By IANS
New Delhi : The US’ standoff with Iran is threatening the peace in West Asia, where American prestige and power has already been dented due to its policies, leading to the Iraqi quagmire, said Indian Vice-President Hamid Ansari said Wednesday.
Inaugurating a two-day seminar on West Asia here, the scholar and former diplomat said the “correctives are suggested by the diagnosis itself”.
“The question is of the will to undertake it. Simple logic, however, is not synonymous with state logic.”
He pointed out that while a majority of the population in the region was Arab, the principal factors were non-Arabs – Israel, Iran and the US. “The interaction of these with the region, and with each other, is having a decisive impact,” said Ansari.
“The US today is not the Sole Super Power of the spring of 2003. The policies of unilateralism, ‘creative destruction’ and pre-emption have faltered,” said the vice-president.
“The US has been mauled by non-state actors in Iraq; its policies have given an impetus to terrorism; it has lost domestic support for its Iraq policy; its unpopularity levels are alarmingly high in Arab and Muslim countries, and its intentions are suspected,” he added.
While talking about the US-Iran standoff on the Iranian nuclear programme, he noted that it was a threat to global and regional peace, but he said it was “a political instrumentality resorted to maximise advantage in a complex negotiating process”.
Ansari, who was India’s envoy to Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, felt that “emerging security concerns cannot be viewed in a vacuum and in a single dimension; they need to be seen both from the internal and the external perspectives and in terms of the historical experience of individual societies.”
“Progress in comprehension would therefore be possible only through de-segregation; generalisations would be possible only if we succeed in identifying common threat perceptions,” he added.
The conference on “Emerging Security Concerns in West Asia” has been organised by the Rosa Luxumburg Foundation of Germany and the Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
Before being elected vice-president this year, Ansari guided ORF’s West Asia programme.
Earlier, making the opening remarks, ORF Centre for International Affairs president Maharajakrishna Rasgotra suggested an Asia-Arab initiative for peace in West Asia.
“Why not an Asian-Arab initiative instead of the US, Western efforts? Is the Middle East peace of concern only to the US and Europe,” said Rasgotra, who is also chairman of the National Security Advisory Council.