Pakistan's effect on Iran

Sunday, Aug. 29, 2010

Pakistan's effect on Iran

By PRAKASH SHAH and RAMESH THAKUR
Special to The Japan Times

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.....Washington may be committing a similar error with respect to Iran's nuclear motives. Iranian security concerns are focused as much to the east on Pakistan as to the west on Israel. Iran's quest for nuclear weapons may be aimed at meeting the Sunni threat — not just the Israeli threat.

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.....The aggressive Iranian posture in the Middle East is in part a reaction to its fears of being overwhelmed by Sunni countries around it. Iran is the Shiite island surrounded by Sunni countries, both Arab and non-Arab. Iraq is a Shiite-majority country, but the years of Sunni rule under Saddam Hussein and the ambiguity of Americans in finalizing the government in Iraq around its Shiite majority is looked at with great suspicion by Iran.

The decade-long Iran-Iraq war, when Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein's minority Sunni regime, was supported by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia among other neighboring Arab countries. The West politely ignored Iraq's aggression and even the United Nations imposed a moral equivalency between the perpetrator and victim of aggression. Iran has not forgotten all that.

Pakistan, the world's only Muslim nuclear power, is an immediate neighbor of Iran. So is Afghanistan. Tehran is opposed to Taliban domination of Afghanistan, at the expense of the sizable population of Hazaras, who are Shiite.

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....If the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons is seen as a search for security in a hostile Sunni region, and not just as the desire to destroy Israel, it opens up possibilities of solutions other than the one based solely on the current approach.

Prakash Shah is a former Indian ambassador to the U.N. and a U.N. special envoy to Iraq. Ramesh Thakur is a political science professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a former U.N. assistant secretary general.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20100829a1.html