15 December 2009: World Politics Review
By Richard Weitz
It's not often that a U.S. official defends Iran at an international forum. But U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman did just that at the sixth annual Manama Dialogue, a regional security conference organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies held in Bahrain on Dec. 11-13.
Feltman deflected charges by the Yemeni and Saudi governments that Iran was providing military assistance to Houthi rebels operating along the Yemeni-Saudi border. Meanwhile, at the same conference, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki provided the most detailed counteroffer to date from Tehran regarding proposals that Iran exchange its low enriched uranium for nuclear fuel for Tehran's main research reactor. Like Feltman's statement, the remarks, though far from a breakthrough, reflect the shared interests and mutual suspicions that continue to characterize U.S.-Iranian relations.
Feltman told the conference attendees that although the U.S. has heard "theories" from its "friends and partners" of Iranian support to the Houthis, "To be frank, we don't have independent information about this." Feltman instead urged an end to "this fighting as quickly as possible," citing humanitarian considerations as well as the need to avert an escalation of regional tensions.
Since 2004, the Yemeni government has launched recurring military operations against the Houthis, who spring from a Shiite sect known as the Zaids, based primarily in northern Yemen. The rebels have condemned the central Yemeni government led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh -- himself a Zaid -- for corruption, for its strong ties with the United States and Saudi Arabia, and for neglecting the interests of the Zaids and Yemen's other national minorities.
Like the previous offensives, the latest campaign, disturbingly titled Operation Scorched Earth, has ended in a stalemate, with neither the government nor the rebels able to achieve a decisive victory. Meanwhile, international aid groups have had to care for the tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting, because the impoverished Yemeni government, ruling the poorest country in the Arab world, lacks sufficient resources to do so.
Yemeni authorities believe that their repeated failure to crush the rebellion is due to foreign assistance to the Houthis. They have repeatedly accused groups in Iran -- and sometimes even the Iranian government directly -- of providing the rebels with weapons and other aid. In October, Yemeni officials declared that that they had intercepted an Iranian ship carrying weapons to the insurgents, and subsequently cancelled a planned visit to Sana'a by Mottaki in protest.
Saudi representatives have also suspected Iranian involvement, especially after some Houthi fighters crossed into Saudi territory and killed two Saudi border guards in early November. Saudi forces launched a vigorous counteroffensive, including air strikes, and have increased their assistance to the Yemeni government. The Saudis and other moderate Sunni Arab governments aligned with the United States fear that the Iranians are supporting the Houthis for the same reason that Iranians support Hezbollah in Lebanon: to expand Iran's regional influence through the use of local proxies.
Iranian representatives have officially denied assisting the Houthis. Mottaki has called on all countries to respect Yemen's territorial integrity, a principle he made clear applied also to Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government has proposed the formation of a joint Iranian-Yemeni commission to investigate allegations of Iranian support to the Houthis, and has promised to curtail any military aid provided to the guerrillas by Iranian groups operating without official approval.
Iranian officials have also offered their good offices in mediating a truce between the rebels and the Yemeni government. Previous mediation efforts by Qatar resulted in the February 2008 Doha peace agreement, but the accord rapidly collapsed. Though a negotiated settlement is the optimal solution in principle, it is unclear whether another truce would prove more durable under present conditions.
Even before Feltman's statement, U.S. analysts indicated that they could find no concrete evidence of Iranian involvement in the conflict. And whatever the Houthis' links to Iran, American regional experts still see the group as less of a threat to U.S. interests than the al-Qaida presence in Yemen. Al-Qaida has been known to recruit many operatives in Yemen in the past, and American observers fear that Yemeni officials will become so preoccupied with fighting the Houthis that they will allow Islamist extremists to expand their influence in the country. The United States, which signed a defense cooperation agreement with Yemen in November, wants to ensure that U.S. military assistance to Yemen is used primarily to fight against al-Qaida, rather than the Houthis or the still-predominantly peaceful secessionists in southern Yemen.
Nevertheless, it was unusual that Feltman would explicitly defend Iran in a public forum that also included senior representatives of America's closest Gulf allies. These governments already worry whether Washington will defend them against Tehran's growing military power. Speaking at the same conference, Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa of Bahrain -- whose government fears Iranian influence among its predominantly Shiite population -- characterized external involvement in the conflict as "beyond doubt" given the rebels' renewed strength. He also pledged Bahraini military assistance to the Yemenis and the Saudis, at one point declaring, "Every single soldier of Bahrain is a Saudi soldier at this point."
In stressing "our collective interest to narrow" the conflict, Feltman was perhaps highlighting regional security issues on which Iran and the United States might cooperate, provided they can resolve their admittedly serious differences over Iran's nuclear program. Although the Obama administration has reaffirmed its intent to impose harsher sanctions on Iran if Tehran does not curtail its nuclear activities, U.S. representatives have notably not repeated the accusations of the Bush administration that the Iranian government was assisting insurgents fighting U.S. forces deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Mottaki used the platform offered by the conference to present Iran's counteroffer to the uranium-swap plan backed by the six governments negotiating with Tehran about its nuclear program. Under the plan, approximately three-fourths of Iran's current stocks of low-enriched uranium (LEU) would be shipped to Russia for further enrichment -- from 3.5 percent to the roughly 20 percent required by Tehran's medical research reactor. Russia would then send the newly enriched uranium to France, where it would be converted into nuclear fuel cells not suitable for further enrichment, before being returned to the Tehran reactor.
The deal's advocates believe it would build confidence by demonstrating that Iran and its negotiating partners can cooperate on a sensitive nuclear issue. The exchange would also provide foreign observers insights into Iranian nuclear activities. Finally, the conversion would constrain Iran's growing stocks of LEU, which have no immediate civilian use given Iran's lack of a functional nuclear power program. Critics object that an exchange agreement would legitimize Iran's enrichment activities, which the U.N. Security Council has banned, and encourage other similar nuclear programs by other states.
Iran's nuclear negotiators initially seemed comfortable with the plan when it was first made public in October. But Iranian hardliners as well as leaders of the opposition Green movement subsequently objected that the deal lacked adequate safeguards to guarantee that Iran would actually receive the promised fuel rods. Mottaki's proposal addresses these concerns by calling for a phased exchange of Iranian LEU for the fuel rods, to occur on Iran's Kish island, situated in the Persian Gulf. Under this scheme, only a small proportion of Iran's LEU would be located outside the country at any one time. Initial Western commentary has been negative, since Mottaki's proposal would not reduce Iran's stockpiles of enriched uranium enough to keep it from making a nuclear weapon from its remaining LEU should it choose to do so.
The maneuvering over the Iranian nuclear file is now focusing on whether Tehran or its Western interlocutors will prove most persuasive at influencing Moscow and Beijing's decision on additional sanctions on Iran. This summer, the Obama administration established a year-end deadline for any Iranian nuclear settlement, after which it would pursue more coercive methods to constrain Iran's nuclear weapons potential. With Dec. 31 just weeks away, time is running out for the shared regional security interests referenced by Feltman to take precedence over Washington and Tehran's mutual suspicion and distrust.
Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday.
