Gwynne Dyer: What to expect after an Iranian nuclear deal
What will the Middle East look like after Iran and the great powers that are negotiating over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1)—sign a deal that ends the confrontation? It’s time to ask the question, because there is going to be a deal.
It didn’t get signed in Geneva last weekend, but it came close. The only foreign minister at the Geneva talks on Friday (November 8) was Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, but progress was so rapid that by Saturday (November 9) almost all the foreign ministers of the “P5+1”—American, British, French, German and Russian—dropped whatever they were doing and flew in for the grand finale. Only the Chinese foreign minister was absent.
The grand finale has been postponed. There were just too many details to clear up in a single weekend, and a couple of sticking points that have yet to be resolved. But the date for the next meeting has already been set (November 20), and nobody went away angry.>
“We are all on the same wavelength,” said Zarif.
“There is a deal on the table and it can be done,” said British foreign secretary William Hague.
There are “still some gaps” between Iran and some of the other countries present, Hague said, but “they are narrow gaps. You asked what went wrong. I would say that a great deal went right.”
Even French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, the one who apparently dropped a last-minute spanner in the works, said that “we are not far from a agreement with the Iranians, although we are not there yet.”
Fabius’s demanded that the reactor in Arak, now nearing completion, should never be activated, as it would produce plutonium as a byproduct. Another of his requirements is that Iran’s store of uranium enriched to medium level (20 percent pure) should be brought back down to five percent to move it farther away from weapons-grade (90 percent). Introduced into the talks at a late stage, his demands brought the proceedings to a temporary halt.
All the other western powers closed ranks and insisted that these were joint demands, but they were not part of the original draft agreement. Speculation was rife that France was acting on behalf of its customers (for French weapons) on the Arab side of the Gulf, notably in the United Arab Emirates, who view the deal under discussion with just as much horror as Israel does. But France can only delay things: the deal is going to happen.
One immediate consequence of the agreement will be that Israel has to stop threatening to attack Iran. The threat was always 90 percent bluff—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own military chiefs would probably refuse to obey him if he ordered such an attack without American support—but now it will be simply ridiculous. Which will swing the spotlight back to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Iran’s economic isolation will also end, although it may take several years to unwind all the economic sanctions. The gradual return of prosperity in Iran will make the current Islamic regime more secure. This may be the main reason that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, authorized newly elected President Hassan Rouhani to negotiate the nuclear deal and end the confrontation.
But the big question is whether a nuclear deal with Iran will cool the rapidly intensifying Sunni-Shia conflict that threatens to suck in the whole of the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula. The answer, alas, is probably not.
The split is as incomprehensible to non-Muslims as the religious wars of Europe four centuries ago were to non-Christians, and mercifully Sunni-Shia hostility has never reached quite that intensity of violence and hatred. But right across the Islamic world it has been getting worse for several decades now, and the eye of the storm is in the Middle East.
Iran is the sole Shia great power, so it is inevitably the focus of the fears of Sunni Arabs and the hopes of Shia Arabs. Moreover, given Turkey’s semidetached relationship with the region, Iran is in practical terms the greatest power in the entire Middle East.
For the past decade, Iran has been greatly weakened by the arms and trade embargoes that the West imposed because of the nuclear issue. Once those embargoes are removed Iran will regain much of its former strength. This is already causing great anxiety in the Sunni Arab countries, especially those that face it across the Gulf.
Even quite experienced people in Washington and other western capitals don’t realize the extent to which the Sunni Arab countries of the Middle East thought that their close ties with the western great powers gave them a kind of guarantee against Shia power—and how betrayed they feel now that they think that guarantee is being withdrawn.
Sunnis outnumber Shias almost 10-to-one in the Islamic world as a whole, but in the smaller world that stretches from Iran and Turkey to Palestine and Yemen—the “Middle East”—Shias make up more than a third of the population. The war is already hot and quite openly sectarian in Syria and in Iraq. In many other places (Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen) it is bubbling just underneath the surface. It will get worse before it gets better.
Comments
7 Comments
McRocket
Nov 11, 2013 at 8:04pm
All major religions are a complete and total waste of time and have caused far more harm then good.
Yam
Nov 11, 2013 at 10:57pm
It should be noted that Israel controls the Senate and Congress.
They do what they say, and never have bluffed. They can't afford to
Reza
Nov 11, 2013 at 11:37pm
I can confidently say 90% of persians dont wear their religion on their sleeves and dont wake up in the morning thinking about it. Most are actually turned off by it! The Shia-Sunni thing is just used for political influence, but i doubt the Iranian government in an open economy will benefit from such silly stuff. They can be much more influential if they ride the iranian peoples potential. The problem with the Saudi/UAE arabs is they cant handle healthy economic competition, resent persians in general, and the potential of a vibrant 80M person economy which can dominate the region (in an economic sense) just like China vis-a-vis smaller countries in Asia. Arabs frankly dont have the human capital/educational skills and culture of hard work, hence they rely on US sanctions to prevent potential competition and maintain unearned influence. Here in Canada, a good percent of technical graduate students are of Iranian background and attend the top canadian graduate schools. In contrast, the Saudi's in canada here to study have the hardest time even getting into the second tier undergraduate programs. If the Saudi royals want respect they need to start from home,
Dagon
Nov 12, 2013 at 3:10am
The ME conflicts are all about definitions. Get the definition right, and you improve your position.
Is it rich vs poor, clan rivalries or Shia vs Sunni? Is it nationalists vs regionalists or Islamists vs Secularists? Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Arab-Israeli conflict?
Turning the Arab-Israeli conflict into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was arguably Yasser Arafat's greatest achievements. It completely changed the game, for better of worse. Turning various power struggles in the region into naked Shia-Sunni confessional divisions is such a change. In places like Iraq, once those became the terms of the conflict the winner was predetermined. Syria is probably in the same boat 9but with the sides reversed.
From the 2013 perspective it seems like the Iranian tensions have always been about Shia-Sunni regional power struggles. We forget that it's gone through stages: Islamist vs Secularist, Resistance (Axis of evil) vs pro western.
SPY vs SPY
Nov 13, 2013 at 7:15pm
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is astonished that the World cannot see the Forest for the Trees!!!!!!
What I mean is - why cannot the UN, the EU and especially the USA not see the Benefits and Profits of a WAR with Iran????
Lordie Sweet Jesus Folks, we can have a Really Great WAR anytime we want, so What The Fuck is all This PEACE TALK ABOUT????
Etienne
Nov 14, 2013 at 3:22pm
From a Canadian point of view the potential consequences are hard to overstate. If sanctions against Iran are lifted, Iranian oil (to say nothing of natural gas) will be back on the world market, and as a result oil (+ natural gas) prices may be expected to fall substantially (over the short term: over the longer term they will of course rise again: Google "Export land model" to understand why).
Now, Alberta and Newfoundland oil is not cheap to extract, and if oil prices fall low enough the entire oil industry of both provinces (and therefore the economies of both provinces) might well collapse.
Of course, lower oil prices would give quite a nice "shot in the arm" to the economies of all oil importers: basically the United States, the European Union countries, Japan, China (plus most Canadian provinces).
And you can be certain that all the politicans in the above jurisdictions who need an improving economy to get re-elected (or, in the Chinese case, to make revolution a little less likely) will be and are pushing hard for a deal with Iran.
Lined up against such a deal: all the world's major oil (+ natural gas) exporters, which stand to lose large amounts of money should oil prices fall: Russia, Saudi Arabia and the other Petro-monarchies of the Middle East. It seems to me that the coalition whose interests would be objectively served by a deal with Iran (and the resulting fall in oil + gas prices) is much more powerful than the coalition opposed to such a deal.
Coming back to Canada: I used to wonder why the Harper government was so unequivocally anti-Iranian, but now I suspect they were and are simply echoing their corporate masters' very rational support of sanctions against Iran, which boosted their profits quite nicely.
If an Iranian deal, fall in oil prices, collapse of the Canadian oil industry, and election of a non-Conservative government all take place it would be VERY interesting to do an autopsy of this government and the oil industry, with special attention paid to the links between the two. In the hands of a good writer of thrillers (A John Le Carré-type writer, perhaps?) this could be mined for decades. Hmm, or perhaps a Douglas Adams-type satirist would be a better choice? I suspect the level of absurdity to be found in such a study may require that sort of author. Thoughts, anyone?
P.Peto
Nov 15, 2013 at 9:25am
I suspect the current Iranian embroglio is more complex than a Sunni-Shia schism, or a historical alienation between Iranian nationalism and American economic colonialism, or just a power struggle for regional hegemony between Israel and Persia or an effort to stop further nuclear proliferation, or just a hostile attempt to destabilize an anti secular Islamic theocracy ,or a western bid to reclaim the Persian oil fields but also a western corporate conspiracy, as Ettiene suggests, to curtail Persian oil production so as to sustain high world oil prices. So, if it's another Banker's plot I would not be so sure that sanctions will be lifted. Surely all of the above issues would conspire against an easy resolution of this problem and failure to do so will ultimately result in war and not peace. Perhaps Dyer is overly optimistic?