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In dealing with Iran old and new lines of conflict loom
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Asia on track for Millennium Goals
12/2006
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[ Middle East ]
In dealing with Iran,
old and new lines of conflict loom
Since the USA started to try to spread democracy in the Middle East five years ago, the region has gone downhill. Iraq has sunk into a bloody chaos; in Lebanon, Israel and a strengthened Iran have waged their first proxy war; and in Palestine, frustrated people are turning their backs on formal institutions of government and are increasingly paying attention to informal tribal and familial authorities.
The West, however, cannot and must not keep out of the region’s conflicts. Whether the situation in Iraq would improve or deteriorate if foreign troops withdrew fast, was a matter of debate at a conference held by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in November in Berlin. On the other hand, all participants largely agreed on how to assess the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: there will be no solution without pressure – and incentives – from the outside. Muriel Asseburg of Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a German think-tank, called upon the international community to immediately engage in fresh negotiations with clear objectives – stressing that Europe should not wait for the US administration to take the initiative.
Salah Abdel Shafi, representative of the Palestine National Authority in Sweden, demanded that Israel, Europe and the USA immediately lift financial sanctions against the Palestinians. But Hamas and Fatah would first have to agree on a government of national unity which recognises Israel’s right to exist. According to Gilbert Achcar, who teaches political science at the University of Paris VIII Israel has used any means available to prevent precisely that from happening. In his view, Israel wants to spark civil war in both Palestine and Lebanon. As evidence, he pointed to the fact that only one day after Hamas and Fatah had agreed on a common negotiating position in late June this year, Israel’s army marched into Gaza. According to him, the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit shortly beforehand simply served as a welcome pretext for Jerusalem.
Israel’s excessive military attacks, like the assault on Gaza in early November, do as much harm to all attempts at making peace in the region as do Palestinian suicide bombings. But matters are more complex than Achcar claims them to be. According to PLO representative Salah Abdel Shafi, Hamas never followed a reliable course in talks with Fatah on forming a government, instead was continually escalating the conflict with Israel and promoting “Islamisation” domestically.
How should the West deal with Hamas and other Islamist groups throughout the region? Boycotts have not only proven ineffective, but sometimes even had catastrophic consequences – from Algeria in 1992 to Gaza in 2006. The advice given by Gudrun Krämer, a scholar who teaches in Berlin, is that Islamic parties that play by the rules should be treated exactly the way other legitimate actors are. She says it is pointless to constantly ask for the “hidden agenda” of Islamists and then deal with them on the basis of such conjectures.
Rather, the focus should be on setting up competent political institutions with adequate provisions to control political power in the affected countries. According to Krämer, if that kind of control worked adequately, individual intentions of political actors would become secondary – whether leaning towards Islam or not.
Meanwhile, Martin S. Indyk, regional adviser to former US President Bill Clinton and Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, warned of underestimating the growing influence of radical Islamists. He sees a new axis emerging, from Iran via Syria and the Hezbollah to Hamas, which is increasingly influential in politics across the Middle East.
In his view, there is a danger of these powers convincing the people that their approach to solving the region’s crises is preferable to Western ones. Indyk wants the West, along with pro-Western Arab governments, to form a countervailing power to the axis outlined. He hopes the USA and the Europeans, above all, will soon embark on this kind of balance of power strategy.
Mark A. Heller, who heads the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, sees yet another fault line. In future, he believes, the main adversaries in the region will not be the USA and Israel versus Iran, but rather Shiites versus Sunnis. In order to contain Iran, Heller says, the West should therefore form an alliance with those Arab governments that feel threatened by emboldened Shiites, mentioning King Abdullah in Jordan or the Mubarak regime in Egypt. However, a precondition for this kind of alliance would be to resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine, as an inter-Muslim clash of Shiites with Sunnis would not become evident beforehand.
Other experts, however, doubt that the Shiite-Sunni divide is felt as keenly by the population in the countries concerned as it is at the governments’ level. During the Berlin conference, survey results were quoted, according to which Iran’s policy towards the West meets with high approval all over the Arab world, regardless of whether the local communities are predominantly Sunni or Shiite.
Strategies as envisaged by Indyk and Heller are risky. They have the potential of pitting Arabs in general against the West and Israel more than ever, but also of expanding Iraq’s civil war between Shiites and Sunnis across the entire region. Andreas Reinicke, who heads the Near East Division of the German Foreign Office, also warns of confrontational approaches. Using the example of Syria, which, according to Indyk, is “part of the problem, not the solution”, the diplomat argued in Berlin that one sometimes has to approach problems in order to solve them.
Thus another well-known line of conflict became apparent at the November conference: the division between Europe on the one side and Israel and the USA on the other. This divide could soon become decisive again, particularly concerning how to deal with Iran. (ell)
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