To this end, the US has designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as proliferators of WMDs and the al-Quds army as a supporter of terrorism. The US military also maintains a significant naval presence in the Persian Gulf. But perhaps most peculiarly, Washington has promoted an aggressive new Middle East peace initiative, which the Bush administration seems to think will help diminish Iranian power in the region. Bush’s hasty push for a solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute in recent months is widely interpreted as an attempt to unite Israel and the Sunni Arab states against Iran, a common enemy. On his recent trip to the region, Bush made further attempts to rally its nations, despite their many differences, around the common threat emanating from Tehran, reiterating his description of Iran as the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror”.

But this strategy seems doomed to fail, for no other reason than because the time frame is terribly unrealistic. The Bush administration can scarcely hope to solve a 60-year-old conflict in less than 12 months, let alone with two political leaders — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — who face significant opposition from many of their constituents. Even if a rapid solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict were ironed out this year, peace would be tenuous, and there would be no guarantee that the Arab states would immediately refocus their energies on countering Iran militarily, in conjunction with Israel. Moreover, as Shibley Telhami wrote in the Washington Post this week, the Arab states have very different concerns about Iran than the US and Israel. While the US and Israel are wary of the military potential of Iran and its proxies, the Sunni Arab states are more worried about Iran’s soft power, including the influence it may exercise over their own Shiite minorities. There is also no guarantee that the Arab states will act uniformly against Iran. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has much warmer relations with Iran than Saudi Arabia.

... contd.