The Purpose Of Condoleezza Rice's Visit To The Middle East

Condi's top priority
Guardian Newspaper, October 6, 2006
Brian Whitaker

The purpose of Condoleezza Rice's visit to the Middle East is becoming clear - to encourage Arab states to form an alliance against Iran.

With a cheery wave and admiring smiles from the Palestinian president, Condoleezza Rice continues her whirlwind visit to "moderate" parts of the Middle East. Meanwhile, the real purpose of her trip is becoming a little clearer.

According to the Wall Street Journal (subscribers only), "leaders across the political spectrum" in Israel "now agree that Israel must find ways to work with other Middle Eastern states, even if that means dealing with governments that have been hostile to Israel in the past".

The idea is to form a "moderate" alliance in which Israel and some of the Arab countries (principally Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states) would join forces to combat Iranian influence, and Shia influence more generally.

This is partly motivated by American/Israeli desires to "get" Iran but also an attempt to repair damage from the 34-day war in which Israel accidentally bolstered the regional standing of Iran and its Lebanese ally, Hizbullah.

The bones of the emerging package are that Arab support for the US and Israel against Iran would be rewarded by progress - or at least the prospect of progress - on the Israeli-Palestinian front. So now, for example, we have the Israeli justice minister, Meir Sheetrit, testing the water with a hint that Israel might finally be prepared to discuss the Arab Peace Initiative after ignoring it for the last four years.

"We are talking about a full peace," he said encouragingly. "We want a full peace. We do not necessarily have to accept every detail of the initiative - withdrawal to the 1967 borders. But let's talk."

A spokeswoman for prime minister Ehud Olmert said later: "These are not the Israeli government's ideas. These are his [Mr Sheetrit's] ideas." Nevertheless, the move is seen as significant because Mr Sheetrit is one of Mr Olmert's close allies. Similarly, there have been reports (subsequently but not very convincingly denied by both sides) of secret high-level contact between Israel and Saudi Arabia. All this is meant to indicate, rightly or wrongly, that after a long period of stagnation movement is afoot.

On the Arab side, it is certainly true that the Sunni-ruled Gulf states are apprehensive about Iran, as they have been for many years. They are, after all, a good deal closer to Tehran geographically than either Tel Aviv or Washington.

The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was widely viewed as a proxy war in which Saddam Hussein (also classified as a "moderate" in those days) fought on behalf of the rich Gulf states - and partly with their funding - to keep Iran at bay. Their alleged ingratitude afterwards was one factor behind Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The Sunni Gulf rulers are nervous, too, because most have Shia communities of varying sizes in their midst which are marginalised at present but could stir up trouble under Iranian influence.

Well away from the Gulf, Jordan, whose indigenous Shia population is negligible, has suddenly (perhaps a little too conveniently) discovered a Shia "threat" of its own - apparently coming from Iraqis who have taken refuge there. In a press briefing on October 1, Ms Rice stated that Jordan "is making really great strides in its political evolution". If anyone has the foggiest idea what she was referring to, please let me know, but it's easy to see the beginnings of a claim that Jordan's giant strides under the unpopular King Abdullah are being sabotaged by militant Iranian-backed Shias.

Whether any of this will be enough to draw some of the Arab states into an alliance with the US and Israel against Iran remains to be seen - though I think it's very unlikely. A similar idea was tried in the early 1980s under president Ronald Reagan but failed for the same reasons that it is likely to fail this time.

The problem is differences in priorities. The US is misreading the signals if it thinks the Gulf Arab leaders share its Iranophobia. They are uneasy, yes, but not hysterical.

"They know they have to live with Iran; it's not going to go away," said Robert Hunter, a Middle East expert at the RAND Corporation. "It's not like the early 1980s when the mullahs tried and failed to spread their revolution ... Aside from [their backing of] Hizbullah and a few minor scrapes here and there, Iran has not been particularly assertive toward these countries."

As far as the Gulf states are concerned, the priority issue is not Iran but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in their eyes lies at the root of the Middle East's problems. Washington - especially under President Bush - does not share that view, so it's not surprising if the Gulf states conclude that talk of Israeli-Palestinian peace is merely a ruse to get them on board for a showdown with Iran.

"The holy grail of US policy in the region has always been to get the Arabs to forget about the Arab-Israeli conflict and to focus instead on some other threat," said Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University. "If you don't think you can or are not prepared to deal with the Arab-Israel dispute, then trying to convince the Arabs that they should subordinate it to other strategic concerns is really a very attractive thought."

Attractive as it may seem from Washington, it's essentially a non-starter. In the words of Michael Hudson, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University:
There's no doubt that there are people in the Gulf, especially, who are very worried about Iran, but the idea that they would be enlisted in an alliance with the US and Israel is just not a politically inviting prospect.

Until the US starts getting actively and even-handedly involved in bringing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an end, it's really politically impossible for the so-called moderate Arab leaders to sign on to the [anti-Iran] project.