"Messages" Sent by Islamic Summit in Tehran Have Profound Implications for the U.S. in the Middle East

By Richard H. Curtiss

"This conference has not been convened to send a message to anyone. It was convened to bring about closer ties among Islamic countries."—Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, Dec. 7. 1997.

The three-day conference of 55 Islamic delegations that opened Dec. 9 in Tehran in the presence of kings, emirs, crown princes, prime ministers, vice presidents, foreign ministers and other heads of state clearly fulfilled its stated goal of bringing widely divergent Islamic countries together. And in doing so, despite the modest denial of the California-educated Iranian official quoted above, it sent many messages, some of them of profound importance.

The Message to the U.S.

The message to the United States was the most obvious. That message was expressed by former Undersecretary of State David D. Newsom in a Dec. 10 article in The Christian Science Monitor: "The linkage between progress in the peace process and the security of the Arab states of the Gulf is real. Ignoring that reality would be detrimental to U.S. interests..."

What drove the message home was the glaring contrast between the Tehran Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the U.S.-organized Middle East North Africa economic summit convened only three weeks earlier in nearby Doha. The latter attracted no heads of state except from the host country, no foreign ministers except the host and Madeleine Albright, and virtually no participation from any major U.S. allies in the region.

Clearly, although American officials revel in the title of "world's only remaining superpower," their inability, for domestic political reasons, to curb Binyamin Netanyahu, the rogue prime minister of a country of 5.8 million citizens which is in clear violation of international law and of solemn commitments to the United States, has brought American prestige and political influence to a new low. This is true not only in the United Nations, where the U.S. is totally isolated except for Israel and Micronesia, but also throughout the Islamic world, whose huge array of traditionally conservative nations should be America's natural allies.

Iran's Message to Its Neighbors

A more ambiguous message emanated to the other Muslim states from the conference host, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and particularly to its Gulf neighbors. Arriving delegates were greeted with banners strung across Tehran streets bearing strong denunciations of the United States and Israel. The messages seemed so harsh that they could be construed as attacks on Iran's Arab neighbors, who have military treaties with the U.S. and who tried, in the era of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, to accommodate a land-for-peace agreement with Israel.

Fiery rhetoric in the opening speech of Iran's Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, only reinforced the impression of an Iran still ready to defy the world. But relatively moderate rhetoric followed from newly-elected Iranian President Mohammed Khatami and even more newly appointed Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi.

This seemed to bear out the conclusion of Iran-watchers that now, more than ever before, the Iranian government consists of "competing power centers." At present, somewhere between the two extremes heard from at the conference, there is also Khatami's predecessor, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who throughout his incumbency managed to convince Westerners that he was a moderate and yet convince religious hardliners within Iran that he would do nothing to imperil their goals.

Iran's Message to Iranians

While fiery hard-liner Khamenei asserted in contacts with delegates that he has the last word on foreign policy, Iranians from various walks of life let them know that soft-spoken Khatami has their support—especially of the women and young people who gave him 70 percent of the vote in Iran's election last May. Seemingly they no longer consider him merely the best of a bad lot, but possibly a leader who can negotiate a relatively bloodless passage for their country from obscurantism back to the modern world—but hopefully without the excesses most Muslims associate with "Western secular culture."

Therefore the message within Iran was that there was hope of working out their internal problems peacefully. And the message to Iran's neighbors was that while Iranians do this, the profoundly fractured Iranian government is less likely to expend resources on subverting the existing governments in its neighborhood.

OIC Message to the World

The latter message, more than any other, is the key to reviving real unity of purpose and action among Islamic states. As thoughtful Muslims gradually are coming to believe since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the real menace to Muslim unity comes less from divide-and-rule Western colonialism than from fear of each other and of their own people among Muslim rulers.

None of the Arab rulers of the Gulf, much less their subjects, are happy about the return of foreign forces to the area in 1990. But fear of over-the-border invasion by Iraq, or subversion and internal agitation instigated by Iran, makes every one of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council members reluctant to cut the ties forged with the U.S. and other Western powers during the campaign to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Meanwhile Israelist policymakers, who have been steadily taking over both the Clinton White House and State Department since 1992, have worked hard to send their own message that Arab states could not look to the U.S. for protection unless they also supported the economic integration of Israel into the Middle East—with or without peace treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Starting All Over Again

Now all bets are off. Israel has a prime minister who is not interested in peace agreements with its neighbors, only territorial aggrandizement. The Arab states have signaled, by the contrast between their participation at Doha and at Tehran, that acceptance of such a regime is out of the question. And meanwhile, the fears that kept them apart have been somewhat alleviated by what happened in Tehran.

Other Messages

There were other messages delivered in Iran that may have seemed more local than global in their significance. But their impact may be felt even sooner. Participating Islamic governments made it clear they have no use for Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. But they also are not going to cooperate in starving his disenfranchised people, who have no way to bring him down in any case.

The Message to Iraq

If the U.S. resorts to military action in response to a Saddam provocation like shooting at a U-2 spy plane in the service of the United Nations, most Islamic rulers probably will say a silent prayer that a bomb or missile will find Iraq's ruler, and that his removal will not usher in the rule of an equally impulsive successor.

But if Saddam does not provide the provocation, the U.S. will have difficulty holding together support in the United Nations for continuation of any embargo that continues to impede the flow of needed food and medicine to Iraq. And there is little doubt that the Muslim countries already participating in small-scale efforts to get more food through to Iraq will be joined by others.

The Message to Turkey

Turkey's President Suleyman Demirel left the conference one day ahead of schedule. If there was one theme upon which there was total unanimity, it was the criticism of Islamic countries that have entered into military relations with Israel. In fact, there is only one such country, and its capital is Ankara.

The Turks have never forgiven the Arabs for joining the allied powers in World War I in an attempt to throw off Ottoman colonialism. Nor have they ever let their Arab neighbors forget that their "betrayal" of their Muslim rulers got them nothing but a generation of colonialism by their Christian allies, the British and French.

In fact the British, who became the new colonial overlords of Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, then compounded the betrayal, imposing Israel into the heart of the Levant. And the French, who became the new colonial overlords of Syria and Lebanon, rewarded their former enemies, the Turks, with a scenic and fertile piece of Syria the Turks call Hatay Province. Now it's the place where the pipeline that brings petroleum from Iraq reaches the Mediterranean, and where more pipelines from Central Asia may soon be built.

Many, or probably most, of the inhabitants of Hatay Province still speak Arabic at home. So the Syrians are getting their revenge. They are hosting, in Syria proper and in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, Kurdish Marxist rebels who have been conducting a full-scale ethnic war across much of southeastern Turkey.

Given this unhappy history, Turkey's military, which still calls the shots in a country that has been run according to democratic norms since the 1930s, probably gave little thought to the consequences of the military treaty it recently made with Israel, with the strong encouragement of the United States. To cement that alliance, Americans made it clear, with winks and nods, that the vast stream of U.S. military equipment that flowed to Turkey throughout the Cold War need not necessarily stop.

But the treaty, and subsequent joint military maneuvers between Muslim Turkey and the Jewish state occupying Muslim areas in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, south Lebanon and, most of all, East Jerusalem, does not sit well with the conservative Muslims of rural Turkey and the expanding slums of Turkey's major cities. It certainly was a factor in the coming to power by democratic means in 1996 of an Islamist government in Turkey, and its dismissal by the secularist Turkish military in June 1997.

The situation is reminiscent of the 1960s in Iran. Then, in pursuit of its policy of inducing the Shah of Iran to spend his petro-dollars on vast quantities of U.S. arms, and to brandish them to keep Israel's eastern neighbors in check, the U.S. helped ensure the Shah's downfall.

Now compounding the danger in Turkey is the national outrage over its rejection for membership in the European Union. Turks attribute that rejection to Christian bigotry. This, however, is only part of the truth. In fact, much as the U.S. would like to see the EU accept Turkey, this will not happen because of the 2.5 million Turks living among the 60 million Germans. Germans fear that if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, there will be a destabilizing influx into Germany of successive waves of relatives of the Turks already there.

If this seems far removed from the matters discussed at the Tehran conference, it is not. The Turks are an extraordinarily proud people, who for 400 years of the very recent past ruled much of North Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and twice knocked on the gates of Vienna. Now in the space of a week they have been rejected first by their fellow Muslims, and then by their fellow Europeans. With no place to go, something probably has to give inside Turkey itself.

In a Washington speech last summer, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins, a shrewd observer both of Middle Eastern and energy affairs, pointed up an irony of 1997. In the same year in which the Iranian public manifested its rejection of Islamist extremism, the people of Turkey seem increasingly prepared to reject the secularism that has failed to solve their problems or secure their acceptance by either West or East.

A Renewed Push for Unity

The Muslim countries of the world are in vastly different stages of national and economic development, but this has become more of a unifying than a divisive factor. The petroleum-producing countries have lavished huge sums on development projects in Islamic countries not so blessed. Now, some of the fear and distrust of each other has lessened at Tehran, while anger is growing at what they see as a mixture of U.S. impotence and arrogance.

Under these circumstances Binyamin Netanyahu's intransigent Israeli government may serve as a catalyst for a considerable increase in unity among the one-fifth of the human race who are Muslims. This would repeat the experience of half a century ago when newly created Israel served as a catalyst for the unity among Arab nations that gave substance to the League of Arab States.

It would be nice to believe that there are policymakers in the present U.S. foreign affairs establishment who recognize that with the world on the threshold of the 21st century, the Islamic world may be on the threshold of momentous changes which can profoundly affect not only their relations with the United States, but the fortunes of the United States.

This possibility adds urgency to the need for American policymakers not to succumb to the self-fulfilling prophecy of a coming "clash of civilizations" which is being cultivated so assiduously by the friends of Israel in U.S. academic, media and government circles.

The Israelists presently dominating Clinton administration foreign policy will resist it. But hopefully there are influential Americans who will understand and act on the clear and urgent messages from the Islamic Summit in Tehran.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.