A scramble for friends over Iran

A GOOD ARTICLE
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Asia Times

"The Arab world has been subjected to a whole new campaign of disinformation about Iran's nuclear program. The principal aim is to perpetuate the felt need for US protectorate power against what is billed as Iran's coming nuclear menace. The latest manifestation of this is a multinational naval exercise led by the United States off Iran's west coast.

Thus a prominent article in the New York Times on Sunday titled "Islam, terror and the second nuclear age" claims that the Arab world is today more concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions than Israel's nuclear arsenal. To substantiate this claim, the author, Noah Feldman, writes: "When the Arab League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for 'a Middle East free of nuclear weapons' this past May, it wasn't Israel that prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching realization."

A careful scrutiny of Moussa's statements reveals a completely different picture. In May, in an interview with China's official Xinhua News Agency, Moussa clarified that "it is not a nuclear issue of Iran but a nuclear issue of the Middle East". And the Jerusalem Post, dated May 30, quoting Moussa, rightly concluded: "Moussa's remarks appeared to be targeted at Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge or deny it."

Thus the New York Times' apparent distortion of Moussa's position on Iran raises a curious question: What exactly is behind such concerted efforts to scare the Arab world away from Iran precisely at a time when the US military is conducting joint maneuvers in the Persian Gulf with the participation of some Arab states, such as Bahrain?

The answer becomes clear when we notice that Israel, along with Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, has been invited as an observer at these maneuvers, imitated under the rubric "Proliferation Security Initiative". This coincides with a four-day international conference in Qatar on "new democracies" to which Israel has also been invited.

Ideally, Israel may wish to complement the United States' protectorate role by offering a conventional and nuclear deterrence to the rich oil sheikhdoms allegedly rattled by Iran's "nuclear ambitions". For some time, Israel has been trying to insert itself into the security calculus of both Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, with its agents playing an increasingly active role in, among other places, Azerbaijan and Iraq.

Israel's much-touted "strategic relations" with Turkey are principally due to Turkey's economic, rather than strategic, interests and are unlikely to be replicated in the Persian Gulf region, no matter how hard Israel, the US and the media blow the horns of Iran's nuclear threat.

It has not escaped the attention of the Arab world that Israel, which has defied repeated UN Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, is now championing the cause of the Security Council. It is pushing vigorously for the implementation of the resolutions on Iran and Lebanon, the latter including Hezbollah's disarmament. Israel's and the United States' selectiveness regarding UN resolutions cannot possibly help their common cause against Iran.

The success of even "mild sanctions" depends to some extent on the cooperation of Iran's neighbors, which might not be forthcoming as long as the US and its European allies fail to convince the world that Iran is proliferating nuclear weapons.

For its part, Iran's public diplomacy - of trying to convince the world that it is being penalized for standing up to US power in the Middle East - has not altogether fallen on deaf ears, as can be seen in recent commentaries in the Arab press. These include an article in Beirut's Daily Star making the case that it is Iran's "growing power" that is behind the present Western hostilities.

As for the implications of Shi'ite-Sunni troubles in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world, contrary to the assertion of certain pundits, the centrality of outside interventionism continues to act as the geopolitical glue transcending sectarian hostilities. "