Passing the blame

Nasrin Alavi

The White House strategy of pinning the escalation of violence in Iraq on Iranian meddling is easily proven to be "a gross misrepresentation of the facts".

After all what has Iran to gain from an unstable Iraq? With the fall of Saddam, Iran's major influence in Shia-dominated Iraq has grown. A country gifted the upper hand by US foreign policy, need merely sit back and reap the rewards. The emergence of a relatively stable Iraq will mean that the Iranians are home and dry and can start lobbying their close powerful allies in Iraq to make calls for a US exit.

It is hard to believe that even US officials have much confidence in their charges against the Iranian government of trying to destabilise Iraq. Washington can choose to ignore the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group led by former secretary of state James Baker for starting a dialogue with Iran. But it cannot discount its finding that lays the blame elsewhere, showing that the Saudis are a source of direct funding of Iraqi insurgents.

Last week Tom Friedman pertinently asked why Saudi Arabia, a country where "private charities help sustain al-Qaida" around the world, is a natural US ally, while Iran, whose residents on September 11 "were among the very few in the Muslim world to hold spontaneous pro-US demonstrations", is not? He added that Iran "has never sent any suicide bombers to Iraq, and has long protected its Christians and Jews".

Be that as it may, Washington may at least feel comforted to have the backing of the Arab street and Arab leaders in unison for a change in pinning the blame for the rising conflict in Iraq on the door of Shia Muslims and, in particular, Iran. Especially at a time when President Bush has urged the world to isolate Iran until it gives up its "nuclear ambitions".

The Henry Kissinger model of negotiating with Iran from a position of strength by pitting Sunni Arab regimes and Israel against Shia Iran may be proving lucrative to arms dealers who are heartily capitalising on the fears of countries such as Saudi Arabia. But these divide-and-conquer tactics are clearly refuelling the poisonous sectarian war in Iraq and it will prove catastrophic if such heightened hostilities - unprecedented since the 17th century - spread throughout Middle East. Three thousand Iraqis are killed every month. The dead, by and large, are Shias killed by Sunni jihadists.

But even the media in the Arab world is unconcerned about these mass murders and, at times, blames the slaughtered for provoking the massacres by simply daring to exist and for having the audacity to want a government that represents the majority Shia and Kurdish populations of Iraq.

Also absent are the habitually noisy self-proclaimed Muslim community leaders in the west, who are quick to voice their contempt for the crimes and double standards of the west and misrepresentation of Islam. Yet they are seemingly unaware of their own hypocrisies and double standards in showing outrage at the deaths of Lebanese Muslims in the recent war with Israel, but appearing to have no qualms about the rising Muslim-on-Muslim killings in Iraq or Palestine, which are increasingly becoming the enduring symbol of a faith they profess to represent.

To simply point the finger at the United States for all the woes of the Islamic world does not solve anything; yet Washington is once more making very dangerous moves in the region. Perhaps Tony Blair is right and the military option is now truly "off the table". But the war of words with Iran and the extreme military build-up in the area is an accident waiting to happen.

For many Iranians the ominous signs are all too familiar. On 22 September 1980 Iraq attacked western Iran, launching the longest conventional war (1980-88) of the 20th century. That the United States gave considerable assistance to Iraq during the war is well documented. The United States wanted to see Iran overpowered, fearing it would overrun or inflame other oil-producing states and export its Islamic revolution.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were used as cannon fodder in "human wave" attacks on Iraqi artillery positions. Yet one need only walk through the Muslim, Armenian, Assyrian and Jewish cemeteries of Iran and read the gravestones of the young men who died defending their country to grasp the degree of patriotism towards a homeland and a heritage that goes back thousands of years. Some may view such national attitudes as yet another sign of our extremist position. Be that as it may, Europeans need not look further than the patriotism that sustained the first or second world war.

Unlike most countries in the Middle East, Iran's borders are not lines in the sand drawn on the impulse of 19th and 20th century European colonialists. So-called American thinktanks can think themselves blue in the face, but Iran will not be balkanised.

Strategic strikes against Iran will not bring about an uprising; just as they didn't in 1980s when Iran was attacked. People are unhappy with the regime and recently we have seen thousands of student demonstrators on the streets of Iran chanting against their leaders; yet in the pre-Iran-Iraq-war period it was not uncommon to see tens of thousands of different disgruntled individuals on the march against a dawning theocracy. Overnight, under the blackout of war, everything disappeared and most political groups were gagged and labelled as traitors. Faced with a greater external enemy, many others voluntarily took an oath of silence for the sake of unity.

Today an international crisis will only serve to revive Iran's infamous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Islamic Republic's last naive desperate grab for a rebirth.

So why is the US once again at the same juncture with Iran that not so long ago, after eight years of a brutal war, failed, giving the world a bolstered Saddam Hussein in the process? We are all aware of the brutality and wrath that has been unleashed by the invasion of Iraq. But what calamity or ogre will emerge out of yet another possible war in the region? Will Israel become further barricaded in a mode of relentless wars with its neighbours that would make the recent war with Lebanon look like neighbourly banter? A Saudi Arabia armed to the brim controlled by al-Qaida? A nuclear Pakistan at the hand of jihadists? How certain is the United States of the stability of these countries that it counts among its natural allies?

It may be worth remembering that nearly a year before the Iranian revolution, the prevailing US intelligence assessment of Iran at the time may well have impelled President Carter to call Iran "an island of stability" in a troubled region.