Iran
on new voyage of discovery By
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
"The Americans try
hard to not be the target of these huge popular
uprisings, but will fail because people have
realized that the policies of Americans and their
cronies are the causes of humiliation and division
among nations. As a result, the key to resolving
people's problems rests on ending America's
arrangement in the region." - Iran's
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali
Khamenei
On Monday, with two
Iranian warships about to sail through the Suez
Canal - much to the chagrin of Israel which viewed
the move "with utmost gravity'" - Iran's Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addressed a group of
foreign dignitaries from the
Muslim world and
confidently spoke of the dawn of a new era in the
Middle East, reflecting a "new Islamic awakening".
With the fall of two pro-West dictators in
Tunisia and Egypt and the rapidly evolving
protests in the largely Shi'ite Bahrain, home to
the US's Fifth Fleet, Iranian leaders have ample
justification for their confident assertion of a
"new Middle East" that is increasingly less
subservient to Western interests and more and more
independent and assertive.
An Iranian
frigate and a supply ship passed through the Suez
on the way to Syria after receiving approval from
Egyptian authorities - the first time such vessels
had navigated the waterway since before the fall
of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that
Iran was trying to exploit instability across the
region.
Under international law, only
ships from countries at war with Egypt are barred
from passing through the Suez Canal. But military
ships need prior permission from Egypt's Defense
and Foreign Ministries.
"I think that
today, we can see what an unstable region we live
in, a region in which Iran tries to exploit the
situation that has been created in order to expand
its influence by passing warships through the Suez
canal," Netanyahu was reported as saying. The
Israeli Foreign Ministry called the ships "a
provocation" that should be "dealt with by the
international community".
The consensus
among Iran's foreign policy experts is that the
Egyptian military's decision to allow the passage
of the Alvand and the Khargh was a
significant ice-breaker that sets a positive tone
for a much-needed improvement in Iran-Egypt
relations.
Accused by the Israeli media of
"conniving" with Iran over the ships' passage, the
Egyptian military leaders - who now effectively
run the country following the ouster of president
Hosni Mubarak in January - may now accelerate the
process of normalization of relations with Iran
ahead of elections scheduled for September. This
is irrespective of the fact that they have pledged
that the government will stick to all previous
foreign obligations, including the Camp David
peace treaty with Israel.
According to the
Israeli paper Ha'aretz, Israel can no longer
guarantee that Egypt will remain an ally against
Iran. A more accurate interpretation might be that
Israel fears Egypt becoming Iran's ally against
Israel, thus denoting a change in the balance of
forces to the detriment of the conservative bloc
spurred by the United States and Israel to isolate
Iran.
In the tumultuous times in the
Middle East and North Africa, it is now pro-US
regimes that are either being toppled or seriously
contested by their own populations, giving the
Iran-led bloc, that includes Syria, Lebanon's
Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza, the unique momentum
to harvest a great deal of (geo) political gain.
This would especially be the case if the present
"domino effect" gives rise to a significant
transformation of Bahrain's archaic political
system.
Although Admiral Mike Mullen, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US
military, in his latest interview implicitly
accused Iran of stirring the troubles in Bahrain,
the fact is that many Bahraini Shi'ites look to
Iraq's holy city of Najaf and the spiritual
leadership of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, while a
minority emulate the guidance of Khamenei.
Regardless, the inevitable empowerment of
Bahrain's Shi'ites - who outnumber the ruling
Sunnis - one way or another (such as through
outright revolution or the government-proposed
"national dialogue") , will be widely interpreted
as an important gain for Iran. This will cause
both Bahrain and other members of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) to demonstrate greater
deference to Iran's rapidly rising power in the
region. The GCC, created in 1981, comprises the
Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This recognition of the changing political
tides favoring Iran, America's bete noir in the
Middle East, can already be seen in Saudi Arabia's
unprecedented decision to allow a port visit by
Iran's warships (that traversed the Red Sea and
the Suez en route to the Syrian port city of
Latika). However, the olive branch to Iran might
also have been motivated by Riyadh's fear of an
uprising by its own discontented Shi'ites (about 2
million out of a population of 26 million).
This raises new questions regarding the
future of US-Iran relations, in light of the
uneasy coexistence of conflicting as well as
shared interests between the two countries in the
Middle East cauldron and beyond.
The US
may now need to revise its coercive approach
toward Iran over its nuclear program and refrain
from further sanctions and the hitherto futile
politics of isolating Iran, in order to get
Tehran's confidence that cooperation on shared or
parallel interests, such as containing the triple
threats of the Taliban, Wahhabi extremism and drug
trafficking, is feasible, not to mention regional
stability.
In terms of the nuclear
standoff, a prudent US move would be to consent to
a nuclear fuel swap for Tehran's medical reactor,
and to throw its weight behind the current United
Nations-led efforts in the realm of a Middle East
nuclear weapons free zone.
Also, the US
may want to drop its objection to India's
participation in an Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline;
the economic logic of interdependence, in fueling
political moderation, cannot and should not be
ignored.
However, it is unlikely that
Washington will ever recognize Tehran's prominent
place in overall Middle Eastern affairs. Instead,
as reflected by Mullen, the US continues to guide
its policy through an Iran-phobic lens, as a
result of which the grey area of "mutual
interests" remains largely unexplored and
untapped.
'Sticky' Palestinian
rights As expected, the Iranian media have
lambasted the Barack Obama administration's veto
last week of a UN Security Council resolution that
criticized Israel's illegal settlements. This
reinforces a widespread perception in Iran and
other parts of the Arab and Muslim world that the
US government is in the palms of the pro-Israel
lobby and fundamentally incapable of drifting
away, let alone opposing, Israel's map of action
for the region.
Unless the White House
proves otherwise, by adjusting its approach toward
the "peace process" by exerting real pressure on
Israel, the suspicion remains that America's
Middle East policy is to a significant degree
shaped in Tel Aviv.
Iran's interest in the
Palestinian "issue" is both ideological and born
out of the desire to enhance Iran's areas of
influence, which essentially means that the US's
policy of excluding Iran from the multilateral
dialogue on the peace process is both
counter-productive and dysfunctional.
"Israel's expansionist policies have
harmed the US's interests and without doubt
contributed to the unpopularity of America's shah,
Hosni Mubarak," says a Tehran University political
scientist who specializes in Iran's foreign
affairs, adding, "Israeli politicians are
naturally blindsighted to this point, but should
the Americans?"
Pointing at the Egyptian
military's recent order to open the Gaza crossing
for several days as an indication of a new
Egyptian approach that no longer subscribes to the
siege of Gaza, both the Tehran professor and a
number of other Iranian pundits are optimistic
about a bright future for Iran-Egypt relations.
This they say would be based on "common solidarity
with the Palestinians". At a minimum, Cairo can
now pitch for a better bargain from the US and
Israel, by raising the specter of bandwagoning
with Iran, indeed an unsettling development from
the prism of US-Israeli interests.
Cognizant of the need to drive a wedge
between the US and Israel, Iran's strategy is to
combine its anti-American stick of a "Middle East
without the US", to paraphrase President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's speech on the occasion of the 32nd
anniversary of the 1979 revolution, with the
carrot of cooperation on "shared concerns", such
as the Taliban's menace.
The fact that
Iran can be a timely corridor in light of the
constant attacks on North Atlantic Treaty
Organization supply lines through Pakistan to
Afghanistan, or be a moderating influence on its
Shi'ite brethren in the Persian Gulf, has been
pointed out by some Tehran pundits. They condition
such a role by Tehran on the US's willingness to
shift its policy away from sanctions, threats and
attempts at regime change.
The irony is
that the net result of the US's policy has been
the exact opposite of what was intended: its
allies are falling while Iran is only minimally
impacted by the "democratic fever" gripping the
region, as a result of which Tehran considers
itself in the driver's seat of dictating the terms
of any US-Iran dialogue. This is because the US is
perceived as having been weakened, on the
defensive and in "panic mode over the dominos
falling", to quote a conservative Tehran daily's
editorial.
The empire might well find ways
to strike back and regain its crumbling order, but
for now the day belongs to Iran and its allies.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click here.
He is author of Reading
In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his
latest book, Looking
for rights at Harvard, is now available.
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