Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 21 /Trend T.Konyayeva/
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will hardly succeed in her efforts to enlist support from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia countries for further exerting pressure on Iran, experts believe.
"Oman and Qatar will maintain a balance of relations with the West and Iran while Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, U.S. ally in the region, will exert the maximum pressure on the West to open a military campaign against Tehran," Yevgeny Satanovsky, President of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, wrote in an e-mail to Trend.
"Kuwait is on the side of the West, but it will not actively oppose Iran," he noted. "The UAE is also on the West's side and is a hostile country for Iran but it will actively stand against Iran only subject to a large regional war."
On Oct. 17, Secretary Clinton started her Middle East tour, which includes travel to Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman, Tajikistan and, reportedly, Uzbekistan.
Clinton visited the sultan of Oman on Wednesday to thank him for helping to secure the release of American hikers from Iran last month and to appeal to Arabs to further increase pressure on Iran, The Washington Post reported.
The meeting came a week after revelations of an alleged Iranian plot to kill an ambassador from Saudi Arabia to Washington. The Obama administration is seeking to use the plot to build support from Arab governments for further isolating Iran diplomatically and economically.
"We hope the Omanis will use their relations with Iran, as they have in the past, to help the Iranians understand the risks of what they're doing," said the senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol.
Oman, a member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, traditionally maintains good relations with Iran and has helped mediate conflicts with the Islamic Republic in the past.
As to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, U.S. expert on Central Asia Bruce Pannier believes that
Clinton will likely bring up the alleged Iran assassination plot on the Saudi ambassador and probably lobby for support to impose further sanctions on Iran.
"If that is one of the issues on Clinton's agenda, she'll likely have success convincing Uzbekistan, which has never had what could be called genuinely friendly ties with Iran," Pannier wrote Trend in an email.
However, Tajikistan would be a different matter though, he thinks.
"Linguistic and cultural affinities are a strong bound between Tajikistan and Iran and Iran has invested a large amount of money into Tajikistan, most notably into the Sangtuda-2 hydropower plant," Pannier said.
The expert said the construction of the Sangtuda-2 was recently completed and Uzbekistan objected constantly and made it so difficult to bring construction materials from Iran to Tajikistan by railway or lorries that Iranian companies started flying parts and equipment into Tajikistan via Afghan airspace.
The Sangtuda-2 power plant will be located on the Vakhsh River. Once completed, this facility will have capacity of 220 megawatts. The project costs around $220 million. A total of $180 million is being invested by Iran. When the plant is launched, Iran will receive all the revenue from electricity sold for 12.5 years.
Furthermore, two countries signed intergovernmental agreement on construction another two hydropower plants during a working visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Dushanbe on September 4 to 5.
Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Ali Larijani heading the Iranian parliamentary delegation arrived in Dushanbe with a two-day visit a day before the arrival of Secretary Clinton in the country.
Iranian expert on Middle East and the Iranian-Arab relations Hassan Hanizadeh thinks the U.S. is trying to form a united front with Middle East and Central Asian countries against Iran and to exert more pressure on it because the previous U.S. sanctions against Iran were not very efficient.
"The U.S. seeks to pursue a carrot-and-stick policy towards Iran," Hanizadeh told Trend by phone from Tehran. "Washington would like to use sanctions and accusations of plotting to kill the Saudi Ambassador as advantages in talks with Iran."
Last week, the U.S. authorities said they had broken up plans by two men linked to Iranian Quds Force - a special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - to assassinate Saudi Ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir.
Iran denies the allegations saying the U.S. uses this tactic to slander again Iran. The IRGC also rejected any involvement of the Quds force in the plot alleged by the United States.
However, the regional countries seem to be pessimistic towards the U.S. and treat the cooperation with it suspiciously because they understand that the U.S. uses them to achieve their goals, Hanizadeh believes.
According to Hanizade, the regional countries will not be ready to break off or damage relations with Iran because of the U.S., given that Iran is one of the powerful and influential countries in the region.
So, the U.S. attempts will not be very effecient and countries will maintain relations with Iran at the same level, he assures.
V.Zhavoronkova, T.Jafarov contributed to the article.