Detente with Iran?

San Francisco Chronicle
July 13, 2007

Is Iran luring the United States into a deal that would concede its domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf? This speculation has been fueled by the recent U.S.-Iranian talks on Iraq. “The Iranians are carpet sellers,” said Mustafa Alani, program director at the Gulf Research Center, told me during a visit to his think tank in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. By that he means, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s anti-American and anti-Israeli tirade masks a tough counter offer. He recalled that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, was “buying arms from Israel” that were made in the United States while breathing fire at Israel and America.

The Arabs’ leeriness about Iranian hegemony has been revived by the unraveling of Iraq. Thanks to the U.S. invasion, Iraq is no longer a military rival to Iran, which has cultivated close ties to Iraq’s Shiite majority. And America, the only other nation to challenge Iran’s geopolitical ambitions, is struggling in the Iraqi quicksand. Iran now has a free hand to exert its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories through pro-Iranian guerrilla and political forces.

The Saudis would normally 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. On March 4, the Arab world was mesmerized by TV bulletins showing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Saudi King Abdullah holding hands and smiling warmly in Riyadh.

The Saudis’ drift away from the United States began in 1991 when U.S. troops were stationed in the kingdom, raising fears among the Saudi populace that their king, Fahd, had made the country an “American colony.”

In April 2003, the United States finally abandoned its Sultan City air base under Saudi pressure. Underground dissident groups in the kingdom celebrated the event as a “victory for Osama” bin Laden. The al Qaeda leader had announced that 9/11 had been part of his jihad to rid “the land of Muhammad” of American forces.

Now, smaller Persian Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, following in the Saudi footsteps, are also mending fences with Iran, with which they have had frosty relations in the past. Oman and the UAE had Ahmedinejad come 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 U.S. forces use those bases for military operations. Their statements are meant to mollify Iran, which would respond to a U.S. or Israeli attack by raining its Shihab missiles on those bases. That would “destabilize the whole region,” said the UAE legislative affairs minister, Anwar Gargash.

The animosity between “the Great Satan” and the member of “the Axis of Evil” will eventually give way to the 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 — rather than achieving the ability to manufacture 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 that they don’t intend to make the bomb.

They know that using a nuke against the United States or Israel would mean national suicide. Either of these countries could devastate Iran in a nuclear counterattack.

The only reason Iran would want a bomb would be to deter a foreign invasion, which the capability to produce a bomb would achieve to a large degree. In fact, the Islamic republic is getting the word out that it would freeze uranium enrichment at 80 percent (at which point the fuel can be used to make a nuclear weapon) without manufacturing and testing a nuclear device. The concession with the West is that they would stop short of making the bomb.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s recent report that Tehran has slowed its enrichment program seems to signal such a strategy. The Bush administration should see this as a basis of a deal.

Of course, detente with Iran would require the United States to recognize Iranian pre-eminence in the Persian Gulf, which it did during the monarchy of Muhammad Riza Shah Pahlavi (1953-1978). Getting the Iranian ayatollahs to help police the Persian Gulf’s oil lifeline, rather than threaten it, wouldn’t be a bad deal at all.