In the midst of the slaughter in
Gaza, a forgotten casualty is President elect-Obama’s promise of a new
Middle East policy. The conflict is trapping Obama in imagines fault lines
aimed at limiting his ability to break with the Bush administration’s
Mideast policy.
I write about this in an
analysis published today on Huffington Post. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trita-parsi/israel-gaza-and-iran-trap_b_157483.html
Sincerely,
Trita Parsi, PhD
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Israel, Gaza
and Iran: Trapping Obama in Imagined Fault Lines
By Trita
Parsi
Jan 13, 2009
The
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/trita-parsi/israel-gaza-and-iran-trap_b_157483.html
In talking about
the assault on Gaza, neo-conservative pundits and Israeli hardliners have
relied on a familiar frame. The fighting in Gaza, they say, is a struggle
between Israel and so-called "moderate" Arab states (namely, Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia) on the one hand, and Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas
on the other. In reality, Israel is fighting Iran in Gaza, the argument reads.
These imagined
Manichean fault lines defy logic and reality. This conflict is the last thing
Tehran would have wished for in the last few weeks of the Bush administration.
It increases the risk of a US-Iran confrontation now, and reduces the prospects
for US-Iran diplomacy once President elect Obama takes over - neither of which
is in Iran's national interest. Rather than benefiting from the instability
following the slaughter in Gaza, Iran stands to lose much from the rise in
tensions. And so does Obama.
To Iran, Hamas is no Hezbollah
While there
certainly is an underlying rivalry between Israel and Iran that has come to
fuel many other otherwise unrelated conflicts in the region, not every war
Israel fights is related to Iran. In this specific case, the parallels to the
2006 Lebanon war are inaccurate. Iran's ties to Hamas are incomparable to the
much deeper relationship Iran enjoys with Hezbollah. Iran's close relationship
with Hezbollah is rooted in the Iranian view that Shiite minorities in Arab
countries are Iran's most likely allies and agents of pro-Iranian sentiment;
consequently, backing Hezbollah is viewed to be in Iran's core national
interest. In contrast, Iran's relationship with Hamas is a marriage of
convenience at best.
In spite of its
ardent pro-Palestinian rhetoric, Iran's relationship with Palestinian groups --
including Hamas -- has often been strained. Tensions with Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian Liberation Organization were mostly rooted in Arafat's insistence
on defining the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a secular Arab nationalist cause
-- leaving non-Arab Iran with no opening to play a leadership role in the
Muslim world's cause célèbre. Differences with Hamas, however, derived from a
mix of politics and ideology. Hamas' intellectual roots go back to the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni fundamentalist movement. Furthermore, during the
Iraq-Iran war, both the PLO and Hamas expressed support for Saddam Hussein.
Throughout the
1980s, Iran was better at offering rhetoric than practical support to the
Palestinian cause, due to Iran's immediate security concerns. This changed in
the mid-1990s, when Iran feared that the Oslo peace process was partially aimed
at securing Iran's prolonged isolation and political exclusion. But even after
the outbreak of the second Intifada, the Iranians took the lead in making
grandiose speeches about Iranian backing of the Palestinian cause, but seldom
tried to live up to the standards set in its statements. As I describe in Treacherous
Alliance - The Secret dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States (Yale
University Press), European diplomats in contact with representatives of
Islamic Jihad and Hamas visiting Iran after fighting between Israelis and
Palestinians had broken out reported back that both groups were utterly
disappointed with their Iranian hosts whom they accused of making empty
promises -- Tehran neither provided them with money nor weapons. A joke in the
streets of Tehran reflected Iran's pretense: "Why aren't there any stones
left to stone the adulteress? Per the order of the Supreme Leader, all the
stones have been shipped to Palestine as Iran's contribution to the Intifada."
Again, history
seems to be repeating itself. After daily demonstrations in Tehran in favor of
the Palestinians, including a six-day sit-in at Tehran airport by hard-line
students demanding government support for sending volunteers to fight in Gaza,
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei contained the protesters by
thanking them - while pointing out that Iran was not in a position to go beyond
rhetorical support since "our hands are tied in this arena." Other
Iranian officials have reinforced that message. General Mohammad Ali Jafari,
commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, declared that
Hamas does not need military support to defend itself. President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's brother indicated to the demonstrators at Tehran airport that
Iran's support for the Palestinians would be limited to "spiritual support
for the victimized people of Gaza."
Why Israel's
offensive in Gaza should worry Obama
Tehran's
complex, if not conflicted, response to the assault on Gaza can best be
understood in the context of its broader strategic aims. By rejecting any
material Iranian support or involvement in the Gaza battles, Iran's strategic
imperatives trumped its ideological concerns and pretenses once more.
Khamenei's statement regarding Iran's hands being tied resembles Ayatollah
Khomeini's refusal to support the Lebanese Shiites by directly entering into
war with Israel in 1984 through his edict that the road to Jerusalem goes
through Karbala. That is, until Iran has defeated Saddam Hussein, it will not
be sucked into a conflict with Israel, regardless of Tehran's ideological
opposition to the Jewish state.
Contrary to the
neo-conservative narrative that the fighting benefits Iran, Tehran seems to
view the Israeli assault on Gaza as highly problematic for several reasons.
First, there are suspicions in Tehran that Israel's offensive is a trap with
the aim of drawing both Hezbollah and Iran into the fighting. With only weeks
left till President Elect Obama takes office, any direct conflagration between
Iran and Israel would significantly reduce Obama's ability to deliver on his
campaign promise of opening talks with Tehran without preconditions.
Second,
increased tensions and polarization in the Middle East undermines Obama's
ability to pursue a new policy towards this region, including a shift in
America's 30-year old policy of isolating Iran. In fact, polarization along the
imagined Gaza fault lines - and a misleading equation of Hamas with Tehran -
traps the incoming Obama administration in an involuntary continuation of the
Bush policies that contributed to the increased instability in the Middle East
in the first place. From the vantage point of Israeli hardliners, this may be a
welcomed outcome since it will make compromise with Tehran more difficult and
pressure on Israel less likely. Hence, Tehran seems poised not to help reduce
Obama's maneuverability.
Third, the
conflict is creating unwelcome tensions between Iran and key Arab states. Arab
dictatorships fearing that the rise of Iran would weaken America's position in
the Middle East and that the survival of Hamas would embolden Islamic
nationalist opposition groups throughout the region - both of which would
undermine these Arab governments' undemocratic rule - initially sided with
Israel by remaining silent or explicitly putting the blame on Hamas. But as the
casualties rose and the images of slaughter spread on Arab satellite TVs, the
anger of the Arab streets reached the Arab palaces and courts. A similar
pattern was seen in 2006 when many Arab governments initially welcomed Israel's
air assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon. There, the change of heart had less to do
with the images of Lebanese casualties and more to do with Hezbollah's
surprising resilience and fighting power.
Though it is
true that increased tensions enables Iran to score propaganda victories on the
Arab streets, since many Arab states have either remained silent or secretly
collaborated with Israel to defeat Hamas, this does carry a great risk for
Tehran. If the fighting in Gaza goes on for too long, the spillover effects
will be felt in increased Arab-Iranian tensions at a time when Tehran is more
interested in soothing ties with the Arabs in order to minimize Arab disruption
to any potential US-Iran opening.
The
neo-conservative narrative and its imagined fault lines may temporarily add
fuel to the US-Israeli alliance, but it will neither bring stability nor order
to the region. Rather, it will push the Middle East further into endless
conflict and restrict America's next president to a mindset and a policy
framework that risks making the promise of change a dream unfulfilled.
Trita Parsi is
the author of Treacherous
Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US, a silver
medal recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award.
Andreas Persbo is a senior researcher at the Verification
Research, Training and Information Centre.
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