Foreign Correspondence

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Iran, US divide stands in Iraq's way

The following text gives a possible scenario that ties a stable Iraq in with the Persian Gulf islands dispute.

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By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

December 4, 2004

TEHRAN - A two-day conference with Iraq's neighbors plus Egypt and Bahrain ended in Tehran this week with mixed results. The conference, attended by a United Nations envoy, Iraq's deputy prime minister, Saudi Arabia's interior minister, and others, was supposed to reflect the spirit of unanimity and consensus on a host of issues ranging from the upcoming January elections in Iraq to border control, terrorism and Iraq's economic reconstruction. Yet the overall impression that emerged after intense, and often divisive discussions, was the depth and significance of divergent perspectives barely glued together in a final communique.

The latter, consisting of nine items, mentions that the next meeting will take place in Turkey, a previous host of the group. One must wonder about the role of Egypt, which has already hosted the group's meetings twice, since it has no border with Iraq and is considered as "out of area" by Iranian policy-makers.

With less than two months to the general elections in Iraq, all eyes are focussed on the thorny question of Shi'ite-Sunni relations and, in the light of the recent request by some 17 Sunni and Kurdish groups from the Iraqi interim government of Iyad Allawi, a postponement of the elections. Although the Kurds have backtracked somewhat, it is hardly surprising to see that the Sunni Arab governments have officially or semi-officially backed this request, hoping that time will somehow turn the tides back in favor of the Sunni minority that ruled Iraq for so long.

Still, perhaps realizing that the momentum for the January elections is at this point irreversible, the Arab participants at the Tehran conference finally relented and signed on to item number 2 of the final communique, referring to the January elections "under the UN's auspices". Yet, given the token presence of UN workers, ie, less than 50, the communique's singular emphasis on the central role of the UN may have been a misnomer aimed to give the impression of greater unity than actually exists among the participant countries.

In the tumult of the pre-elections in Iraq, the Sunni world encompassing Iraq's Sunni population has yet to come to grips with the post-invasion change of political fortunes laying the foundations for a Shi'ite-led regime in Iraq, which in turn will undoubtedly change in times to come the very nature and makeup of the Shi'ite-Sunni calculus in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps Iran's willingness to allow Egypt to participate in this group is an implicit sign of a quid pro quo, namely, a return of favors by permitting a more muscular form of Arab politics in the Persian Gulf at a time when the Shi'ite wave is riding relatively high.

Of course, this is not to say that everything is fine and dandy between Iran and Iraqi Shi'ites, many of whom fought against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, notwithstanding the fact that even Saddam Hussein's government included many Shi'ites in the civil and military bureaucracy. In fact, the Iraqi defense minister, Hamza Shaalan, has quite unnerved the Iranians with his recent blistering criticisms and even threats against Iran's "meddlings" inside Iraq. Hence, it is really not the question of Shi'ites, per se, in the Iraqi government, but which kind of Shi'ites, pro or anti-Iran, that matters most from Iran's point of view.

Presently, Iran has vested its hopes on a gradual process whereby the specifically Shi'ite identity of Iraq's ruling politicians will thicken as time goes on, with the current prime minister and his Shi'ite deputies representing only the beginning points of departure for a more substantive process. Whether or not this is wishful thinking or a tissue of future reality is unclear, but it is important to keep in mind that the leading Iraqi Shi'ite figure, namely, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has his own agenda not always commensurate with Iran.

Concerning Sistani, he has appointed a small council that is busy nowadays apportioning seats in the upcoming assembly among the several dozen Shi'ite groups and parties, some of whom have protested their small share of the pie. A case in point, the ayatollah's committee has designated fewer than 30 seats for the group(s) supporting the rebel Shi'ite, Muqtada al-Sadr, and this may not satisfy him.

As the bargaining among Shi'ites continues, a larger bargaining between the Shi'ites and Sunnis appears to be even more problematic. The Sunnis are complaining of a "tacit" approval of Iraqi Shi'ites for the recent American assault on Fallujah, and certain Arab commentators have even gone further and painted gloomy pictures of a coming civil war along sectarian lines. The mere threat of such a dreadful prospect, while many Muslims are convinced Israel is actively sowing the seeds of division in order to exploit the instability of Iraq for its own purposes, has been sufficient for the moment to accentuate the points of coinciding interests among Iraq's Sunni and Shi'ite neighbors, none of whom want to see the troubled region face any more crisis than it has already experienced.

But the prospect of a Sunni boycott of the upcoming elections remains strong and unless a deal is worked out for a mutually satisfactory distribution of power between the two sides, such a boycott will undoubtedly diminish the legitimacy, if not the legality, of the post-election polity. The Kurds, on the other hand, with their eyes set on Kirkuk, ideally hope that with delayed elections they can manage a comfortable Kurdish majority in the Kurdish areas, but at the same time they have not thrown their lot in with the Sunnis, who are at the moment the political losers of the invasion. By adopting a flexible, pragmatic attitude meant to extract more political capital from Baghdad and the American authorities, the Kurds remain largely optimistic that no matter when the elections take place, they will gain politically.

Iran's worry, on the other hand, is that a stable Iraq will be used against it, that the new Iraq may be added to the Gulf Cooperation Council thus enhancing the hands of United Arab Emirates, which is in dispute with Iran over three Persian Gulf islands, and that the regional security framework will be reshaped to the detriment of Tehran's interests, not to mention the insecurity over US military bases near Iran's borders and the occasional US-Israel threats of surgical strikes inside Iran against its nuclear facilities.

Thus, an Iranian conundrum: its participation and cooperation for stable borders and Iraqi stability may not pay off in the end and, instead, cause a bigger problem down the line, suggesting the protean value of multiple strategies inclusive of the threat card meant to maintain hostility toward the US presence in the region and increasing fears of the US Western power self-entrenching in a crucial corner of the abode of Islam.

Yet, simultaneously, just about every salient feature of Iran's Iraq policy today is in tandem with US policy, which is why at the Sharm el-Shaikh conference in Egypt two weeks ago, Iran followed the US's policy toward Iraq, ie, with respect to the elections, and this was partly to disallow the US to paint Iran as non-cooperative at a delicate time when Iran was negotiating with Europe over the nuclear issue.

There are, however, serious side effects to Iran's Iraq policy in tandem with the US approach, given the second George W Bush administration's stubborn resistance to acknowledging any positive role played by Iran in regional crises, depicting Iran instead as a "rogue" power that, in the words of Kenneth Pollack in his new book, Persian Puzzle, aims to overthrow its neighbors. Such caricatures of Iran's regional foreign policy are not helpful and the Bush administration must sooner or later reckon with the fact that Iran is a major regional player with a sophisticated, multilayered foreign policy, featuring certain shared or parallel interests with the US.

Until and unless the US comes to this new realization, or new threshold, any chance of even a mini-breakthrough in US-Iran relations remains remote.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.

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