between the US and Iran.
An incident-at-sea agreement between the
US and Iran touches on the least contentious of
the military-security dimensions of US-Iran
competition, while providing a small opening for
bigger opportunities should they remain
constructively engaged.
By widening the
scope of non-contentious issues and delinking
navy-to-navy transactions from the ups and downs
of political and diplomatic relationships, such an
agreement could prove an important vehicle for
confidence-building between Iran and the US.
Should it be adopted, it would then serve as an
important barometer of progress in the poisoned
environment dominating relations between the two
countries.
Other confidence-building
measures include anti-terrorism, given their
shared interests against the threat of
anti-Shi'ite al-Qaeda terrorism. Unfortunately,
the misleading usage of cold-war terminology has
contributed to the deteriorating climate precisely
at a time when neither country can afford such a
deterioration. After all, in the United States'
other "containment" strategy, vis-a-vis the threat
of al-Qaeda (or the Taliban in Afghanistan), Iran
is not on the opposite side of the equation, and
that, indeed, goes to the heart of paradoxes of
Bush's new Iraq strategy.
Notes 1. The economic cost
of the Iraq war has been projected to reach US$1.8
trillion in the near future, per the calculations
reflected in a new documentary on the Bush
administration's serious blunders, No End in
Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson. 2. In
the US press there has been much talk of "Iran's
intentions" while taking for granted the United
States' intentions, warranting this letter by the
author in the Washington Post (September 14) in
response to an article by Robin Wright: "Regarding
Robin Wright's September 11 Fact Check item 'What
Are Iran's Intentions'?: Iran's intentions are to
contain interventionist US power in the region, to
form an alliance with the Shi'ite-led Iraqi regime
to promote the idea of collective security in the
Persian Gulf and to neutralize the
national-security risks posed by the encircling US
military, which plans to build a base near the
Iranian border. The latter undertaking is
ostensibly to disrupt the flow of Iranian arms
into Iraq, but from Iran's vantage point, the plan
is a convenient excuse for a long-term US presence
and continued military occupation of Iraq. Ms
Wright failed to ask the pertinent question: What
are the United States' true intentions?"
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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