An Update on Iran and Iraq
By Larry Johnson on March 6, 2008 at 5:53 PM in Current Affairs
Ray Close, a distinguished intelligence officer, provided his views on the latest developments between Iran and Iraq. I commend it to you.
by Ray Close
This commentary concerns current U.S. strategic policy in the Middle East, especially the seemingly intractable problems of dealing effectively with Iraq and Iran.
I believe Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh have made some extremely significant points in the L.A. Times article posted this past Tuesday:
The U.N. Security Council on Monday passed a third round of sanctions against Iran. But at the same time that the United States and its European allies were building support for the new U.N. resolution, Iran’s president was making an official visit to Iraq, the first such visit since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The upshot is that despite the tightening of U.N. sanctions, the West’s efforts to contain Iran are crumbling where it matters most: in the Middle East.
While Washington continues to press for a stark policy of political isolation and military containment, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf are overtly pursuing a new strategy of engagement. Even the Iraqi government, despite its ostensible alignment with the Bush administration, has opened its doors — hence President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s red carpet treatment in Baghdad. If U.S. policy toward Iran is to yield results, Washington must adjust its approach to the reality that its closest allies in the Middle East have effectively broken with U.S. strategy. (read the rest here)
For the past three or four years now, the Bush Administration has been presenting every important feature of its Middle East policy as part of a master plan to contain the threat of hostile Iranian encroachment on a region that the United States now openly declares to be its legitimate and permanent sphere of influence. For example, in explaining the new $20 billion arms deal with GCC countries in August 2007, Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Burns announced that: “It says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be, and is not going away.” Even the American policy position at the 2007 Israel-Palestine conference at Annapolis, for the first time in the history of the Middle East Peace Process, implied that containing a hostile Iran was the ultimate goal of U.S. regional policy, and that achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace was looked upon in Washington these days as merely a useful step in that direction.
The Bush Adminstration’s obsession with the threat from Iran has been continually accompanied by belligerent rhetoric. This has been more than misguided and ill-founded, in my opinion. It has been dangerously self-defeating, and has contributed in important ways to the worsening of other problems we are facing in the region.
The most obvious (and the most futile) objective of our confrontational posture has been to intimidate Iran’s leaders into acting more cooperatively with U.S. regional master planning. Washington’s in-your-face attitude has produced, and will continue to produce, equally negative results in the following unintended ways:
1. It portrays America’s Gulf Arab allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, as dependent on the United States for protection against a dangerous and predatory Iran, and suggests that integration into an American-led regional defense structure is essential to their survival.
2. It dovetails comfortably with Israel’s strategic vision and its preference that America concentrate its attention on Iran as the principle threat to peace and stability in the region. If in the process it prevents peaceful accommodation between Arabs and Iranians, and heightens tensions between Sunnis and Shiites everywhere, so much the better. If Israel’s Arab neighbors are divided, insecure, and dependent on America for their military defense, and if their attention is focused on a threat from Iran, that’s the best of all worlds for Israel. Not coincidentally, this fits very neatly into the Bush Administration’s past and present neocon-inspired strategic outlook toward the entire Middle East.
In reality, America’s efforts to organize the neighborhood into a defensive barrier against Iran has already had at least three major negative impacts on U.S. strategic interests.
1. First, it has made the rulers of the GCC countries very ill at ease; they are embarrassed before the world and their own people when they are portrayed as mercenary puppets of the despised George W. Bush, and hence feel more vulnerable than ever. Even Bob Gates, whom we have credited with more sensitivity than others around him, took the opportunity of a visit to the Gulf recently to lecture his audience imperiously on the need to organize themselve under American leadership to confront the evil Persians lurking just over the Eastern horizon.
The second and third harmful effects can best be illustrated by viewing the situation from Iran’s perspective. One can see immediately that America’s open challenge to Iran’s vital interests has done the following:
2. It has hardened Iran’s determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent for its own protection. That natural reaction should be too obvious to mention, but it seems to be beyond the comprehension of anyone in a policy position in Washington these days. We have even been blind to the reality that national pride is a major factor in bolstering Iran’s resistance to all kinds of bullying, starting with economic sanctions and continuing up through explicit threats of regime change by violent means.
3. It has (of course; obviously) hardened Iran’s determination to consolidate its growing political, economic and military domination of Iraq. For Teheran, that makes perfect strategic sense. A side effect is probably (although I can’t prove this) increased Iranian pressure on its Shia allies and clients in Iraq not to make the accommodations with Iraq’s Sunni minority that the United States has been demanding. As long as America’s openly declared objective is to challenge and threaten Iran’s every legitimate concern in the Middle East, the Teheran leadership obviously feels no incentive to promote a resolution of the Iraq conflict that would enable the United States to disengage with dignity and honor. (Destruction of al-Qa’ida remnants and rogue militias of various affiliations by American military action, at America’s expense, is nothing but a convenient bonus for Iran. While Petraeus eliminates the troublemakers, Ahmedinijad patiently constructs Iran’s long-term power base. Consider that factor, please, when evaluating Senator McCain’s triumphant assurances that military “victory” is already assured. Mission accomplished? Not yet, by a long shot!)
by Ronald Scott
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