By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 27 1996 (IPS)

Tighter oil supplies and changing geopolitics in Central Asia and the Gulf region are moving Iran towards the top of the U.S. overseas agenda just as President Bill Clinton’s new foreign policy team prepares to take over next month.

While forces favouring “containment” or even a more aggressive stance against Teheran retain the upper hand within the administration, a growing number of critics — foremost among them, big U.S. oil interests — insist the current policy is outdated.

The latter have gained as a result of successful diplomatic coups pulled off by Teheran during the past week. Iranian President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani’s trip to Turkey, where he signed new trade accords and promoted a 23-billion-dollar energy deal, marked a striking rebuff to Washington.

Just 24 hours later, Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s first state visit to Teheran, where he backed Iran’s objections to the deployment of U.S. forces in the Gulf, signaled a major advance in ties between the two traditionally suspicious neighbours.

“These moves don’t help much,” said one U.S. official here Thursday. “In fact, they’re something of a thumb in the eye.”

For now, official U.S. policy remains resolutely hostile. Despite hints by his top Mideast aide in October about the possibility of easing tensions in Clinton’s second term, Secretary of State Warren Christopher told reporters at a farewell press conference here last week that Washington’s position has not changed.

The U.S., he said, continues “to regard Iran as a dangerous projector of terrorism, a country that’s dangerous because they’re trying to assemble weapons of mass destruction (and) because of their efforts to undermine the (Middle East) peace process.”

Christopher, Washington’s chief negotiator during the disastrous 1980-81 Iran hostage crisis, has been perhaps the strongest voice for a hard line against Teheran within the administration. His departure and the fact that his successor, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, is a protegee of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, may present an opening for a change of policy.

Brzezinski has been calling for a “hard, critical revisionist look at our policy toward Iran,” for several months. “We need a good strategic relationship with Iran in the longer run if we are to have not only stability in the Persian Gulf but access to Central Asia …where there are enormous deposits of energy which will be important in the next two decades,” he told CNN last September.

This view echoes arguments made with increasing vigour by big U.S. oil companies, several of which gained multi-billion-dollar stakes in oil-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But these companies have yet to devise a sure way of getting the oil to market. Russia, the main westward route, is holding out for major financial concessions, while Iran, with the shortest and most direct route, is off-limits due to the U.S. trade embargo.

With Asian demand for oil rising sharply and traditional Gulf sources unable to substantially lift production, “oil markets have become increasingly precarious,” according to J. Robinson West, chairman of the Petroleum Finance Company. Indeed, the price of heating oil and gasoline at the pump have been rising steadily for several months.

“To lower prices and promote greater stability in the global oil market,” West wrote recently in the New York Times, “more oil must flow from a variety of sources through as many routes as possible. Difficult as it sounds, Washington must re-examine its strategy toward Iran, the largest and most stable country in the region.”

This argument has been bolstered further by growing fears of instability within other Gulf states, where more than 20,000 U.S. military personnel have been based since the 19918Gulf War.

Last June’s bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar military barracks, in which 19 U.S. soldiers were killed, underlined how little U.S. intelligence knows about the internal dynamics of Saudi society, according to administration sources.

After the bombing — the second against U.S. targets in the desert kingdom in less than a year — the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time organised a special task force to review internal threats to the Saudi royal family.

The Saudis have denied they face any serious internal unrest and have instead charged that Iran was behind the attack. Teheran has strongly denied any involvement, although it conceded recently that some of those involved may have slipped into Iran after the attack.

U.S. officials remain sceptical of the Saudi claims, seeing in them an attempt to divert attention from Riyadh’s domestic problems and to rally Washington and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) against Teheran at a critical moment.

If, however, the Saudis present more convincing evidence of an Iranian hand in the Khobar bombing, analysts here say U.S.-Iranian ties would take a sharp turn for the worse.

A report last week in the Washington Post — which has given substantial coverage to the Saudi case — quoted officials as saying that Washington would at least seek mandatory U.N. sanctions against Iran if it was presented with conclusive proof of Teheran’s role in the attack. It might also take retaliatory military action, according to these officials.

Anti-Teheran hard-liners in the administration are also looking with some hope to Germany to bolster their cause. A verdict is expected next month in a case in which five Iranian intelligence agents are being tried for the 1992 slaying of an Iranian Kurdish leader and three of his colleagues in Berlin.

At the same time, a federal court is considering issuing arrest warrants for Rafsanjani and Ayatollah Ali Khameini for allegedly ordering the murders.

Germany has long opposed Washington’s policy of isolating Iran. Instead, it has been a leading advocate for engaging Iran in a “critical dialogue” designed to retain diplomatic and economic links between Teheran and the West.

Analysts here, however, believe that a guilty verdict and issuance of the arrest warrants would force German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to impose sanctions against Iran and bring Iran’s most important trading partner much more closely into line with U.S. policy.

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