Peace talks regarding the Middle East again, this time in Annapolis, Maryland. Israel, the Palestinians, and their Arab neighbors all sitting down to give Condoleezza Rice one more chance of leaving a positive legacy as Secretary of State. After all, cutting the Gordian Knot of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be one way to make us forget her complete ineptitude as both Bush’s National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State, a record replete with failures from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, China, Africa and Europe.
There’s little chance of actually making any real progress, however, given the intransigence of the current Israeli government and of Hamas, and the skeptical attitudes of their Arab neighbors. Still, peace is not the only reason Ms. Rice has for calling a conference where Israel and America’s Arab “friends” can all sit down together to pontificate. Her other agenda has little to do with peace in the region. Rather it has everything to do with the principal non-attendee to her little soirée, a certain Shi’ite Islamic Republic over which the Bush administration continues to obsess, despite the chaos in Iraq and the potential for an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. If you haven’t guessed by now, that country is Iran, and Rice fully intends her “conference” to form the basis for an Israeli/Sunni Arab league against the Menace from Tehran’s Imams:
Tuesday’s Arab-Israeli peace summit in Annapolis, Maryland, is supposed to be about resolving long-standing Palestinian issues, the Golan Heights, and other contentious matters. But, increasingly, it is framed in the United States and Israeli media as a dual-purpose conference, the other being the containment of Iran. […]
[I]n the US a number of pundits have painted Annapolis as a “means of sorts of cementing a coalition against Iran and its allies”, to paraphrase Tamar Cofman Wittes of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. According to Cofman and a host of media pundits paraded on American television news programs, Annapolis is President George W Bush’s wakeup call to the world on the “Iran threat”.
It comes as little surprise, then, that the US military in Iraq has quickly pinned on “Iran-backed militias” the responsibility for the recent explosion at Baghdad’s pet market which killed more than a dozen people – call it pre-Annapolis fuel for “blaming Iran”.
Interestingly, a powerful Iraqi politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, has questioned the US’s accusations against Iran, asking the US to “offer more proof” of Iran’s alleged role in inciting violence in Iraq. That is a fair request, particularly since both the US and Iran are now poised to hold their fourth round of direct, bilateral talks on Iraqi security. And, per the US military’s own admission, there has been a substantial reduction of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, suggesting a more cooperative role on Iran’s part. […]
But, Israel and the US do not call all the shots at the conference and Syria in particular, which has participated in a number of summits and conferences in the past in pursuit of regaining its territories in Israel’s hands, can increase the diplomatic pressure on Israel in Annapolis. And so can other states of the Arab League, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that have made clear their unwillingness to go along with the Bush administration’s division of the Middle East into “moderate” versus “radical” camps.
The big question, then, is to what extent the Arab participants at Annapolis will be successful in repelling the US-Israeli map of action against “Iran-led extremism”, which has a clear nuclear dimension, aimed at taking advantage of the Arab world’s fears of an Iranian bomb? Another question is what kind of concessions does Israel have to make on the Arab front to make gains at the Iran front? Will Israel go as far as appeasing Syria, to wrest Damascus away from Tehran at his critical juncture in the Iran nuclear crisis? […]
Any overt linkage of this summit with Iran has its own perils, potentially backfiring on the US and Israel, showing them to be not serious on the core Palestinian issues and, as Tehran has put it, pursuing “their own interests and objectives”. On the other hand, a soft linkage, whereby Syria’s pro-Iran proclivity can be chipped away and Iran’s international standing suffers, has its own dividends.
“Iran should follow the strategy of avoiding confrontation,” writes a Tehran analyst, Ibrahim Motaghi. After all, the latest IAEA report, despite its minor shortcomings, has been rightly viewed by Tehran as a timely plus, enhancing its hands in the nuclear negotiations and weakening those of the US. Yet, the Annapolis summit and the likely negative spins against Iran around it are aimed at eroding Iran’s nuclear gains and facilitating US-led coercive diplomacy at the UN and beyond. […]
The problem, however, is that whereas ElBaradei has reported “good progress” on Iran-IAEA cooperation, this has not had any impact on the US-led road to tougher UN sanctions on Iran, except perhaps small speed bumps. China, which balked at participating at the last “Five plus One” meeting on Iran (the Security Council’s permanent members plus Germany) , is now under pressure to go along with tougher sanctions, as is Germany, which like China has much to lose in lucrative business with Iran as a result of a sanctions regime.
But, again, a major problem for the US’s Iran policy is none other than the IAEA itself, whose findings, of the absence of any military diversion, etc, serve Iran’s purpose of rallying the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), comprising the majority of UN member states, behind its cause, in light of the NAM’s resolution at the recent IAEA meeting that warned against the meddling influence of “certain governments” in the IAEA’s relations with Iran.
Tuesday, I’ll be at the Dentist getting my teeth worked on. Somehow I expect that I will have a better time of it than Ms. Rice tomorrow as she tries to convince the Sunni Arabs in the region that they should give their full backing to an Israeli/United States military confrontation with Iran. Our Arab “friends” in the region don’t like Iran’s government much, and they have reasonable suspicions about it’s nuclear program, but neither do they want another war at their doorstep, one which will only inflame the passions of minority Shi’ite populations within their own countries, lead to an increase in terrorism throughout the region and quite possibly result in the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
At this point they see the Bush administration’s military approach to the Middle East’s problems as a complete and utter disaster. Why should they enable him to double down on Iran at this point? What can Bush and Rice offer them that would make such a risky strategy palatable? I can’t think of anything, can you?
