Close up: Changing course By Salama A Salama Until recently, Arab media was awash with speculation over a possible Israeli strike against Tehran. News of aerial drills in Israel and missile testing in Iran further fuelled the rumours. But then the US changed course and sent one of its top officials to Geneva for talks with Iranian and EU officials. Lacking any independent intelligence, Arab countries kept guessing which foot to put forward. An obscure Iranian documentary about president Anwar El-Sadat's assassination ignited the flames of rancour. Tehran, which denied any connection to the documentary, was once again portrayed as the archenemy of the Arabs and the mastermind of all Shia-Sunni strife. Iran is not without admirers among the Arab public. Its defiance to Europe and the US and refusal to discontinue its nuclear programme strikes a chord with our masses. It is easy, of course, to find fault with Iran's "rule of the clerics" ( velayat-e-faqih ) style of government. But then again, worse goes on in the Arab world, faqih or no faqih. So it may be prudent to focus on the common interests between Iran and Arab countries, if just to avoid a war whose only purpose is to keep Israel ahead. If you look at how the US and the West are handling Iran, you find that their ways are clearer in intent and generally more purposeful than anything Egypt and other Arab countries have come up with. Arab policies towards Iran are a mess. In public, the Arabs oppose the use of force against Iran, whereas privately many of them hope to get rid of Iran, its revolutionary version of Islam, and its rising influence in the Gulf and the region. For reasons that mustn't be difficult to fathom, Western countries are rethinking their relations with Iran. Now they are trying to resolve the nuclear dilemma in a peaceful way, especially now that they know that Iran has achieved reasonable progress in its uranium enrichment programme. The Bush administration, with only four months to go in power, knows that it cannot sort out its situation in Iraq, force Iran to stop the enrichment programme, or fulfil the promise of two states in Palestine without help from the EU and Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana. The US is about to open an "interests section" in Tehran. And commercial flights between the two countries may soon resume. This sudden shift in US policy is not as extraordinary as it seems. It took place only after the policy of sanctions proved futile and after the International Atomic Energy Agency failed to find evidence that Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons. The new policy is also in line with an older recommendation by the Baker-Hamilton Commission about the need to engage Tehran in dialogue. Turkey is said to have played a major role in arranging backdoor contacts between the Americans and the Iranians. Everyone expects Washington and Tehran to hold talks within the next two weeks. The talks will be about mutual containment: the US would promise to freeze its sanctions against Tehran if the latter freezes its enrichment programme. Arab countries that tried to mirror the US approach to Tehran are now out on a limb. The situation has changed so fast that they are totally wrong-footed. One must therefore wonder why some people in Egypt are pressing with their hate campaigns against Iran and Shias. The whole hate thing no longer makes any sense. At one point or another, we'll have to rethink our ways as well. So don't be surprised to see a turnaround in our policies once Secretary Rice has talked to Arab foreign ministers in Abu Dhabi.
