To blow things out of proportion is not the wise thing to do, warns Sherine Bahaa Bahrain needs to secure its place in the sun and Iran wants to be a close, albeit non-Arab, ally to Arab Gulf monarchies, but a recent row between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the tiny kingdom of Bahrain is not a good start to better relations. Bahrain protested after Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, a prominent conservative member of Iran's powerful Expediency Council, said the kingdom used to be Iran's 14th province and that it even had a representative in the Iranian parliament. The tiny Gulf states are concerned about Iran's rising influence in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories and its potential effect on their own large Shia communities. The comments hit hard in Bahrain itself because the majority Shia are ruled by a Sunni king. However, there doesn't seem to be any particular Iranian interest in inflaming the crisis right now, and the Iranians quickly moved to defuse the crisis, clarifying on Arabic-language TV that they have no territorial ambitions in Shia-majority Bahrain. The tiff did not prevent Iranian Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli from heading to Bahrain this week carrying a message from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for King Hamad in a bid to calm down Bahraini ruling family's anger. "Meeting and talking to the Bahraini king and delivering a message from our president tops the agenda for Mr Mahsouli's trip to Bahrain," the state IRNA news agency said. It was not only the Iranian foreign minister who tried to make up for the irking statement of Nouri. On Tuesday, Iran's Majlis Speaker Ali Larjani denounced the whole crises. Larjani made the remarks at the opening of the parliament open session, he referred to it as developments in the region due to some "minor issues" pertaining to Bahrain. As Larjani put it, "certain people created such ballyhoo about a comment issued from a historical point of view and created such traffic of unusual visits across the region. To make its position clear, Bahrain suspended talks over the importation of natural gas from Iran and barred Iranian ships from its shores. There were clear, strongly-worded statements from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE against Iran's comments, as well as visits of solidarity by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan to the Bahraini capital of Manama. The Gulf Cooperation Council ministerial meeting emphasised the resolute common stance of the Arab leaders. The Arabs seem to prefer to ratchet up the issue. The visits by Mubarak and Abdullah, comments by the Saudis, and the sensational coverage in much of the Arab media all seem intended to exacerbate the crisis. Arab leaders seem to be using concerns about the Iranian "threat" to help reinforce the attempt to form a common Arab position on the Palestinian and Syrian tracks. This is not the first time that such statements have come from Iranian officials. Two years ago, an editorial in the influential pro-government Tehran newspaper Kayhan claimed that Bahrain was a "province of Iran" and that public opinion there wanted "reunification" with the "native land". This sparked tensions which were dampened only when the Iranian foreign minister flew to Bahrain and assured it that the Islamic Republic respected its sovereignty. The editor, Hussein Shariatmadari, was also forced to admit that the opinions had been his own. But what is the actual reason behind Iran's saber-rattling policy? As Mustafa El-Labbad, director of the Sharq Centre for Regional and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told Al-Ahram Weekly, the fact that these statements come from ex-officials who are of second rank saved Iran a great amount of the blame, though it is still "of considerable significance". The fact that Bahrain was under Iranian hegemony during the days of the shah explains their use of the term "historical rights", El-Labbad explained. The late shah of Iran relinquished Iran's claim to Bahrain in 1970, a year before the island, a British protectorate, became an independent state. Iranian leaders have carefully avoided raising the Bahrain issue since the 1979 Islamic revolution although it is occasionally brought up in the press during periods of tension with conservative Arab states across the Gulf, two of which host Western military bases. El-Labbad argues that by making these kind of statements, Iran wants to keep up the pressure on Gulf monarchs and "thus have the upper hand in any regional initiative be it towards settlement or escalation". Yet no comparison should be made between the current situation and what happened in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when Saddam Hussein also claimed responsibility over a tiny kingdom, Kuwait, that had once been part of historic Iraq. El-Labbad stated "Iran is more witty than its neighbour, Iraq. Iran cannot by any means invade Bahrain."
