Railways, religion and politics

Evidence of an earlier German railway project in the Middle East

Following the news last week that the Hijaz Railway is to be revived, another Middle East, railway related story caught my eye this morning. The Iranians have signed an agreement with a German company to build a high-speed "maglev" railway line from Teheran to Mashhad, a shrine for Shia pilgrims. A spokesman for the German firm brushes aside the threat of further sanctions on Iran. "The transportation of pilgrims", he says, "is certainly not a project that would fall in the remit of a political boycott." If he truly believes this, he is falling into the trap of trying to separate politics and religion in a part of the world where they are intertwined like arabesque designs.

In this project's likely underlying motive, its similarity with the Hijaz railway, 100 years old next year, is uncanny. The Times article says, almost in passing, that "The Iranians, for their part, appear determined to make the Shia shrine easily accessible across the region." And this is surely the crux of the matter. Some of the greatest beneficiaries would, of course, be the sizeable Shia population in Iraq. Like the Hijaz Railway, this new project is profoundly political. It is to win the gratitude of Shias worldwide, and along the way, cause disagreement in Europe on the need for tighter sanctions.

The diplomatic dividend of dealing with Syria

It looks as if the Iranians are about to release the 15 British service personnel they captured in the northern Gulf. Earlier today the Syrians said that they had played a role in mediating between the Iranians and the British and bringing the matter to a conclusion. The British have been cultivating the Syrians for some time and this has brought a diplomatic dividend now.

Contrast that with the slating Nancy Pelosi has received from the White House for meeting the Syrian President Bashar Assad. The White House says that Pelosi is sending the wrong signals; but the fact is, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation - and it is a complex one - the Syrians are influential in the region. No peace deal will be achieved without their backing, and that is something the White House needs to accept.

Out of the box thinking

This article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker is well worth a read. But it is long, so if you don't have the time, here is a rough summary of the content.

1) As the situation in Iraq has deterioriated, Iran has emerged the clear winner from the US decision to invade the country in 2003.

2) The deterioration, and Iran's ascendancy, have prompted the US to embark on a "new direction". This includes:

a) accusing Iran of active involvement in the killing of US troops inside Iraq to create a casus belli for possible US action inside Iran;

b) portraying the Sunni states (including Saudi Arabia) as moderates, and Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as extremists with an intent to destabilise the region;

c) building a coalition of the "moderates", and encouraging better relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel to resist the rise of Shiite Iran (which helps explain why the Saudis tried to broker the "peace deal" between Hamas and Fatah at Mecca);

d) running a programme of covert action out of the vice-President Dick Cheney's office to undermine Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria. This uses funds designated for US operations in Iraq (and therefore impossible to account for) to pay the Saudis and the Jordanians to back Sunni extremists, and to seek evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq using special forces now operating inside Iran.

3) As Hersh points out, if accurate, this is a fundamental sea change. The policy has echoes of the Iran-Contra scandal, Cambodia, and most recently, Afghanistan. Effectively, desperation is forcing the US administration to fund exactly the groups which are behind the radicalisation of the Middle East and the emergence of Al-Qaeda. And at the heart of the strategy is a trust in Saudi Arabia which can most charitably be described as touching. One unnamed US government source tells Hersh that the Saudis have assured the White House that they will "keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was 'We've created this movement, and we can control it.' It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran."

It's worth remembering when considering the value of this assurance and the wisdom of the strategy Hersh is describing that fourteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. As Vali Nasr, of the US Council on Foreign Relations is quoted observing, "The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back."

The American predicament

There's an interesting article in the Guardian today about the brains trust advising the top US General in Iraq, David Petraeus. They believe they have six months to turn the situation around. It is not an enviable predicament, because they are fighting for hearts and minds not only in Iraq but in America as well. The problem for the commanders on the ground is that they are having to launch dangerous urban operations to clamp down on the militias in Baghdad, which they know will inevitably lead to more US casualties, just as domestic public opinion in the United States is softening. And they are having to do so without the necessary number of troops: effective counter-insurgency is very labour-intensive. The question is whether they can accomplish the task before public support completely evaporates, given that the harder they try to tackle the militias the more US deaths there will be, and the more US voters will turn against the policy.

Added to this dilemma is the fact that any American military action in Iran would only worsen the problem. Boris Johnson covers this vividly in the Daily Telegraph. The problem is, I suppose, that if the Iranians correctly recognise the fundamental weakness of the American position, ignore the sabre-rattling and persist in their nuclear ambitions, they will make belligerent action against themselves more likely. And bearing that in mind, an American offensive against Iran would be a sign of weakness, and not of strength.

Jaw Jaw...

Reuters is reporting that British and American envoys will join representatives from Iran and Syria next month to discuss ways to stabilise Iraq. The approach - which was recommended by the Iraq Study Group but studiously ignored by President Bush - tends to confirm other reports that US efforts to quell the violence in Baghdad by means of a troop surge have not succeeded.

Earlier this week one of those who did the ground-work for the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Michael Ancram, pointed out the inconsistency between the American pressure on the British to open talks on Northern Ireland in the 1990s and their position now. Like all the best letters to newspapers, it is short, and well worth reading.

"A sign of our resolve"

The Daily Telegraph has several reports this morning that add up to a significant amount of sabre-rattling. Israel is apparently requesting permission from the Americans to fly over Iraq so that they can bomb Iran. Another report comes from an American aircraft carrier somewhere in the mouth of the Persian Gulf. This carrier, according to an American diplomat, Mike Gayle, speaking in London last night, is "a sign of our resolve". That was as direct a reply as he would give to the repeated question of whether the United States is willing to go to war with Iran.

The American doctrine of pre-emption has fewer supporters today than it did in 2002. That seems to be the reason why Mr Gayle was keen to suggest that, effectively, Iran is already at war with the United States, citing as evidence a dossier recently published by the US military. This showed photographs of weapons seized in Iraq which the Americans claim are Iranian-made and which they say proves that the Iranian government is behind a wave of devastating attacks on American forces using explosively formed penetrators. But there is a leap in logic there, as one US general has admitted: even if we accept the assumption that the weapons are Iranian-made, proving they have therefore been supplied by the Iranian government is a hard task given the fact that, as any expert on Iran immediately admits, the political structure in Iran is Byzantine in its complexity. And the Americans face considerably greater scepticism than they did five years ago.

The question of whether Iran is supplying weaponry to bog the Americans down in Iraq is misleading and designed to draw attention away from the central question of whether a pre-emptive attack on Iran to halt its nuclear weapons programme is either justified or likely to succeed, by suggesting the United States already has a casus belli for future action.