Has the Obama’s White House started to get its political calculations wrong on Iran? On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the ASEAN summit being held in Thailand that if Tehran did not come clean on and scrap its nuclear weapons program, the US is prepared to boost the defenses of the Gulf countries.
That is effectively a ratcheting up of the warnings President Barack Obama has already given, to the effect that Washington’s hand of friendship to Iran will not stay open indefinitely. But is this really the time to be reiterating such a threat? The dispute over the Iranian presidential election has still not been resolved. The theocratic establishment is clearly split but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei are blaming the continuing unrest on outside interference, particularly the Americans and the British. Therefore, this latest intervention from Clinton may very well be untimely, since it reinforces the Iranian leadership’s arguments.
Obama cannot one moment, while expressing concern at the repression of those protesting the presidential vote, refuse to be drawn into the current imbroglio but then the next permit his secretary of state to launch a veiled threat toward Iran. Besides, can anyone in the White House or the State Department seriously imagine that such a warning is going to bring about a change in Ahmedinajad’s hard-line policies? Rather it is going to cause the regime to hunker down and blame even more strongly and rightly or wrongly all its current domestic troubles on outside interference.
Then there is the wider consideration that the Gulf states made it clear to President George W. Bush and repeated the message to Obama, that they would prefer that relations with Iran should be conducted on a regional basis and that there should be no need for defense guarantees from outside powers, not least from the United States which has its own particular long-standing differences with the government in Tehran.
There is also of course more behind Clinton’s statement on Wednesday. It is not simply the Gulf countries that Washington says it is seeking to bolster. The defense of Israel against a possible Iranian nuclear attack actually lies at the real heart of Clinton’s words. And here also stands the elephant in the room.
Israel has already a nuclear arsenal with technology begged, borrowed or stolen from the US. In its desire to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponry, is Washington also prepared to provide a shield for the Arab world and indeed, even for Iran against Israeli nuclear threats?
The major concern at this apparent new shift in Obama’s approach to Iran has to be that the Americans are once again allowing one single part of the complex regional issues to divert their attention from everything else. A just Palestinian settlement remains the lynch pin of any successful US Mideast policy, from which so much else is likely to fall into place. If Washington gets confrontational with Tehran, the Lebanese, Palestinians and Iraqis will pay the price with more Iranian-sponsored instability and the chances of a lasting regional peace will evaporate.
