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By Gilles Kepel
Sunday March 2 and Monday March 3, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on an official visit to Baghdad: Tehran parades around as the central protagonist of any way out of the Iraq crisis and Washington is forced to ratify its role. Yesterday, the option of an American strike against Iranian nuclear installations was on the table at the White House; the president of the Islamic republic was a pariah, deemed untouchable in the West for having called for "Israel to be wiped off the map," as Nicolas Sarkozy recalled at a recent Crif [Representative Council of French Jewish institutions] dinner. Received with honors in an Iraq under American protectorate today, he effects his big comeback as the "regional superpower" of the Persian Gulf. Has George Bush gone to Canossa by allowing the poster boy for the "Axis of Evil" to be welcomed in a country where 160,000 American troops are stationed? And is Ahmadinejad's triumph what his zealots proclaim? Beyond the paradoxes, the reality is more complex and fits into the process of opening a system of overall negotiations in the Middle East that will ultimately include the nuclear issue, the Lebanese-Syrian crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. The Europe over which France will soon preside would be well-advised to take measure of the situation and maintain its own role therein if it wishes to count in the future of peace in the great Euro-Mediterranean-Gulf region that will be its natural place in the globalized planet of the twenty-first century, between the American hammer and the Asian anvil.
Ahmadinejad's visit first of all cements Tehran's decisive influence on the various Iraqi Shiite militias which, by going on the offensive against the Sunni and al-Qaeda in 2006, had unleashed a virtual civil war. The Sunni tribes and factions - excluded from Iraq's political and economic future, dispossessed of the steady oil income confiscated by Shiites and Kurds by virtue of the new Constitution - had used the head of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the "cutthroats' sheik" al-Zarqaoui, to conduct a bloody jihad against their Shiite compatriots, the primary victims of suicide attacks. Initially supposed to limit their targets to "infidel" foreign troops only, they primarily killed "heretic" Iraqi civilians. After allowing chaos, which put the American Army and American leaders under pressure, to move in, Tehran has prodded its Shiite protégés in Iraq to mark a truce - to which the greater part of the 2007 drop in violence is due. If Iraq has temporarily vacated The New York Times' front page during this electoral period, allowing Republicans and Democrats to confront one another over the sub-prime crisis or the social safety net, it's thanks to the Islamic Republic rather than to President Bush sending 30,000 additional soldiers at the beginning of 2007. However, this way Iran invites itself into the United States' presidential campaign, as Khomeini did during the US embassy hostage crisis in 1979-1980 that contributed to Carter's defeat and Reagan's election. Like his mentor, Ahmadinejad hopes to sell his vote to McCain, Obama or Hillary Clinton for a high price.
Yet the Iranian president, who arrives in Baghdad this Sunday, is not really in any better position domestically than his colleague George W. Bush. The policy of confrontation, at least of the verbal variety, with the United States, Israel and the West has manifested itself in an impoverishment of the country caused by financial and economic sanctions, and in spite of the incredible increase in hydrocarbon prices which has barely benefitted Iranian citizens, unlike their Arab neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council. The armed "Pasdaran generation" and the militias of the Guardians of the Revolution it represents is in conflict with the clergy, frightened by its adventurism, and with the Iranian middle classes, who live on Western time through satellite television and don't understand why they are deprived access to prosperity when the price of crude oil exceeds $100 a barrel. Faced with this coalition that threatens to make him lose the March 14 legislative elections, Ahmadinejad is counting on this visit to Iraq to provide him the status of an internationally acknowledged head of state. But negotiations or the outline of a dialogue with the West will benefit the Reformists first of all, and that's the Iranian president's dilemma. His power paradoxically stems from the freeze he exerts on the Lebanese presidential election via Hezbollah, on recognition of Israel, etc. With respect to his domestic adversaries, beginning to negotiate could be the kiss of death for him.
The Bush administration's policy, the "war against terror" that was supposed to reorganize the Middle East under the United States' leadership, has failed with the Iraqi fiasco; the Islamist apotheosis promised by bin Laden, Zawahiri and their ilk, thanks to jihad and martyrdom, has not succeeded in mobilizing the Arab masses; and "the Islamic State of Iraq," established by al-Qaeda in the Sunni provinces, has no reality outside the Internet. Bush and bin Laden's common enemy, Shiite and revolutionary Iran, is in a situation today that favors negotiation. While the American presidency, delegitimized by its failure, handicapped by electoral uncertainty, cannot take on this challenge, it's up to Europe to show the way, in partnership with the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, an institution formed against Iran in 1981, but which welcomed Ahmadinejad during its last summit in Qatar. This challenge, which is a challenge of civilization, will be one of the major tasks for the French presidency of the European Union: we must evaluate the stakes involved and demonstrate political will.
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