Arabs must stop the Iranian advance and save the Middle East
By Ahwazna
While it can be interesting to predict future events, it is imperative that the next step and primary objective of the Gulf States after hitting the Tehran regime’s proxies in Yemen and regaining Arab prestige must be to act to save Syria and Iraq from the clutches of Iranian interventionism. This can be most effectively achieved through the formation of an ‘Arab NATO’ to work with the legitimate opposition and Sunni majorities, all of which have had their fill of the mullahs’ murderous occupation.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Arab states have avoided involvement in Iraq, allowing the Iranian regime to expand and impose its hegemonic domination in Iraq and across the region. The Arab states also adopted a hands-off position on the Syrian revolution, allowing Tehran and its regional proxies, including Hezbollah, to maintain the barbaric Assad regime in power via terror and savagery, indiscriminately slaughtering men, women and children. It is clear to anyone following events that the seismic recent changes witnessed in the US’ regional policy under the Obama administration are being felt from Tehran to Beijing.
There is no doubt that the Geneva agreement between the P5+1 world powers and the Tehran regime, of which the United States is the godfather and Oman the nurturing nanny, is the most prominent force driving these massive geopolitical changes.
Regardless of Washington’s public statements asserting its continuing alliance with its traditional allies, the facts of the Geneva agreement and regional events confirm otherwise, proving that the US is seeking to distance itself from its Arab associates in preference for focusing its efforts on forging new ties with the “strong and influential” regime in Tehran.
Washington’s geopolitical strategic shift is no longer an abstract or theoretical concept for Arabs but a tangible reality compounded by the prospects of a developing consensus between Tehran and the P5+1 global powers bringing ever closer cooperation. This new spirit of Washington-Tehran collaboration appears to include tacit support for the Iranian regime’s regional interventions without any attempts to hold the regime accountable for the massive chaos being wreaked across the region as a result. This seems likely to lead to prolonged hostilities, resulting in increased tensions and unrest across the region.
The objective of the Gulf officials’ in the meeting with Obama and other US representatives at Camp David – with the Gulf delegation pointedly no longer include most of the Gulf leaders, who are instead sending junior representatives – is to obtain real and substantive answers on the position of their traditional ally, the U.S., as the Obama administration moves towards normalization of U.S. relations with Tehran. The sincere hope of this author is that the Gulf delegates don’t calmly accept the lethal hesitations, contradictions and hypocrisy of Obama’s regional policy or the relentless lies of his Secretary of State John Kerry.
It’s a sincere hope that the Gulf leaders’ delegates attended the Camp David meeting won’t put any value or faith in the words of President Obama, who has put no value on the lives of Arabs throughout his presidency. Indeed all the evidence suggests and I firmly believe that Obama requested the meeting with the Gulf leaders in order to devise a PR strategy to rescue the U.S. from the rapidly deteriorating regional political crisis created by its own blundering and arrogant foreign policies. Obama needs the Gulf leaders’ help to devise such a strategy to help him overcome the obstacles placed in the way of his ‘legacy’ nuclear deal with Tehran by the U.S. Congress, apparently disregarding the fact that the deal is decidedly not in the interests of the Arab states or the regional balance of power.
The current situation bears strong similarities to a previous ‘Camp David Accord’ signed by Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat in 1978 to support his friend, the then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who faced a domestic electoral impasse over the crisis in Egypt. This decision led to Egypt’s then-Foreign Minister Mohammed Ibrahim submitting his resignation during the Camp David talks in protest at what he and many others saw as a decision to sell Egypt and its security to Israel for the benefit of Sadat’s friendship with Jimmy Carter.
Now Obama wants to repeat a similar scenario with the difference being that he wants to offer empty promises to the Gulf states in exchange for their acquiescence on the Tehran regime’s nuclear program, despite the fact that the agreement and the subsequent lifting of sanctions will empower Iran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and destroy the military and security balance in the region. Obama wants this agreement from the Gulf in order to put pressure on Congress to enact legislation which would give the congressional seal of approval to the nuclear deal with Iran and any future deals with the regime.
In short, Obama wants the Gulf leaders to save his face and provide a whitewash for his shameful policies at the expense of their own nations’ interests, offering in return only more of his empty and worthless promises, whose value is seen in his infamous non-existent ‘red lines’ on Bashar al-Assad’s (continuing) use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people. The Gulf leaders should first study the 1978 Camp David Accords if they don’t want to repeat Sadat’s cataclysmic mistake with another accord in a long record of shameful concessions in Arab history.
Having proven its effective and influential leadership of the Arab alliance, Saudi Arabia should continue its proactive policy of confronting the steady Iranian advance across the region. The Saudis’ decision to confront Tehran’s proxies in Yemen without hesitation or wavering has sent a strong signal to the U.S. that it must adopt a clear position and be genuinely attentive to the Gulf’s concerns about Washington’s new rapprochement with the Tehran regime.
The Gulf leaders’ delegates who went to Camp David with a military and civil plan for a post-Assad Syria drawn up with the Syrian opposition, something that requires a genuine U.S. commitment to helping restore stability in the region and to decisively battling against the terrorism of all forms which threatens everyone without exception!
Arab Gulf states have legitimate rights for concern and suspicion over the Geneva and Lausanne agreements and the strategic shifts in Washington’s future policies and redefinition of U.S. interests in the region. The greatest of these concerns at present is that the rapprochement between Washington and Tehran will remove all remaining obstacles to the Iranian regime’s expansionist imperialist ambitions, leading to further regional instability and war. It’s every Arab’s right to wonder whether the Gulf nations will unite with other Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Sudan, to stop Iranian expansionism and intervention in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as decisively as they have in Yemen. With Iran’s military and political involvement and presence in all these nations being no secret (indeed, with senior regime officials publicly boasting of their control of these countries) and its tentacles stretching into every regional nation, will the Arab states continue to build alliances and diplomatic relations that will weaken the Iranian hegemon, such as strengthening relations with Azerbaijan and opening the channels of communication with Russia?
From the U.S. perspective, a positive Tehran-Washington relationship could mean that Washington has influence to possibly persuade the Iranian regime to play a positive role in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. As the U.S. will discover, however, this theoretical geopolitical ‘advantage’ will quickly evaporate in the wake of the ensuing current and future regional conflicts, worsening the already increasing sectarian tensions, particularly between Sunni and Shia, particularly in light of a new Saudi policy which favours action over reaction and which will resort to all options to prevent Iran’s regional domination, particularly military action.
If Washington believes that its convergence with Tehran will enable it to use the regime to help ‘stabilize’ the region or that the peoples of the region will accept this policy, the policymakers need to wake up and to be aware that Arabs will not accept such a strategy at the expense of their own human rights and continuing violations against Arab peoples and the security of the whole Middle East.
To curb Iran’s expansionist ambitions, destroy its plans to resurrect its Persian empire and expose its agents in Arab nations, those nations must strengthen their internal cohesion and devise well-planned and coordinated projects to neutralize Tehran’s sectarian project which has sown venomous sectarian divisions as part of a divide-and-rule policy for some years. This is the only effective answer to the potential dangers emanating from Iran and its regional counterparts which rely on playing the political Islam card to dominate and subjugate Arab nations.
Gulf states must specifically end their policy of consultation and dialogue with the Tehran regime and work actively to thwart its sectarian project by exploiting Iran’s internal weaknesses, including its nakedly racist and supremacist oppression and violations of the rights of non-Persian nations within Iran; in the forefront of these nations are the more than eight million Ahwazi Arabs, the residents of the Arab emirate of Al-Ahwaz occupied by Iran in 1925 and subsequently renamed Khuzestan, whose lands contain over 90 percent of the oil wealth claimed by Iran. Real help for the Ahwazi peoples, subjected to openly racist and oppressive occupation by the Iranian regime and denied their heritage, rights and even the benefits of the resources from their own lands, will mark the start of the disintegration of the Iranian hegemon that threatens the entire Middle East.
