Middle East Special: "Why Chuckles Greeted Hillary Clinton's Gulf Tour"

Rami Khouri writes for Beirut's Daily Star:

American secretaries of state have been coming to the Middle East to create all sorts of complex alliances against Iran for most of my recent happy life, but every time this show passes through our region I learn again the meaning of the phrase “lack of credibility.” Hillary Clinton is the latest to undertake this mission, and like her predecessors her comments are often difficult to take seriously.

We are told that her trip to the region has two main aims: to strengthen Arab resolve to join the United States and others in imposing harsh new sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear development program; and to harness Arab support for resumed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In both of these critical diplomatic initiatives the US has taken the lead and achieved zero results. Either the actors involved – Arabs, Israelis, Iranians – are all chronically, even chromosomally, dysfunctional (for which there is some evidence) or the US is particularly inept when assuming leadership.

Middle East Transcript: Hillary Clinton at Qatar Town Hall Meeting (15 February)
The Latest from Iran (17 February): Psst, Want to See Something Important?

The weakness in both cases, I suspect, has to do with the US trying to define diplomatic outcomes that suit its own strategic objectives and political biases (especially pro-Israel domestic sentiments). So Washington pushes, pulls, cajoles and threatens all the players with various diplomatic instruments, except the one that will work most efficiently in both the Iranian and Arab-Israeli cases: serious negotiations with the principal parties, based on applying the letter of the law, and responding equally to the rights, concerns and demands of all sides.



Two Clinton statements during her Gulf trip this week were particularly revealing of why Washington continues to fail in its missions in our region. The first was her expression of concern that Iran is turning into a military dictatorship: “We see that the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted, and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship,” Clinton said.

Half a century of American foreign policy flatly contradicts this sentiment (which is why Clinton heard soft chuckles and a few muffled guffaws as she spoke). The US has adored military dictatorships in the Arab world, and has long supported states dominated by the shadowy world of intelligence services. This became even more obvious after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Washington intensified cooperation with Arab intelligence services in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East are military and police states where men with guns rule, and where citizens are confined to shopping, buying cellular telephones, and watching soap operas on satellite television. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, as well as the entire Gulf region and other states are devoted first and foremost to maintaining domestic order and regime incumbency through efficient, multiple security agencies, for which they earn American friendship and cooperation. When citizens in these and other countries agitate for more democratic and human rights, the US is peculiarly inactive and quiet.

If Iran is indeed becoming a military dictatorship, this probably qualifies it for American hugs and aid rather than sanctions and threats. Clinton badly needs some more credible talking points than opposing military dictatorships. (Extra credit question for hard-core foreign policy analysts: Why is it that when Turkey slipped out of military rule into civilian democratic governance, it became more critical of the US and Israel?)

The second intriguing statement during Clinton’s Gulf visit was about Iran’s neighbors having three options for dealing with the “threat” from Iran: “They can just give in to the threat; or they can seek their own capabilities, including nuclear; or they ally themselves with a country like the United States that is willing to help defend them. I think the third is by far the preferable option.”

This sounds reasonable, but it is not an accurate description of the actual options that the Arab Gulf states have. It is mostly a description of how American and Israeli strategic concerns and slightly hysterical biases are projected onto the Gulf states’ worldviews. These states in fact have a fourth option, which is to negotiate seriously a modus vivendi with Iran that removes the “threat” from their perceptions of Iran by affirming the core rights and strategic needs of both sides, thus removing mutual threat perceptions.

This is exactly the same option the US used when it negotiated détente and the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union (and whose results ultimately brought about the collapse of Communism). Why the US does not use the same sensible approach to the perceived threat from Iran is hard to explain. Perhaps two reasons explain it: Washington would have to deal with Iran (and other defiant Middle Easterners) through negotiations rather than haughty neo-colonialism; and, Israel would have to submit to nuclear inspections and end its aggressive behavior.

Comments

[maliheh[tehranweekly]]

iran is not moving in a dictatorship ~iran is a dictatorship ~get it right hillary clinton

[Catherine]

Excellent op-ed piece. Thanks for posting this. I couldn't agree more. However, the extremely valid points made by the author still do not answer the question of whether Iran is in fact slipping toards military dictatorship or not.

[Doug]

    This is a good revelation about the inherent wickedness of diplomacy. None at the table, it would appear, care at all about the death and suffering of the Iranian protesters. In this game, it appears, Hilary Clinton is out of her league. The others know which lies to tell in each situation.
    If human suffering were a pure game then the only way to win this game would be for the US to do the opposite of what it has been doing in certain aspects: it is rumored that some time ago, we told the Israelis that they need not worry about the Iranian nuclear program because we had secretly intercepted or interfered with some shipments of materials to Iran. It is said that we sabotaged parts for the centrifuges in such a way that although they would appear normal would be sub-standard and would not work well.
    Instead, perhaps we should clandestinely help them make a successful bomb and then we can attack them or get sanctions in place. Perhaps we should give them missiles with targeting computers that only point it at Saudi Arabia, and give it a long range missile pointing at Russia and China. Then maybe we'd get cooperation.
    This is a joke of course.
    But there ought to be a way around all this cynical diplomacy that kills innocent people.
    Actually, if we ever gave the green light to Israel to attack Iran, a better target than the nuclear facilities would be IRGC headquarters and barracks.