Chatham House Report:
- The US-led "war on terror" has bolstered Iran's power and influence in the Middle East, especially over its neighbour and former enemy Iraq,
- Unless stability could be restored to the region, Iran's power will continue to grow.
- Iran has now superseded the US as the most influential power in Iraq, regarding its former adversary as its "own backyard".
- It is also a "prominent presence" in its other war-torn neighbour, Afghanistan.
Quotes:
There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East.
The United States, with coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures.
The US-driven agenda for confronting Iran is severely compromised by the confident ease with which Iran sits in its region,"
While the US and Europeans slowly grind the nuclear issue through the mills of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations security council, Iran continues to prevaricate, feeling confident of victory as conditions turn ever more in its favour.
Iran "simply too important - for political, economic, cultural, religions and military reasons - to be treated lightly".
The United States needs to take a step back and reassess its entire policy towards Iran and work out, first of all, what does it want and how is it going to achieve it, because at the moment everything is rather like putting a sticking plaster on a fairly raw wound, and it is not really actually doing much at all.
Bush administration has shown little ability to use politics and culture to pursue its strategic interests while Iran's knowledge of the region and its fluency in the languages have given it a strong advantage.
Ali Ansari, a Middle East analyst with Chatham House:
Western policy toward the Middle East shows a complete lack of imagination. There is a world of opportunities between neglect and military action which has yet to be fully explored.
One of the authors of the Chatham House report, Dr Ali Ansari of the University of St Andrews, told BBC Radio Five Live:
We've seen really since 9/11 that the chief beneficiary of America's global war on terror in the Middle East has been the very country that it considers to be a major part or a founding member of the axis of evil.
And that basically tells us that there's an enormous incoherence in American approach to the Middle East.
They simply haven't managed to work out a strategy and a policy that will work and will achieve results.
1 comment:
Trudy Rubin says the Lebanon war makes U.S. plight even worse in Iraq/Iran:
Shiites make up only 10 percent to 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. U.S. Mideast policy has traditionally been focused on Sunni countries led by Arab allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, it upended a regime whose Sunni leaders repressed a predominately Shiite population. U.S. leaders thought Iraq was dominated by a secular middle class. They believed an Iraqi democracy led by elected Shiite officials would encourage Iranian Shiites to overthrow their regime.
Wrong!
Iraq's Shiite majority was predominantly religious. Shiite political leaders, who had spent their exile years in Tehran, would not drop their ties with the Iranians.
By removing Saddam, the United States made Shiite Iran the strongest power in the region.
This Shiite revival helped other minority Shiite movements in the region, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, to strengthen their position. They were aided by Iran, and - in Hezbollah's case - by elections.
But U.S. missteps in Iraq opened the door to a virulent Sunni insurgency that deliberately targeted Shiite civilians. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda followers in Iraq wanted a civil war and used hatred of Shiites to recruit Sunni Arab jihadis.
Iraq's Shiites have grown increasingly impatient with the inability of the United States to curb Sunni attacks on their civilians. Many Shiites suspect that the United States, nervous about Iranian influence, is turning against them and moving back toward its traditional support of Arab Sunnis.
Sistani's calls to refrain from revenge are heeded less and less by his followers; the Shiite militia led by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has murdered innumerable Sunni civilians and is growing in strength.
Enter the war in Lebanon.
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