VECTORS

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Breakthrough to Iran --
A New Mideast Triad in the Making?

By Franz Schurmann

<fschurmann@pacificnews.org>

Date: 10-28-96

In a commentary distributed by PNS on Oct. 21, PNS editor Franz Schurmann predicted a major U.S. diplomatic initiative was in the works towards Iran. On Oct. 25, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Robert Pelletreau, in a speech in Abu Dhabi, called for talks between Washington and Teheran. Schurmann looks at the 1971 Nixon-brokered breakthrough to China and the prospects for a similar scenario unfolding in the Middle East. Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at U.C. Berkeley, has authored numerous books on U.S. foreign politics and reads widely in the Arab language media.

Last week, in a little noted speech in Abu Dhabi, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Robert Pelletreau called for the U.S. and Iran to start talks. If Teheran accepts, it could mark the first step in a Mideastern replay of the 1971 Nixon breakthrough to China.

A quarter century ago, Nixon was desperately looking for a way out of the Vietnam quagmire. China, long portrayed as the world's most dangerous exporter of revolution, suddenly became a quasi-ally. The turnaround came in part because by then China had gone from being best friends to worst enemies with Washington's number one enemy, the Soviet Union.

Today the U.S. is facing not one but two quagmires in the Middle East: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a divided Kurdistan. In his Abu Dhabi speech, Pelletreau warned that "a collapse of peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis could trigger a new cycle of violence in the Middle East." While less apocalyptic on the Kurdish conflict in northern Iraq, Pelletreau did say that "clashes there will encourage other states to intervene militarily in the region."

Pelletreau has reason to be optimistic on Kurdistan. He has been doing shuttle diplomacy with the leaders of the two rival Kurdish groups, Iraq-backed Mas'ud Barzani and Iran-backed Jalal Talibani. Through these two leaders, the U.S. has found diplomatic bridges to both Iran and Iraq. Just before Pelletreau's speech, Saddam Hussein sent a personal messenger to Iranian leader Rafsanjani calling for a region-wide settlement. The news, ignored in the U.S. media, made headlines in the Arab-language media.

What the Clinton administration may now envision is the possibility of the U.S. inserting itself between Iran and Iraq as key middle-man for peace in the region. This would duplicate the position Nixon achieved in 1971 when he inserted the U.S. as referee between China and the Soviet Union, pairing his China breakthrough with a breakthrough to the Soviet Union. In the process, Vietnam lost both its China and its Soviet cards. (That it wound up winning the war was in good part due to Nixon's presidential incapacitation due to Watergate.)

Both Iran and Iraq have strong reasons for wanting a rapprochement with the U.S. Saddam's main aim is to restore Iraq -- and himself -- to its pre-Gulf War status as a unified strongman of the Middle East. Iran, which enjoys political stability, desperately wants access to the world market to get out of its economic stagnation and poverty. At the same time, both Baghdad and Teheran finally appear ready to put their own eight-year bloody war behind them.

Should a three-way rapprochement come about, a new Middle Eastern triad could emerge: Iraq, Iran and the U.S. While it would take some creative PR to turn both countries from demons into acceptable allies, Washington was able to accomplish a similar transformation with the "Chi Coms" (Chinese Communists) in 1971.

As then, there is more at stake today than averting a new cycle of violence. Had Nixon not ended the Vietnam war but chosen to fight it out even with China staying out of the action, the force of the Vietnamese revolution would have spilled over into Indo-China and maybe even Burma and beyond. (At the time, Maoist Naxalite revolutionaries were fomenting revolution in India, and Arab revolutionary movements were creeping up the oil-rich Gulf).

Today two revolutionary currents are flowing in the Middle East. One comes from eastern Turkey where the Kurdish PKK preaches a Maoist-type revolution. A second flows out of Afghanistan where the Islamic Talibans are calling on the poor to rise up and take power.

In Teheran and Baghdad, as in Ankara, Jerusalem, Cairo, there is little taste for revolution. In all these nation-states the political classes want first and foremost to stay in power. Just at this moment, Washington may be offering to referee a grand alliance that could open up the golden doors of the world economy even as it guaranteed them stability.

The challenge is to drain the two quagmires and pave them over with good solid asphalt on which industrial, commercial and cultural links can be forged. This is what's happening today in once-revolutionary China, Vietnam and South Asia. Pelletreau's speech suggests it could happen today in the Middle East, even though the region seems to be hurtling towards a new cataclysm.