An Acquiescent U.S. in the Face of Russian Provocation

By JOHN VINOCUR

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 23, 2007

Does anybody out there remember Dick Cheney's harangue in Lithuania last year, the growlingly bellicose one that the Russians regard as heralding a new Cold War?

Here's how that dreadful man, who is 800 percent responsible for the Russians suspending the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, threatening to target European Union members with new missiles, and even talking the possibility of an America versus Russia shooting war within the next decade, got it all started:

In a speech in May 2006 to a group of new democracies at the edges of the old Soviet Union, Cheney said, "None of us believe that Russia is fated to become an enemy."

"A Russia that increasingly shares the values of this community can be a strategic partner and a trusted friend as we work toward common goals," he said.

The Wild Man from the White House also asserted - although just in passing, a re-read of the speech shows - that there were opponents of reform in Russia trying to reverse its movement toward a lawful, civil society, and that "no legitimate interest is served" when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail.

For at-your-throat shock and provocation challenging peace among nations and good sense, that's it.

Fourteen months later, we have a remarkable situation. The Russians, insisting they face a vast, American-led Western menace, move almost weekly from new outburst to new provocation.

And the Bush administration, out-doing even some of its European allies, offers a half-contrite, half-rationalizing response that depends heavily on the idea that Russia's assertiveness is linked to nationalist posturing ahead of its presidential election (or selection) next year.

What seems to reign on the administration's policymaking floors - where's Cheney? - is the rather daring hope that this is a harsh Russian moment that will pass. In Europe, you can add to that wish the idea that if everyone sits tight now, greater impetus toward calm will surely accompany George W. Bush's departure in 2009.

But the circumstances show an intensifying pattern.

Well before Cheney's almost bland speech on Russia's regression toward authoritarianism, the Russians were threatening the energy supply of countries like Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland.

When the West had a chance to use its leverage to press a charter regulating fair energy supply at the G-8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg later in 2006, it let Russia off the hook. The American explanation was that Vladimir Putin's help was needed at the United Nations to stop the Iranian drive toward nuclear weapons.

Now, with the Russians still occupying the gatekeeper's chair at the UN Security Council, a third set of Iran sanctions that the Bush administration said would be enacted in July is off the rails because of Russian opposition.

Officials in Washington explain that there is growing agreement with Russia on the need to stop Iran, but that tactical differences are "heightened" and getting new sanctions is a tougher matter.

How could they not be? Russia sees that it can maneuver pretty much at will.

When Russia unilaterally announced 10 days ago that it was suspending its participation in the conventional forces agreement of 1990 - which ended the nose-to-nose troop confrontations of the Cold War, but included no provision for suspension - the Americans rationalized the move as a pause for rethinking a treaty that needs readjustment.

Last week, in the face of a Russian veto threat, the Americans and Europeans abandoned the Security Council as the enabling forum to deliver the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a Russian client.

This was not just a tactical retreat. It was a victory for a Russian strategy that seeks to redivide Europe and re-establish its own spheres of influence.

On the scale of Russian successes since the Soviet Union's implosion, the partial Western climb-down on Kosovo was so marked that no new Russian leader, elected or imposed, would ever want to disregard it as a precedent.

This is bundled into a kind of Russian brow-beating that seems to have taken on a life of its own. Examples:

Sergei Ivanov, the Russian first deputy prime minister, says that if the Americans, Poles and Czechs go ahead with deploying a defensive missile shield aimed at potential Iranian nuclear threat, Russia would consider targeting nukes at Europe from Kaliningrad. That's a deployment area provokingly wedged on a speck of Russia outside its borders, between the NATO members Lithuania and Poland.

Major General Alexandr Vladimirov tells Russia's biggest newspaper, Komsolskya Pravda, that war with the United States is a possibility in the next 10 to 15 years.

The problem here is not just excess, but that the single American-European answer for it has been increasing the level of dialogue - with the Russian response, in turn, dismally clear on issues like Iranian sanctions or Kosovo.

With no Western push back marking their recent experience, the Russians have no objective reason not to try to turn so-called explanatory discussions on conventional forces or the missile shield into zero-sum negotiations: The Americans make concessions Russia wants, while Russia continues to demarcate the do-not-tread zone of its new influence.

The Bush administration's acquiescent manner has somehow rendered Russian action reasonable where it is not. Privately, the administration bewilders at least a couple of its European friends.

A cabinet member of a West European government, who asked not to be identified, said that the explanation may be that 80 percent of the White House's preoccupations are concerned with Iraq. Anything outside that area is subordinate.

The Russians, it would seem, fall onto a B-list of concerns, having chosen mostly to leave the Americans alone to twist in their Iraqi misery.

It's in this climate that signs of resistance to Russia are regarded elsewhere with respect.

The British expulsion of Russian diplomats following apparent Kremlin involvement in a British citizen's murder in London is such a step.

The expulsions' subtext makes clear that in dealing with the Russians, there are points when potential commercial repercussions must not be taken into account.

"It's the hard option," said the European official. Alongside more talk, he called it "the right way to start."

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

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With Iran Ascendant, U.S. Is Seen at Fault

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; Page A01

Arab Allies in Region Feeling Pressure

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Kuwait rarely rebuffs its ally, the United States, partly out of gratitude for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But in October it reneged on a pledge to send three military observers to an American-led naval exercise in the Gulf, according to U.S. officials and Kuwaiti analysts.

"We understood," a State Department official said. "The Kuwaitis were being careful not to antagonize the Iranians."

Four years after the United States invaded Iraq, in part to transform the Middle East, Iran is ascendant, many in the region view the Americans in retreat, and Arab countries, their own feelings of weakness accentuated, are awash in sharpening sectarian currents that many blame the United States for exacerbating.

Iran has deepened its relationship with Palestinian Islamic groups, assuming a financial role once filled by Gulf Arab states, in moves it sees as defensive and the United States views as aggressive. In Lebanon and Iraq, Iran is fighting proxy battles against the United States with funds, arms and ideology. And in the vacuum created by the U.S. overthrow of Iranian foes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is exerting a power and prestige that recalls the heady days of the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iranian clerics led the toppling of a U.S.-backed government.

"The United States is the first to be blamed for the rise of Iranian influence in the Middle East," said Khaled al-Dakhil, a Saudi writer and academic. "There is one thing important about the ascendance of Iran here. It does not reflect a real change in Iranian capabilities, economic or political. It's more a reflection of the failures on the part of the U.S. and its Arab allies in the region."

Added Eyal Zisser, head of the Middle Eastern and African Studies Department at Tel Aviv University in Israel: "After the whole investment in democracy in the region, the West is losing, and Iran is winning."

The United States has signaled a more aggressive posture toward Iran. President Bush on Friday defended a Pentagon program to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq. Vice President Cheney, in a Newsweek interview published Sunday, said the deployment of a second U.S. aircraft carrier task force to the Persian Gulf was intended to signal to the region that the United States is "working with friends and allies as well as the international organizations to deal with the Iranian threat."

And John D. Negroponte, outgoing director of national intelligence, told Congress this month that Iran's influence is growing across the region "in ways that go beyond the menace of its nuclear program."

Widespread Support

---

Iranian officials -- emboldened but uneasy over nuclear-armed neighbors in Israel and Pakistan and a U.S. military presence in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan -- have warned that they would respond to an American attack on Iran's facilities.

"Iran's supporters are widespread -- they're in Iraq, they're in Afghanistan, they're everywhere. And you know, the American soldiers in the Middle East are hostages of Iran, in the situation where a war is imposed on it. They're literally in the hands of the Iranians," said Najaf Ali Mirzai, a former Iranian diplomat in Beirut who heads the Civilization Center for Iranian-Arab Studies. "The Iranians can target them wherever, and Patriot missiles aren't going to defend them and neither is anything else."

"Iran would suffer," he added, "but America would suffer more."

As that struggle deepens, many in the Arab world find themselves on the sidelines. They are increasingly anxious over worsening tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims across the Middle East, even as some accuse the United States of stoking that tension as a way to counter predominantly Shiite Iran. Fear of Iranian dominance is coupled, sometimes in the same conversation, with suspicion of U.S. intentions in confronting Iran.

"It was necessary to create an enemy to justify the failure of the American occupation in Iraq," Talal Salman, the editor-in-chief of as-Safir, a Lebanese newspaper, wrote in a column this month. "So to protect ourselves against the coming of the wolf, we bring the foreign fleets that fill our lands, skies and seas."

Iranian rivalry with its Sunni Arab neighbors is centuries old, but as with most conflicts in the Middle East, its modern contours are shaped by politics and interests.

Iran has found itself strengthened almost by default, first with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to Iran's east, which ousted the Taliban rulers against whom it almost went to war in the 1990s, and then to its west, with the American ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, against whom it fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.

Arab rulers allied with the United States issued stark warnings. Jordan's King Abdullah in 2005 spoke darkly of a Shiite crescent that would stretch from Iran, through Iraq's Shiite Arab majority, to Lebanon, where Shiites make up the largest single community. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt suggested last year that Shiites in the Arab world were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. And in a rare interview, published Saturday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested that Iran, although he did not name the country, was trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shiism. "The majority of Sunni Muslims will never change their faith," he told al-Siyassah, a Kuwaiti newspaper.

Across the region, Iran has begun to exert influence on fronts as diverse as its allies: the formerly exiled Shiite parties in Iraq and their militias; Hezbollah, a Lebanese group formed with Iranian patronage after Israel's 1982 invasion; and the cash-strapped Sunni Muslim movement of Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

"I disagree with Iranian policy, but you have to give the Iranians credit," said Abdullah al-Shayji, a political science professor and head of Kuwait University's American Studies Unit. "You have to appreciate that they have an agenda, they're planning for it, they seize the opportunity, they see an American weakness and they are capitalizing on it."

A Helping Hand

---

In Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, a banner hangs near a bridge wrecked by Israeli strikes last summer: "The Zionist enemy destroys, the Islamic Republic of Iran builds." Even before the 33-day war ended, Iran had provided Hezbollah with $150 million to begin rebuilding, some of it going to victims in $10,000 bundles of crisp U.S. currency, according to a Shiite politician who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"You want me to give you my opinion? Honestly?" asked Hajj Hassan Sbeiti, a 44-year-old merchant, his face breaking into a wry smile. "If you say hello to me, you probably like me. If you say hello to me and ask what I need, you're a friend. If you say hello to me, ask what I need and put money in my hand, then you're going to be my brother."

In Iraq, U.S. officials say Iran is providing Shiite militias with sophisticated projectiles capable of penetrating U.S. armored vehicles and backing those forces in a gathering civil war against Sunni Arabs. One commander of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia that U.S. military officials now identify as the greatest security threat in Iraq, said that however much he might dislike Iran, he was eagerly anticipating the delivery of 50 rocket-propelled grenades to Basra.

But no less influential are the ties that Iran has deepened with the three main Shiite groups in Iraq, some of whose leaders spent years in exile in Iran and are now nominally allied with the United States, and the burgeoning economic relationship between the two countries.

The extent of Iran's engagement in the Arab world, and the rising sectarianism that has accompanied the Iranian ascendance, troubles Arabs who already worry about growing tension between the United States and Iran.

"If Iran is bombed, Iran's reaction is a sure thing. They cannot sit idle, and what kind of reaction they will take is a big question," said Abbas Bolurfrushan, the president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai, a booming city-state on the Gulf that is part of the United Arab Emirates, where an estimated 400,000 Iranians live and work.

Mirzai, the former Iranian diplomat, offered a similar scenario in more threatening terms. Wearing a white turban and the robes of a cleric, he sketched out potential Iranian responses: cutting the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes; retaliation in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon; attacks on U.S. targets in the Gulf.

"There is a policy the Iranians have and they've repeated it often -- the Gulf is either safe for everyone or no one," he said.

In an attempt to contest Iran's influence, the United States has sought to form an axis among Sunni Arab states it considers moderate: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and smaller countries in the Gulf. Israeli officials have spoken about a possible alignment of their country's interests with those states to arrest both Iran's influence and its nuclear program.

In November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would try to deepen ties with those states, some of which have yet to recognize Israel, in what Israeli analysts saw as an opening bid to create an anti-Iranian bloc.

But Zisser, of Tel Aviv University, cautioned that "all of these countries are not very strong, and they have their own problems."

"Iran's threat could do something to bring them together, but I would say that any alliance that comes out of it would be defensive in nature," he said. "These countries are not going to be able to unite in any way that would meaningfully change the face of the Middle East."

Potentially more far-reaching is the sectarian tension that the struggle has ignited. In the Palestinian territories, Israeli officials say, Iran has been increasingly successful in influencing the chaotic political situation, particularly by funding the Hamas-led government.

The connection has not gone unnoticed in the Palestinian street. At two rallies this month for Fatah, the movement led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, crowds directed chants at Hamas, a Sunni Arab group. "Shiites, Shiites," they shouted.

Across the Middle East, once antiquated words have sprung up in conversations about Shiites -- Safawis, for instance, drawn from the name of a Persian empire that brought Shiism to Iran. In Lebanon, posters have gone up in Sunni neighborhoods portraying leaders united by little other than their Sunni sectarian affiliation: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister killed in a 2005 car bombing, and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

"You are in heaven," the poster reads, "and those who killed you will go to hell."

Iranian officials have repeatedly warned against the phenomenon, fearing it will curb their leverage in an Arab street that remains majority Sunni. Many in the Arab world watch its gathering force with a sense of helplessness.

"It's very bleak and it's very dangerous," said Dakhil, the Saudi writer. "We have a sectarian civil war in Iraq now and this is drawing sectarian lines through the region. This is the most important, the most dangerous ramification of the American war in Iraq."

Correspondent Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

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