The Middle East kaleidoscope took an unexpected twist this week as Iran invited the presidents of Iraq and Syria for a weekend summit with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani will fly to Tehran Saturday, according to The Associated Press, which also reported that Syrian President Bashar Assad plans to participate in the talks.
The three presidents will reportedly explore ways to cooperate to curb the runaway violence in Iraq that threatens to spread throughout the region.
That’s certainly a worthy goal. But whatever modest hopes for regional stability were aroused by this initiative were sharply discounted just one day later when Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel – a firm foe of Syrian interference in his country – was assassinated in Beirut Tuesday.
President George Bush denounced the murder of Gemayel and called for a full investigation to identify “those people and those forces” behind the assassination.
He stopped far short of blaming anyone specific for Gemayel’s slaying – the latest in a long string of political assinations in Lebanon – but the president did accuse both Damascus and Tehran of trying to undermine the elected government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and thus the stability of the nation.
Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns went further and noted that the radical Hezbollah group in Lebanon, which is strongly supported by Iran and Syria, has repeatedly threatened to bring down the Saniora government.
Lebanese leaders blamed the assassination on Syria. The leader of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, Saad Hariri, told CNN, “We believe the hand of Syria is all over the place” in Gemayel’s death.
Even before Gemayel’s assassination, U.S. officials were skeptical of the Iranian initiative, fearing it would disrupt an emerging shift in U.S. policy that might emphasize a regional approach. It’s no secret that the bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton intends to recommend talking to Iraq’s neighbors to help foster stability in Iraq during and after a U.S. withdrawal.
Americans aren’t keen to see Iran enhance its standing with its neighbors, given its influence already with Syria and Lebanon.
But both Iran and Syria would have to be part of a regional dialogue, which, according to the U.S. vision, would ultimately include Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, among other parties.
Given Ahmadinejad’s outspoken antagonism toward the United States, he’s an unlikely figure to forge regional unity. Having said that, however, we believe that regional discussions do hold out the most practical hope that Iraq might survive its current wave of sectarian violence and gain a measure of stability.
And it’s just possible that Iran and Syria might diminish their mischief-making if they have a hand in crafting Iraqi security, though Gemayal’s assassination destroys any real cause for optimism.
Neither Syria nor Iran has to embrace the U.S. occupation to realize that violence in Iraq could spill across their borders and inflame their own peoples. Both nations have sectarian divisions of their own, and the Kurdish minority in Iraq has strong ties to its kin in Iran and Turkey.
It’s also worth noting that the Iranian overture coincides with the upcoming restoration of diplomatic relations between Syria and Iraq during this week’s visit of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem to Baghdad. Syria broke ties with Iraq in 1982, accusing it of inciting riots by the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.
As the late French President Charles de Gaulle often observed, nations don’t have friends – they have interests. If Middle Eastern rivals can work together to safeguard their mutual interests, that could speed the day the U.S. and other outside forces can withdraw from Iraq.
