Perilous Crossroads for Iran and the US

By Andrew I. Killgore

"Did it ever occur to anyone that Iran may not want better relations with the United States?"

—Anonymous Iran specialist, June 1991

Two basic concerns have long motivated Iranian foreign policy. The first is fear of Russia, which for 200 years pressed southward and threatened Iranian territory. The second is ambition to play a dominant role in the Persian Gulf, especially during the past 50 years, when the area's vast petroleum reserves lent it such enormous economic and strategic significance.

The Washington-based retired foreign service officer quoted above, who prefers to remain anonymous, was expressing irritation to the writer over the recent spate of news stories portraying Iran as increasingly "pragmatic," and preparing to resume cordial relations with the United States. Knowing Iran perhaps as well as any American, he sees that the US is no longer needed as Iran's protector, because the Soviet Union is no longer perceived in Tehran as a threat.

A Means to an End

Iran could, however, use the United States as a means to an end. If Iran is to repair war damage from its 1980-1988 war with Iraq, and further develop its economy, Iran needs Western capital and technology. Neither can be supplied by Japan or Europe without offending their American ally before Iran's Hezbollah (Party of God) allies in Lebanon release the Western hostages, including six Americans, they still are holding. Also, after these hostages are released, Tehran can retrieve the huge total of Iranian financial assets still frozen in the United States.

Iran then can look to Europe and Japan for the help it needs, while continuing to cast a jaundiced eye on the "Great Satan," the hateful epithet for the United States employed until recently by Iran's Islamic revolutionary government.

Iran is likely to use its influence to free the hostages, the foreign service specialist quoted above believes. After that, Iran's "pragmatism," so frequently cited by Israel oriented journalists in the US, will probably have run its course. Unless.

This " unless " refers to the possibility that Iran's ambition to dominate the Gulf's 65 percent of the world's total petroleum reserves will overcome its fear of failure. Tehran's Islamic revolutionary leaders know that, under the leadership of the late Muhammad Reza Shah, Iran failed disastrously in its previous attempt to dominate the Gulf, even after it was armed to the teeth by the United States in 1972, to become America's surrogate in the Gulf.

This bitter experience ultimately left Iran with 700,000 dead and its economy destroyed in a war with Iraq which eventually became a war of Iran against the entire Arab world, with the exception of Syria.

The chances of Iranian success, however, could be better this time. Ever since 1967, Israel has desperately sought a non-Arab Middle East ally to intimidate the Arabs into acquiescing in, Israeli territorial expansion. Israel continues to favor Iran as that ally because of ancient mutual antipathies between Arabs and Persians.

Tehran sees the Middle East with Iraq weakened militarily and economically, and the Soviet Union so eager for American economic assistance that it is quite unlikely to risk rearming Iraq.

In a political system where media "direction" can and sometimes does guide US Middle East policy, Tehran can see tantalizing hints that Israel's powerful supporters in the United States could again incline Washington to select Iran as its Gulf surrogate. Straws in the wind are not only the accounts by pro-Israel journalists of Iranian "pragmatism, " but also a rising tide of media reports seeking to divert blame for the current impasse on peace negotiations from the intransigence of Israel's Likud government to Saudi Arabia, Syria or the PLO.

Such evidence of continued Zionist domination of the US media alone will not tempt Iran. What could move it to challenge the entire Arab world again would be inaction by President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker if Congress agrees to bestow billions of dollars on Israel to settle Soviet Jews without requiring Israel in return to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.

It seems unlikely that the administration would so blatantly betray its Arab coalition partners in the successful war to oust Iraq from Kuwait, not to mention King Hussein and the Palestinians. If the US does so, however, Islamic revolutionary Iran may emulate the Shah and again "go for the prize" of domination of Gulf oil reserves.

In spite of its deep ideological bias against the United States, Iran is still twice as populous as all of the Arab states on the Gulf combined. And, as a legacy of centuries of Arab-Iranian rivalry, Iranians can easily convert their assumption of cultural superiority over the Arabs into a feeling of "entitlement" to Gulf hegemony, and the wealth, power and grandeur that entails.

The assumption of the anonymous foreign service officer still makes sense. Unless, of course, Israel's demonstrated power in the media, and documented power in Congress, persuades the Bush administration to scrap "the new world order" in favor of old-world divide-and-rule colonialism in the Mideast.

Andrew L Killgore, who was US ambassador to the state of Qatar at the time of his retirement from the career foreign service, is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.