Muslims and Liberals

The Columbus Dispatch
July 27, 2007

Is Iran luring America into a deal that would concede domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf? The speculation has been fueled around the gulf by the recent U.S.-Iranian talks on Iraq.

“The Iranians are carpet sellers,” said Mustafa Alani, program director at the Gulf Research Center during my recent visit to his think tank in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He suspects that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-American and anti-Israeli tirades mask a tough bargaining counter. The Iraqi bedlam has heightened Gulf Arabs’ wariness about Iranian hegemony. States centered on what is now Iraq intermittently have served as Arab shields against Iranian power. Thanks to the U.S. invasion, Iraq is no longer a military rival to Iran, which also has cultivated close ties to Iraq’s Shiite majority. And America, the only other challenge to Iran’s geopolitical ambitions, is agonizing in the Iraq war’s quicksand. Hence the Iranians feel free to flex their muscle in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine through pro-Iranian guerrilla and political forces in those countries.

The Saudis normally would have challenged Iran’s expansionist policy from behind the U.S. security shield. But the plight of U.S. forces in Iraq has shattered their faith in that shield, and they have begun courting Tehran. The Saudis’ antipathy for America has been growing since 1991, when U.S. troops were stationed in the kingdom. During my trip in October that year, several Saudi youths in Jeddah and Medina told me on condition of anonymity that their king, Fahd, had made their country an “American colony” guarded by American troops. On my next trip four years later, my interlocutors no longer requested anonymity as they criticized America and its military presence in their country. And in April 2003 when the United States was abandoning its Sultan City airbase under Saudi pressure, underground Saudi militants celebrated the event as a “victory for Osama” bin Laden, who had called 9/11 part of his jihad to expel U.S. troops from “the land of Muhammad.”

An unprecedented level of anti-Americanism among the Saudi public is a main reason the monarchy is re-aching out to Iran and expanding its relations with Asian nations. And smaller Gulf sheikdoms, following in the Saudi footsteps, are also mending fences with Iran, with which they have had frosty relations. Recently Oman and the UAE had Ahmadinejad over for state visits. The foreign ministers of Kuwait and Qatar have announced they wouldn’t let the Americans attack Iran from their soil. And the lower house of the Bahraini parliament has passed a resolution expressing the same intent.

All these states host U.S. military bases and are treaty-bound to let America use them for military operations. The gulf governments’ pro-Iranian statements are meant to mollify Iran, which would respond to a U.S. or Israeli attack by raining its Shihab missiles on U.S. bases in their countries. That would “destabilize the whole region,” said UAE legislative minister Anwar Gargash.

But I think the animosity between Washington and Iran eventually will give way to new realities. Washington needs Iranian cooperation to end its disastrous occupation of Iraq, and Iran can’t afford further economic sanctions, which U.S. opposition to its nuclear program would entail.

Iran’s likely acquisition of nuclear-weapons capability — not the actual manufacture of the weapons — could become a catalyst for a deal. Domestic public opinion wouldn’t let any Iranian regime stop enriching uranium precipitously under Western pressure. Yet Iranian leaders should be taken at their word when they insist they don’t intend to make the bomb. They know that using nukes against the United States or Israel would be suicide. The only reason they would want the bomb would be to deter foreign invasions, which the capability to make it would achieve to a large degree.

In fact the Islamic republic is letting the word out that it would freeze uranium enrichment at 80 percent (at which fuel can be used to make the nuke) in a comprehensive agreement with the West. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent report that Tehran has slowed its enrichment program seems to signal such intention.

The Bush administration should approach Tehran with the imagination reflected in President Nixon’s outreach to China.