[Comment] Are we heading for a second war in the middle east?
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY
10.03.2006 @ 09:40 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - Oh dear! In the matter of Iran and its desire to enrich uranium for purposes specified, but not generally believed, we are getting into a very difficult situation; one indeed from which it is not altogether easy to see a happy outcome.
For either Iran will be forced to back down, thereby ensuring continuing Muslim animosity towards the West, or we shall; meaning that Iran will build an enrichment facility and later, perhaps, a nuclear bomb. And if neither side backs down there will be war.
If we want to see Iran complying with the UN's demands, we in the West will have to ensure that one of 'our' own states - Israel - obeys them, too. (Photo: United Nations)
Thus far the dance of negotiation has been proceeding under the umbrella of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' watchdog on these matters.
Now the stakes are raised: Iran has been referred formally to the UN Security Council, who will undoubtedly take some species of action, though probably mild enough to begin with.
This Iran will just as undoubtedly ignore - for why should it do otherwise? We shall then embark on round two and down the slippery slope we all shall go.
As with Iraq, the rhetoric is already fierce, 'pain and harm' being the current threats of choice. Members of the US administration rattle their verbal sabres in their scabbards and speak of no option (that is, war) being ruled out. The audience applauds. Oh dear!
No force … yet
The European line has been softer. 'Force is not even on the agenda,' the mantra regularly trotted out by Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary. But always there is the unspoken 'yet:' three little letters, heavy with portent.
So despite the eloquent diplomatic protestations to the contrary, we - and that very much means us in the European Union - are back on this same slippery slope that led to war in Iraq.
Who will blink first? And what happens if it's not them? We should not underestimate the gravity of the situation.
Let us stand back a moment and look at the issue from an Iranian, as opposed to a Western, perspective. Iran is a large country with a land area three times the size of France and a population almost as big as Germany's. It lies at the centre of a deeply turbulent, troubled and insecure region.
Of the seven countries with which it shares a land border, two have recently been invaded by the West. Moreover, it is sandwiched within an easy air strike of nuclear Israel in the west, nuclear Pakistan in the east and nuclear Russia to the north.
All that Iranian gas
Its Islamic cultural and religious ethos is perceived as threatened by a Coca-Cola world of globalised American values. And if this were not enough, Iran is sitting on some three trillion cubic metres of natural gas at a time when the West is running short of hydrocarbons.
If Iraq was the oil war, Iran is determined it should not become the gas war.
No wonder then that Iran's elders feel under threat and why having the capability to develop a bomb could seem logical, indeed imperative, to Iranian eyes.
No doubt the country wants a civil nuclear programme too. After all wasn't that what the European Commission was advocating to its own member states in its own energy paper published just this week? It's not a matter of being climate-change friendly; it's just that shortly there'll be no more oil.
One lesson we might have learned from the Iraqi imbroglio - and which we rapidly need to take on board in this mounting confrontation with Iran - is that the motive behind both countries’ recalcitrance is essentially the same: to wit lack of security and international order in the region, coupled with a distrust of the UN.
And the fundamental reason for this is the septic thorn of the Palestinian conflict, which continues to spread its infection throughout the wider Middle East and beyond.
It is this unresolved mess that is the true cause of the 'pain and harm' and which today increasingly bedevils the orderly settlement of international affairs.
Sort this out and Iran can become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Universal application of international law
But for this to happen we in the West have to accept that international law must be applied universally, to friends of the US and Europe as well as to our enemies; to established democracies as well as to dictatorships and failing states.
When Israel - the right of whose people to live in security and at peace within internationally recognised borders is absolute - is able, with the backing of the United States, to flout UN Resolutions with impunity, the whole system of international security is thrown into disrepute.
This was a factor in Iraqi defiance of the Security Council; and it is a factor behind Iran's equally delinquent posture. Why should the UN be trusted when its members are not even handed?
So before we invite perdition in the shape of another Middle East conflict, we in Europe might do better than to reflect that, as the Irish say, the longest way round may actually be the shortest way home.
If we do this we may conclude that perhaps the key to the Iranian issue lies not in Tehran or New York, but in Jerusalem and Ramallah. That if we want to see Iran complying with the UN's demands, we in the West will have to ensure that one of 'our' own states - Israel - obeys them, too.
That should be our 'removing settlers from Gaza' policy. Painful, but necessary.
Settling the Palestinian conflict would be worth any amount of funding spent in collective security arrangements to which Iran, certainly, should be a party.
Given the funding channelled by the European Union into the Palestinian Authority - without which the statelet would simply cease to function - we have a measure of leverage with the new Hamas-led government. We should use it.
Nor should we be frightened by rhetoric. If Iran were ever to try to 'wipe Israel off the map' it knows that Tehran would be rubble before breakfast. Iranians may be given to posturing, but they are not stupid.
And in the worst case, would not a nuclear Iran in a peaceful and settled Middle East be preferable to a second crusade by the West with the long and virulent tail of terror that would be the inevitable fallout across the world?
The author is editor of EuropaWorld
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