By Morteza Aminmansour - Hamsayeh.Net

January 17, 2010

After failing in it’s attempt to implement the so called new Middle East initiative, the White House felt compelled to change it’s strategy and began fomenting conflicts in the Persian Gulf region.

It is obvious that an arms buildup by the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf could also threaten Iran's national security, because the U.S. would surely try to provoke them to act against Iran's interests in the future.

In addition, such an arms buildup would allow the United States to send more military experts to the Persian Gulf region under the pretext of training Arab armies.

Saudi Arabia and other regional Arab countries will definitely face internal challenges because of their cultural backwardness and their refusal to democratize, but no foreign power is going to threaten them. The purchase of U.S. weapons by Arab countries sought by the Persian Gulf will certainly foster distrust between the countries on both sides of the Persian Gulf, and may also undermine their economic development, but will not guarantee the security of these undemocratic regimes such as UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

The actual winners of this game will be western countries including the U.S. military-industrial complex, which takes advantage of the situation between Islamic countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. And the losers will be the people of these countries.

Seeing as Iran is a home to 75 million people, it is unrealistic to expect that western countries can exclude Iran from any conceptions of Middle East security in the future. But the Western countries have already recognized that as long as the United States dominates the region and Iran seeks to undermine this dominance, other Persian Gulf States and external global powers such as China, Britain, Germany, Japan, and France with a stake in the region would be reduced to a status as "friends" or "enemies" of one another.

 

The Persian Gulf States need to put more trust in their relationship with Iran as a peaceful alternative, and need to realize the strategic commonalities between their states. Unfortunately, the current US-British strategic framework leads to the presumption that Iran is a threat that requires the counterbalancing force of the United States, and a situation in which "each side believes that the other is the locus of the security deficit in the region."

Many argued that the "natural geographic proximity driving Iranian concerns" makes the United States’ interference in destabilization of Iraq seem hypocritical. Some nationalistic Iranians are not thinking about Iraq however, but instead are focusing on U.S. involvement in the region and how to teach a lesson to those in Iraq. As a matter a fact, if Iraq is destabilized and the U.S. pull out, certain civil war would most
likely happen and it will destroy Iran's chances at building bilateral economic ties with Iraq and other Arab countries south of the Persian Gulf, and that could potentially spark internal problems with it’s own people.

There is very important ground questioning concerning if the establishment of the Shia government in Iraq is important for Iran's strategic goals, and it might be considered just one step in decreasing U.S. involvement in this region. It is unrealistic to believe that it is in Iran's best interests to see Iraq descend into a bloody civil war.

External powers such as the European Union, Japan, and China expressed a desire to see a better equitable and balanced U.S. leadership role in the region. Within this security framework, major outside powers (Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and China) would feel more comfortable investing in trade and new energy projects, whereas the Persian Gulf Arab states could comfortably negotiate with both the United States and Iran and all of the other countries that they could provide aid for domestic political developments in the region.

It has to be recognized that the United States will always have an interest in the security of the Persian Gulf. A subtle shift towards bilateral negotiations and more cooperative action could reap enormous economic and socio-political benefits for the region including its enemy, Iran. Some assessments are that the United States will need to adopt a more comprehensive approach to the region’s problems while advancing such other regional goals as a secure access to cheaper oil.

The United States is trying to reconfigure and reshape its security and military relationships with regional friends and allies in the Persian Gulf to take account of their changing security perceptions and policies.

In the last decade, the overriding U.S. concern was preserving access to the Persian Gulf oil at reasonable prices, despite its internal political problems at home, Iran possessed only a limited ability to dominate its power and influence beyond their borders; the Persian Gulf states acquiesced to a significant U.S. military presence on their soil, despite the domestic costs, and the United States was reasonably successful.

Besides all these arguments, there were grounds for questioning whether shifting more of the political and military burdens of supporting U.S. military strategy to the smaller Persian Gulf states (Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar) was sustainable over the long haul, and if it could inflame the tension between these two countries, the USA and Iran over dominating the power in this region.

The most comprehensive vision by Iran on the issue of Persian Gulf security includes:

Preparing common security grounds for fighting terrorism, organized crime and drug smuggling, as well as other joint security concerns.

Gradual removal of all restrictions in political, security, economic and cultural fields.

Development of trade ties by taking the countries' potentials into consideration and conducting joint investment in economic projects to achieve a regional free-trade mechanism.

Guaranteeing the security and energy export of regional countries to secure their interests and achieving a sustainable mechanism for energy needed by the world.

Making foreign military personnel exit the region and establishing full security by the regional countries.

Unfortunately, there is only a dim prospect for this proposal's acceptance by the Arab states of the PGCC, which have devised their own version of "collective security" that does not include the region's two most populous states, Iran and Iraq, and which have traditionally relied on US protectorate power. The PGCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Source: United press international Finding Persian Gulf Security
Alternatives by Katherine Gypson
Iran unveils a Persian Gulf security plan By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University
 

Morteza Aminmansour,