The Peninsula Newspaper
Wednesday, 26 October 2011 00:49
The Iranian regime is living in internal, regional and international isolation. With the passage of time the isolation is increasing with the political positions and provocative actions taken by it with the Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the Arab states of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. The whole area changed today with the winds of the Arab revolutions while Iran is going in the opposite direction?!
(1) The last attempt which disclosed the involvement of one of the members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the bombing of the Saudi embassy and the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington may constitute a turning point in the relationship with Tehran. It indicates that the cold diplomatic relations and soft policies, statements, courtesies, implicit and indirect moves, patience, restraint and dominance of good intent between the Gulf States and Iran have fallen and been replaced by open political and media confrontation and may be military confrontation in the near future! It seems that the relationship associated with the proverb that “they lied to us and we lie to them” has expired. Historically the relationship of Iran with Gulf was characterized with cautious, tension, fears and ambitions. The confrontation did not calm after the 1979 Islamic revolution and the arrival of the clergy (mullahs) to rule. The label of the Arab Gulf States continued to evoke the Iranian side, even in the pure Gulf and Arab forums! The international or regional platform hardly provokes differences and problems on the basis of name. Tehran has threatened the international airlines by preventing them from passing in the airspace of Iran if they are named as (Arabian Gulf) in the maps, including Qatar Airways. The Iranian political market is expert in selling the pro and anti points of views at the same time, double standard with regional and international issues and playing with the political balances and benefiting from the Arab and Islamic issues for the self-interest. The Iranian politics was focused on religious and sectarian factors in the investment of tensions that live Shia minorities, which is spreading in most countries of Arabian Gulf including Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and provoking the sectarian disputes in some other Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan as well as the interference in the internal affairs of some countries, in which a large proportion of the Shias live.
(2) Are there sleeper cells that began moving into internal instability in some countries of the Gulf? In Kuwait, Iranian spy networks made up of five people, including two of the Kuwaiti and Iranian citizenship, while the other two from other Arab nationalities were arrested. Kuwaiti authorities have charged them with spying for a foreign country and foreign intelligence, and the Kuwaiti and two Iranians have been sentenced to death while two others of Arab origin have been sentenced to life imprisonment. A number of Iranian diplomats from the Iranian embassy in Kuwait have been sent home because of their involvement in the Iranian spy network. The Kuwaiti Foreign Minister told that there is a conspiracy hatched by Iran against the security of politics, economy and military of Kuwait. In Bahrain, there was Iranian inciting by the officials and media to ignite sedition and pour oil into the fire. A member of the National Security Committee of parliament of Iran, “Dariush Ghanbari” claimed before the Shura Council and the international media that Bahrain 40 years ago was a part of Iranian territory and it was separated by a distorted referendum and if a referendum is held fairly, the people would vote to join the mother country (Iran)! The MP and Chairman of the Security Committee in the Shura Council threatened the UAE and raised the issue of occupation of three UAE islands. We see the continued overt and implicit threat targeting the countries of the Gulf and the strategic areas whenever a crisis emerged between the international community and Iran’s ambitions to enter the nuclear club. The chief military adviser to Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution in Iran and former defence minister threatened the countries in the region with an inclusive war in case of a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. He pointed out that the Gulf States will be a target of Iranian ballistic missiles and Iran would not strike the US military bases in the region only, but it will also hit the strategic targets such as oil pumps and power stations in the Arab Gulf states. The latest leaks from a representative of Khamenei in a newspaper Kayhan Hossein Shariatmadari called the revolutionary executions against the social and governmental personalities of Saudi Arabia around the world and asked the Revolutionary Guard to adopt this approach against the Saudis who are in America and Europe for different reasons!
(3) Zogby International conducted a survey at the start of the Arab revolts on the Arab peoples’ view towards Iran. It included more than 4,000 Arab citizens who are descended from the Kingdom of Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The survey mentioned a decline in popularity and breadth of the negative perception associated with the Iranian regime because of the policies pursued by the authorities off Tehran in Iraq, Syria, the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Arabian Gulf. The survey linked the present to the past while the Islamic Republic of Iran have a positive outlook in all of these Arab countries in a 2006 survey. The ratio of Iran’s popularity was above 80 percent. Commenting on the results of the survey James Zogby pointed out that he believed in the past, that the Arab governments are the only that fear the infiltration of Iranian hegemony while the Arab public opinion looks at Iran differently, but this equation may have been true in 2006 and 2008 but it is no longer true in 2011. The Arab public opinion no longer looks at Iran through the perspective of the confrontation with the United States of America and Israel. Now it looks at Iran as a state which is ready to exploit every opportunity to impose its hegemony on the Middle East.
(4) Will we enter the military confrontations, especially with the international pressure against the nuclear program and the latest U.S. accusations? The region is tired and bled a lot of wealth and a reserve of future generations in the wars and military and confrontations during the past three decades. Will the Iranian regime recalculate? Will it provide the encouraging and genuine positions in openness to the peoples of the region and present positive and reassuring initiatives to its neighbors in the Gulf at the time of the Arab revolutions? We have seen the age which is called as Arab spring and its repercussions on the region. Will we see a similar Persian spring?
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