December 13 2006 Financial Times
The way to Iraq is through Iran By Anatol Lieven
Last week in Washington, George W. Bush, US president, and Tony Blair, UK prime minister, engaged in their familiar bluster about "isolating" Iran and Syria if they do not accede to US wishes in the Middle East. This line today is utterly senseless. Iran is in a stronger position than the US -- and Iran knows it.
The condition for Iranian help on Iraq set by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad -- that of US withdrawal -- is something the US must fulfil sooner or later with or without Tehran's agreement. US conditions for talks with Iran, by contrast, are unacceptable to the Iranian establishment and most of the Iranian population.
If they maintain their present course, the US and British administrations face a choice between an endless bloody impasse in Iraq and a humiliating withdrawal leaving chaos behind. As James Baker and Lee Hamilton's Iraq Study Group recommended, the US needs Iranian and Syrian help if civil war in Iraq is at least to be prevented from escalating into a regional war. This is also the line being strongly advanced by parts of the Iraqi government.
As the ISG report states, this approach to Tehran and Damascus must be part of a drive for regional consensus on managing the Iraqi conflict, or at least limiting intervention on opposite sides by Iraq's neighbours. The goal therefore should be to draw Iraq's neighbours into an agreement that while de facto, Iraq will doubtless become a fairly loose confederation, de jure it will remain one state. The members of this concert could agree on the borders of Iraq's constituent units and ideally even provide troops to patrol those borders and secure Baghdad.
Such a concert is essential if the Iraqi civil war is not to spiral into a completely unrestrained conflict that will drag in regional states on opposite sides. It is possible because all the regional states fear this outcome. Moreover, all have potentially separatist ethnic or religious minorities which would be emboldened if Iraq were to break up altogether.
It is pointless, however, to aim at any such goal as long as competing groups in the US administration play with radically incompatible ideas of either unrestricted backing for the Iraqi Shia against the Sunni, or creating an anti-Iranian and anti-Shia bloc of Sunni autocratic regimes in the region, led by Saudi Arabia. Either strategy would point directly towards a full-scale Iraqi civil war with Saudi-Arabia and Iran ranged on opposite sides and Syria catastrophically divided.
Instead of this disastrous course, the US and the Europeans should craft a new strategy to form a "concert of powers" aimed at maintaining stability and preventing the unravelling of more states. The Iraq Study Group and Mr Blair courageously set out an essential component of this in calling for a genuine US push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
President Jacques Chirac of France contributed another by proposing that the west formally acknowledge Iran's vital stake in Afghanistan.
To enlist Iran's help, the west must also reach agreement with Tehran over Iran's nuclear programme. As the International Crisis Group argued in a February report, for such an agreement to be acceptable to any Iranian leaders, it must involve a return to the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and recognition of Iran's right to limited uranium enrichment under strict international inspection.
However, this would by no means involve accepting the inevitability of Iranian nuclear weapons -- especially as Iran itself seems to be aiming at nuclear weapons potential rather than the weapons themselves. Such a regime would verifiably freeze Iran at 18 months to five years short of attaining nuclear weapons. It would therefore give the international community time to react if Iran did abandon the NPT.
In return for allowing Tehran to engage in limited enrichment, the west should extract formal, detailed promises from other states including Russia and China as to the harsh sanctions they would impose if Iran broke its word on nuclear weapons.
Such an agreement would of course be far from ideal, just as a Middle Eastern regional concert to manage Iraq's conflict would be difficult both to achieve and to manage. But do any of the other ideas for US strategy stand a better chance of success? For example, does anyone seriously believe the US public will tolerate for long the existing level of US casualties and expenditure in Iraq, with no serious prospect of US victory?
The writer, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, is author, with John Hulsman, of Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World (Pantheon)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006