Rice, Gates trip signals united front

The Secretaries of State and Defense set out for the Middle East to make a case for US initiatives.

from the July 31, 2007 edition

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"Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries are not doing all they can to help us in Iraq," Mr. Khalilzad said on CNN Sunday. If anything, the former US ambassador to Iraq added, "they are doing things … undermining the effort to make progress."

US officials say Saudi Arabia has not stanched the flow across its border into Iraq of Islamist militants who carry out terrorist attacks including suicide bombings. At the same time, they say, the Saudis are funding Sunni insurgent groups and militias that target both Iraqi government forces and US soldiers.

"The Sunni militias are killing Americans and the Saudis are helping to fund them, so that's not good," says Mr. Tanter, who is president of the Iran Policy Committee, a group that advocates US support for the Iranian opposition as a way to tackle the Iranian regime.

Tanter says stabilizing Iraq will require much more cooperation and action from Iraq's neighbors, but that their involvement alone won't be enough – it will take credible US efforts to pressure Iran and address regional concerns about Iran's growing power. And that will take the "coercive diplomacy" of a State-Pentagon initiative.

"The Sunni Arab core is the key to stabilizing Iraq," Tanter says, "but they don't have the threat of military force to pressure Iran. So you need an alignment of the US with Sunni Arab states." Tanter says that for starters, the US should tap into the Iranian opposition force – MEK – held in camps inside Iraq because they have "excellent relations" with both Iraq's Sunni politicians and the US military.

The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to authorize the sale of $20 billion in sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf states. On Monday Rice announced plans for a new $13 billion military assistance agreement with Egypt to "strengthen Egypt's ability to address shared strategic goals."

The open question is whether the proposed arms sale or anything else the US offers will succeed in altering the approach the Saudis and other Sunni Arabs have adopted toward a Shiite-dominated Iraq. The US wants the Saudis and other Sunni states to support the Iraqi government as a bulwark against Iran. But for the Sunni Arabs, the Maliki regime is proving to be the pawn of an ever-bolder Iran.

"Saudi policy is undergirded by the reality that neither Iran nor Iraq is going anywhere, so they will have them as neighbors for centuries to come," says Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They are hunkering down for the long haul, finding allies and trying to coopt enemies, but it's a different problem than the US has."

The fact that Rice and Gates are taking the US case to the Middle East together won't be lost on the region's leaders, Mr. Alterman says, but it may not be enough to overcome doubts that have developed about the US.

Alterman says the trip "makes a difference because it clearly ties … a diplomatic solution on the Arab-Israeli front to a broader alliance in regional security. We'll have to see if it's enough," he adds, "to overcome high skepticism in the region over US intentions and the US ability to deliver."

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