Crossing the Persian Gulf

When I spent four months in Doha, Qatar back in 1981 I was advised not to refer to the ocean surrounding the mostly Arab states as the “Persian Gulf”. Apparently, letters from home would arrive in a more timely fashion if the last line of my Doha address read “Arabian Gulf”. In those days, when Arab Iraq was in the first year of its eight year war with Persian Iran, Arab pride was literally causing a big gulf between Muslim nations of the Middle East.

How times have changed? President Bush’s “war on terror” is now rapidly bridging the divide between these disparate Muslim countries. In fact, after we toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran began to accelerate its nuclear program. The leadership in Iran has recently started to get nostalgic about its ancient Persian heritage. We have learned that Saddam Hussein had dreams of becoming a modern-day Saladin. We shouldn’t be too surprised then, if Iranian President Ahmadinejad soon adopts the mantle of Cyrus the Great? In order to earn that sort of reverence from the Iranian people, Ahmadinejad feels the need to acquire the power, prestige, and protection afforded by nuclear weapons.

Sadly, Iran’s determination to proceed along this nuclear path presents a dangerous dilemma to the western world in general and the U.S. in particular. In his April 19th New York Times column, Thomas L. Friedman said it offered us a stark choice between “Iraq II or a Nuclear Iran?” Unfortunately, this is a Hobson's choice. Nonetheless, we might be forced to pick the lesser of two evils for now – a Nuclear Iran? Iraq I established the failure of the much vaunted Bush Doctrine and the inefficacy of preemption. In fact, it produced the opposite effect, which was to increase the belligerence of the “axis of evil” nations. So it’s unlikely that any carrot-and-stick policy attempted by the Bush Administration with Iran is likely to produce any meaningful change in Iran’s behavior. It might be best to put Iran on ice for the next 33 months and let the next President start with a clean slate. In the meanwhile, the Bush Administration should focus on getting Iraq I right – that might even have a causal effect on Iran?

Speaking of getting Iraq I right, I was surprised to read Friday’s Wall Street Journal editorial, “Bush and Iran”. The WSJ editors were apparently not practicing what they often preach to the “Bush and Iraq” critics. Their lengthy dissertation on “Bush and Iran” reiterated the complexity of the problem but offered no solution beyond:

“the President must begin to educate the American public about what is at stake in Iran and what the U.S. might be prepared to do about it.”

Excuse me? The “gulf” between Iran and the U.S. has become so wide and so deep over so long a period, it is unlikely that a majority of the American public is not already aware of the threat that a nuclear Iran poses to the United States. As far as Iran’s nuclear program is concerned, unless we can get the international community to agree to prolonged and comprehensive sanctions enforced by a complete land, air, and sea blockade of Iran – we might as well get used to a nuclear Iran, just as we have become accustomed to a nuclear North Korea.

If we are ever going to cross the Persian abyss, preemption is not an option and meaningless threats must stop at the water’s edge. If President Bush is really serious about making headway with Persia before he leaves office, he could appoint President Clinton as a special envoy to head bilateral negotiations between Iran and the U.S. - with carte blanche authority to bridge the gulf between our two nations!

Kissing Up to India

It looks like Nixon White House counselor John Dean is now seeing a cancer growing on the Bush presidency. At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing yesterday on President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping, the Watergate icon suggested, “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.” Ouch!

While Bush is certainly unlike Nixon on domestic policy, they do seem to have some similarities on the foreign policy front and I am not talking about the Vietnam-Iraq comparisons that have been made almost from the start of the Iraq war. It’s their shared obsession with Pakistani dictators that confounds me.

Some political pundits have compared Bush’s recent trip to India with Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. However, back then Nixon wanted to befriend China as a counter to the Soviet Union, which happened to be cozying up to India. Nixon thus also chose Pakistan over India and, as the BBC reported last June, “developed a ‘special relationship’ with Pakistan's then military dictator, General Yahya Khan.”

Official documents released last year from that era also reveal a strong personal distaste that both, Nixon and Kissinger had for Indians in general. Here is another snippet from that same BBC News story:

One key conversation transcript comes from the meeting between President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger in the White House on 5 November 1971, shortly after a meeting with the visiting Indira Gandhi.

“We really slobbered over the old witch,” says President Nixon.

“The Indians are bastards anyway,” says Mr. Kissinger.

Ouch! As a first generation Indian-American that revelation stung me. Kissinger is revered like a foreign policy god, but I remember him being flummoxed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s diplomatic panache and political skills during the Bangladesh crisis. The same “old witch” ran circles around Kissinger back then as he desperately tried to save Pakistan from humiliation and inhibit the creation of Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, Nixon did make a stark choice – he clearly preferred Pakistan’s military dictatorship to India’s then fledgling democracy. In contrast, President Bush appears to be hedging his bets on the subcontinent – opting for a new strategic relationship with India while continuing to coddle yet another Pakistani military dictator, General Musharraf. This wily leader manages to simultaneously “talk the talk” about Pakistan’s assistance to the United States in its “war on terror”, while he continues to hedge his bets on the future of the Taliban. One can’t imagine that Bush and Condi Rice are naïve enough not to recognize this transparent behavior. I can almost visualize a post-9/11 White House conversation transcript being released in 2025 that reads as follows:

“We really slobbered over that two-timing armchair general,” President Bush remarks.

“The Pakistanis are idiots anyway,” Condi Rice adds.

Ouch! In any event, after 9/11 President Bush probably recognized that it would be impossible for the western world to contain, what Jimmy Carter recently referred to as, a “Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation” already in progress. Bush found out that this box had been blown open by Pakistan several years prior to 9/11, when their top nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, began selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. In fact, this Pandora’s Box had actually begun a slow leak after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War.

By negotiating what President Carter called in the same Post article a “dangerous deal with India”, President Bush is strategically trying to rope in a growing economic and nuclear power on to the Judeo-Christian side of what is quite clearly becoming a political divide along religious lines. Also, it is highly unpredictable as to which side of this religious fault line the old “evil empire” and the remnants of the communist world will come out in the long term. I would therefore counter that not consummating Bush’s nuclear deal with India would be dangerous to the lasting interests of the United States.

Not surprisingly then Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, co-chairman and chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, also believes that Bush’s nuclear deal with India would harm the “United States' vital interest” in preventing nuclear proliferation. Surely Senator Nunn must recognize that India has lived without US civilian nuclear technology for over thirty years. There is no reason, aside from its burgeoning energy needs, that India would have a need for US nuclear power reactors. Irrespective of the outcome of this deal, India will continue to honor the principle of nuclear non-proliferation without being an actual signatory to the NPT.

The United States has a lot more to lose from a business and global security standpoint than India, if this deal were not consummated. I would much rather see my native country dependent on the US, than either Iran or Russia, for its long term energy needs. Besides, with the US economy increasingly reliant on communist China, a diversification in our strategic relationships portfolio is long overdue. The new US-India relationship could well turn out to be the only significant foreign policy achievement of the Bush presidency.

So while prominent Democrats are trying to put the kibosh on President Bush’s nuclear deal with India, some renowned Republicans are supporting it. After Dr. Henry A. Kissinger’s old anti-Indian sentiments were exposed last year, he quickly apologized for branding all Indians with a broad brush in such harsh terms. His bona fides were further established recently in an article entitled, "Anatomy of a partnership” that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 10, 2006. In a strong endorsement of President Bush’s India policy, the man who once doubted the legitimacy of my birth concluded:

In a period preoccupied with concerns over terrorism and the potential clash of civilizations, the emerging cooperation between the two great democracies, India and the United States, introduces a positive and hopeful perspective.

As the old saying goes “from your lips to God’s ears” – kissing up never felt sweeter – Amen!