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MIDDLE EAST: Iran Cosies up to UAE, Against US

Meena Janardhan

DUBAI, May 17 2007 (IPS) - It was billed as a meeting to intensify cooperation in the trade and energy sectors between two neighbouring countries suspicious of each other. But it also had to do with the United States.

Iran’s political message in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s talks with United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan this week was loud and clear – there was a need to end U.S. role in the region and evolve a regional cooperation mechanism.

Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UAE, the first ever by an Iranian president, is significant in two respects. First, it warms relations between neighbours who have been locked in a dispute over Iran’s control of three UAE islands – Lesser Tunb, Greater Tunb, and Abu Musa – since 1971.

More than 400,000 Iranians reside in the UAE, which is about 10 percent of the total population with accumulated assets estimated at over a trillion dirhams (about 300 billion US dollars). The UAE is Iran’s largest trading partner at a time when wide ranging U.N. sanctions are in place.

According to the Iranian Business Council in Dubai – one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE and a re-export hub that serves as an important outlet for Iran’s commerce with the outside world – the trade between the two countries was worth about 11 billion dollars in 2006.

According to the Emirates News Agency, the UAE President stressed that Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, wanted to see the ‘‘elimination of the causes of tension in the Middle East,” especially in the Gulf.

Khalifa also said that ‘‘the international community should take into consideration, when making relevant decisions, the interest of all countries and peoples of the region, in a way that would ensure security… and continued development.”

Accordingly, a joint committee has been established under the chairmanship of the Iranian and Emirati foreign ministers to promote cooperation in both political and economic issues.

Ahmadinejad’s tour of the UAE and Oman was preceded by a statement, which could be construed as a confidence-building measure, from an Iranian member of parliament (MP) that his country is willing to work to solve the island dispute through negotiations and a memorandum of understanding signed in 1971.

Though neither president made any reference to the island issue after the talks, MP Ali Nadimi’s response to the UAE call to settle the dispute by abiding by the United Nations Charter and international law during the 116th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Indonesia on May 1 is the first such positive statement in a long time.

The UAE also made a conciliatory move ahead of the Iranian president’s arrival, announcing that it would release the 12 Iranian divers detained on May 1 while working on a sunken ship off the Abu Musa island in the Gulf waters.

The historic visit is another confidence-building measure, according to Prof. Ali Reza Sheikholeslami of the American University of Sharjah, ‘‘An official visit by a hard line president is a clear indication that Iran has changed fundamentally and the ‘sacred’ duty of exporting the Revolution does not exist any longer.”

>From the beginning of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the 80s, Iran had rejected the ruling monarchies of the Gulf. ‘‘The visit is a clear indication that Iran accepts the legitimacy of the ruling families in the UAE” and of the other countries in the region, the academic told IPS.

The second significance of Ahmadinejad’s visit lies in the increasing signs of cooperation and emphasis on dialogue among the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Iran. Amid Tehran’s willingness to discuss the Iraq situation with Washington, this further distances the possibility of U.S. using force to deter Iran’s nuclear programme.

In March, the UAE and Qatar had publicly announced that they would not allow their territories to be used for any attack against Iran. Among the other members of the GCC bloc, Saudi Arabia has been proactive diplomatically to leverage Iran’s influence to calm the crises in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestinian territories. In fact, Ahmadinejad made a similar visit to the Saudi kingdom in March, while the Qatari emir visited Iran last year.

While Oman has consistently been against escalation and confrontation, Kuwait said it was not in the interest of the region which has undergone 25 years of destructive wars to see another military conflict. Realising the delicate situation, Bahrain – which has a Shiite majority ruled by a Sunni regime – has watched its words too.

Thus, while still being anxious about Iran’s nuclear programme, the position of the GCC countries has dramatically altered from being mere spectators in the war of words between the U.S. and Iran to emphasising the utility of dialogue over war. This has clearly complicated the situation for Washington which only recently sent a second aircraft carrier to the region as a warning to Tehran.

Adding an element of drama to the new ground realities is the fact that the Iranian leader’s visit came only three days after U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney visited the UAE to discuss the Iran and Iraq crises.

While Iran has been pushing the idea of establishing a Gulf Security and Cooperation Organisation that would include the six GCC members, Iran and Iraq, which was on the agenda during Ahmadinejad’s visit, the precondition that foreign troops should leave the region is unacceptable to the GCC countries. The U.S. is the principal security guarantor for the oil-rich bloc.

This week, Iran agreed to hold talks with the U.S. in a bid to improve security in Iraq, after Washington made an official request to Tehran through the Swiss embassy.

According to Prof. Gary Sick of Columbia University, ‘‘Contrary to those who viewed the U.S. military build-up in the region as a prelude to an attack on Iran, it seems quite likely that it was intended to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position in preparation for talks.”

‘‘The crucial turning point was the Iranian capture of the (15) British sailors (in March); if the U.S. was simply waiting for a pretext to escalate into an attack on Iran, that was the perfect chance,” but that was not to be, the Iran expert told a web-based forum.