Page 1 of 2 Iran turns the charm
on its neighbors By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
By all indications, this week's
28th summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
in Doha, Qatar, is more than business as usual.
Rather, with the GCC's unprecedented initiative of
inviting Iran's president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who
is both revered and feared in the Arab world, this
is a watershed development in the volatile,
oil-rich region that can have real and tangible
benefits, particularly on the economic and
security fronts. The summit will reportedly
cover a host of regional and extra-
regional issues, ranging from
regional cooperation, the currency policy of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC), Palestine, the results of last week's
Annapolis summit, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and
Iran's nuclear crisis.
Increasingly, in
light of Iran's defiance of the United Nations
Security Council's demand to suspend its
uranium-enrichment activities and the prospects of
tougher UN sanctions against Iran, the GCC states
are wary of the negative implications of the
nuclear crisis for a region that has been much
traumatized by cycles of wars and conflict over
the past 30 years.
The UN Security Council
is considering imposing a third round of sanctions
on Iran over its nuclear program and may reach an
agreement within weeks. This follows a closed-door
meeting on Saturday. These talks in New York came
a day after Javier Solana, the European Union
foreign policy chief, met Saeed Jalili, Iran's
nuclear negotiator. Solana described the meeting
in London as "a disaster".
The US,
Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany agreed
in September to delay sanctions against Iran until
the end of November, pending reports on an
investigation by the UN nuclear watchdog and an EU
mediation effort. They had decided that if the
reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) and Solana did not show "a positive
outcome", they would agree on more sanctions
against Iran and put it to a vote in the Security
Council.
By engaging Iran and welcoming
Ahmadinejad, the GCC states (Bahrain, Kuwait,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates - UAE) led by Saudi Arabia, which
recently offered to set up a regional facility for
producing nuclear fuel for Iran, are hoping to
play an effective, moderating influence on Tehran,
which has been rattling them with what the GCC
media routinely refer to as "extreme statements by
Iran".
But, Ahmadinejad, who last week
told a visiting foreign dignitary that "through
love and kindness the regional problems can
disappear", is now about to resurrect the "charm
offensive" that one of his predecessors, former
president Hashemi Rafsanjani, tried with the GCC
states a decade and a half ago. [1]
Iran's
new charm offensive is packed with substantially
more weight, however, as Iran is broadly viewed in
the region as a clear winner of the Iraq war,
"controlling the main centers of power within the
Iraqi state", according to a Saudi commentary, not
to mention the influence it wields in Lebanon and,
potentially, among Shi'ite minorities in eastern
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the GCC region.
From Iran's vantage point, Ahmadinejad's
participation at the GCC summit is a welcome
development that can, at a minimum, guarantee
Iran's observer status, which was initially,
albeit fleetingly, bestowed on Iran after the 1991
Kuwait crisis.
More than a symbolic
presence, Iran seeks a meaningful role in the
GCC's architecture of regional security, by
championing the idea of collective security [2],
following the principle of regional
self-sufficiency, that is, the notion that the
regional states should shoulder their own security
responsibility instead of "farming out" to
external powers such as the US, viewed by Iran as
a source of instability.
Hence, a number
of Iranian legislators, such as Rashid Jalali
Jaafari, have called on Ahmadinejad to prioritize
the withdrawal of "foreign forces from the region"
at the GCC summit. Another Majlis (Parliament)
deputy, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, has urged the
president to draw "the red line" on the contested
issue of Iran's possession of three islets, Abu
Musa, Little Tunb and Big Tunb, and to "defend
Iran's territorial rights from the position of
power".
On the eve of the GCC summit,
however, the UAE, which claims sovereignty over
these islands, has once again resurrected its
complaints against Iran's "illegal" control and it
remains to be seen if the GCC summit will
undermine itself by allowing this divisive issue
to mar its olive branch toward Iran, or,
prudently, relegate it to the background for once,
instead of inserting it in its final communique as
in previous years.
"If all the GCC states
take a position on the three islands, then there
is no reason for Iran's president to participate
at this summit," Falahatpisheh has warned, with an
eye to pressure the GCC summit organizers to avoid
what is clearly a minefield of an
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