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News ID: 63387
Publish Date : 20 February 2019 - 21:37
Bloomberg Article:

Iran ‘Has Big Advantage in Battle’ With Enemies

WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- Why can’t the U.S. and its allies get the better of Iran? An article on the Bloomberg website has tried to provide answers.
"To all appearances, the face-off is a colossal mismatch, with incomparably greater power arrayed against Tehran than for it. But Iran and its allies have several underappreciated advantages, not least the relative cohesion on their own side versus the disarray among their opponents,” the article written by Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Persian Gulf States Institute in Washington, said.
Last week’s U.S.-organized Warsaw Summit was regarded by most participants and observers as an effort by Washington to shore up the coalition seeking to confront Iran.
There were allegedly representatives of more than six dozen countries, all of whom are opposed to Iran. "They include most of Europe’s NATO members, many of the largest Arab countries and Israel. On its face, it’s a very large and formidable coalition,” the article said.
"By comparison, Iran’s committed allies seem a small and ragtag bunch,” it speculated, citing Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, anti-terror groups in Iraq and the Houthi fighters confronting a Saudi-led aggression in Yemen.
True, in confrontations with the West Iran can call on the general sympathy of Russia and China. But those large powers are unlikely to bail Tehran out of a crisis, and they maintain good relations with many of Iran’s key opponents such as Saudi Arabia and the occupying regime of Israel, it said.
"The key to the strength of Iran’s Middle East coalition is its relative vertical integration and discipline,” the article said.
"The relative vertical integration of decision-making on the pro-Iranian side is also buttressed by cultural and religious deference to authority among Shia Muslims. Shias are typically supposed to adhere to the judgment of senior clerics, and Iran’s revolutionary appeal is precisely to such religious-political authority,” it added.
That compared with the coalition of Persian Gulf countries, other pro-U.S. Arab countries, the occupying regime of Israel, the U.S., and most NATO states that are "quintessentially oriented to keeping the status quo, to preserving the global and regional order.”
"This is not made easier by the disarray in the anti-Iranian camp. The Persian Gulf Arab countries and Israel don’t even have diplomatic relations. They remain profoundly divided over the Palestinian issue. All cooperation on security such as sharing intelligence must be limited and surreptitious. There’s no real possibility of an open alliance between them, as has become painfully clear to a disappointed Trump administration. And the Sunni-majority Arab countries are themselves bitterly divided, as the ongoing boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt demonstrates,” the articled continued.
NATO is badly divided on Iran as well, it said. Since the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear deal, Britain, Germany and France, along with the European Union, have been trying to keep the agreement alive despite Washington’s opposition. They have created a "special purpose vehicle” for European companies to get payments for trading with Iran in currencies other than the dollar, bypassing the U.S. banking system and, therefore, American sanctions. They all sent junior delegations to Warsaw, except for Britain, whose foreign minister said he was only there to talk about Yemen.
Another key NATO member, Turkey, opted out of Warsaw altogether, preferring to join Iran and Russia in a rival conference at Sochi, Russia, ostensibly to talk about Syria. Turkey is increasingly taking a neutral attitude toward Iran, which it views as a rival rather than an adversary.
Finally, in contrast to the Shia deference to clerical authority, most rival traditions encourage believers to choose among various opinions for different purposes. This allows Takfiri extremists such as Qaeda to reject denunciations of terrorism by senior clerics in favor of justifications by junior or marginal jurisprudents they claim to find more persuasive, the article said. It also makes it difficult for Iran’s opponents to deploy religion as a politically unifying, integrating factor in a regional coalition that includes non-state actors and militias. The last time this was systematically attempted, by the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia during the Afghan war in the 1980s, it helped defeat the Soviet Union, but also produced Qaeda and the Taliban, the article said.
Instead, "Iran and its small but potent coalition do enjoy some clear advantages, including much stronger unity and relative integration” and as Warsaw demonstrated so clearly, the utter disarray on the other side, it added.