Will it be Iran next? Despite assurances from Nicholas Burns, head of the US Iran desk, that Washington "is not looking for a fight" with Tehran, European diplomats are increasingly nervous at the belligerence of President Bush's administration. In recent days the president has stepped up the war of words, threatening to shoot or imprison Iranian agents in Iraq, and reinforced the US Persian Gulf naval presence.
A battlegroup of seven ships is sailing from the Red Sea, part of a deployment that will involve 50 vessels, including two aircraft carriers, the biggest US build-up there in four years. In sympathetic Gulf states the US is installing new batteries of Patriot anti-missile systems.
Vice-president Dick Cheney, in a Newsweekinterview on Sunday, said the deployment was intended to signal to the region that the US is "working with friends and allies as well as the international organisations to deal with the Iranian threat". The US has made clear it is determined to curb Iran's spreading influence in the region.
But, as former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer warned in a recent article: "If the threat of force ... aims at preparing the ground for serious negotiations with Iran there can and should be no objection. If, on the other hand, it represents an attempt to prepare the American public for war on Iran, and a genuine intention to unleash such a war when the opportunity arises, the outcome would be an unmitigated disaster."
Attempts to cool matters at the weekend came to nothing. The call by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei for a "timeout", under which Iran's uranium enrichment and UN sanctions would be suspended simultaneously to allow negotiations to restart, has been rejected by both the US and Iran. The latter now intends to announce it will expand uranium enrichment from an experimental 330 centrifuges to "industrial scale" by rigging up 3,000 of them. If run in unison, nonstop for long periods, that could enrich enough uranium for at least one warhead within a year, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies said yesterday it believed it would still be two to three years before Iran had an effective nuclear weapons capacity. Iran still denies that such is its intention.
Although European states share US concerns about Iran's real intentions and accept the need to step up diplomatic and sanctions pressure on Tehran, they look with dismay at Washington's reflex recourse to force. And, as the former neocon Francis Fukuyama has argued, Iran is deterrable by other states with nuclear weapons. Instead of increasing the isolation of Iran or bombing it, and in the process inevitably silencing its moderate forces, there is a need to seek to engage with it in some kind of regional forum to address local issues, not least the stabilisation of Iraq. The demonisation of a "monolithic, terrorist Iran" only serves the agenda of President Ahmadinejad whose domestic popularity is waning as his economic incompetence has been increasingly exposed.