U.S.-GULF: ‘Dual Containment’ Policy Befuddles Experts, Allies

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 16 1995 (IPS) - Washington’s policy to isolate Iran and Iraq, economically and politically, has fast become an isolated exception to President Bill Clinton’s general enthusiasm for free trade and an annoyance to many businessmen and allies alike.

Since becoming president in 1993, Clinton has opened trade with Vietnam, offered trade ties to North Korea and promoted a thriving, if sometimes troubled, commercial link with China.

But Iran and Iraq remain isolated, as Washington clings to its ‘dual containment’ policy which the administration says is designed to prevent either nation from becoming the dominant power in the Gulf.

The policy has served to confuse businessmen and foreign-policy experts, U.S. allies abroad and even some of the administration’s own supporters.

That confusion has come to a head as France and Russia, among other countries, increasingly chafe under a U.N. embargo against Iraq, while U.S. businesses wonder whether or not to deal with Iran’s Islamist government.

The White House Tuesday stepped up its containment policy, announcing it would use its executive authority to block a one- billion-dollar deal between Iran and Conoco, an oil subsidiary of the U.S.-based du Pont conglomerate.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry explained the need to block the deal by saying it would have “dangerously added to the Iranian capacity to do the things that we regard as most dangerous to the international community.” Conoco said it would not proceed with the deal.

“Now we understand Bill Clinton’s definition of free trade,” Hossein Sheikholeslam, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, complained in response to the seemingly exceptional treatment of Iran in an era of “economic engagement”.

“A lot of people in Iran put their necks out on this deal because they wanted a relationship with the United States” despite their previous enmity, argues Professor Greg Gause of New York’s Columbia University. “This was a terrible missed opportunity.”

“So why is what is right in China (i.e., engagement through trade) wrong in Iran?” asked the New York Times this week. “It’s not entirely clear.”

It becomes even less clear when Washington tries to explain why Conoco cannot deal with Teheran, but U.S. companies can buy a quarter of Iran’s crude oil exports to sell to Eastern Europe and Asia.

“U.S. firms are the major purchaser of Iranian oil and have been for years,” says Joe Stork, the editor of the Washington- based ‘Middle East Report.’ He decries the “flagrant inconsistency” of Clinton’s containment policy and argues it would eventually doom the ‘dual containment’ strategy.

Dual containment is the political and military effort to keep both Iraq and Iran from becoming too strong in the region — and thus to prevent either Iraq’s anti-U.S. Arab populism or Iran’s anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism from spreading.

That policy in turn results from the end of an era in which the United States could play off the two traditionally hostile nations against each other.

Washington lavished Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran with weapons and infrastructure during the 1970s, when, until his fall in 1979, he served Washington’s regional surrogate. It then quietly backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran in the decade that followed.

But since the United States and Iraq fell out over the latter’s short-lived 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Washington has seemed to wish a plague on both their houses.

“The dual containment policy is not one that can be sustained over a long period,” Stork says. But, he adds, it remains politically risky in Washington to favour either nation.

Much of the reason for dual containment, Columbia’s Gause argues, has to do with domestic politics. Unlike with China or Vietnam, where U.S. businesses and the Clinton administration shared an interest in normalisation, Iraq and Iran are countries where Washington needs to maintain a tough stance for domestic consumption, he says.

Clinton, Gause says, “doesn’t want to go into the next election campaign as the party that was ‘soft on Saddam.’ And neither Iraq nor Iran are big markets for the United States, so domestic considerations have a lot of influence.”

But the policy has required maintaining the nearly five-year U.N. embargo on Iraq when most nations have no patience to keep it going. It has also called for the tricky task of convincing other nations that, even if U.S. oil companies deal with Iran, they should not.

Unsurprisingly, those efforts generate friction. Economic isolation “has lost any kind of credibility it had with the Europeans,” Gause argues. “So much U.S. business has been done (in Iran) that the Europeans see the whole business as farcical.”

At a time when France and Russia are eager to profit from promised oil deals with Baghdad, the Iraq embargo is equally unpopular.

“The U.N. Security Council sanctions regime is definitely eroding,” Stork contends. “Although the sanctions were renewed this week (for two months), the handwriting is on the wall…”

France’s U.N. ambassador, Jean-Bernard Merimee, says Paris is ready to push for lifting the oil embargo if Iraq meets its commitments to the United Nations by next month. Just ten days ago, France opened a diplomatic mission in Baghdad, the West’s first since the Gulf War.

At the same time, French firms stand to pick up the deal to develop Iranian oil fields that Conoco reluctantly had to drop.

While Washington is more used to French insubordination, it has a harder time coping with some of its other partners. It has made very clear to Japan, for example, that it must either reject a big hydro-electric deal with Iran in the next week or risk U.S. anger. Tokyo is already Teheran’s biggest export market.

And both Iran and Iraq have helped strain ties with Russia. Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argues that the Iraq oil embargo is inconsistent with U.N. rulings and must end soon. Moscow also has resisted U.S. efforts to stop it from selling a nuclear reactor to Iran, a move which stoked alarm in Washington about Teheran’s nuclear ambitions.

Many of Washington’s allies believe that Washington is really trying to bar others from the two profitably markets because domestic opinion in the United States makes it impossible for U.S. business to compete.

But administration officials insist that competition has nothing to do with it. The character and actions of these two states, they say, put them “beyond the pale”.