IranIran not invited to a UN summit on ISIS because U.S. designates it as a state sponsor of terrorism

The United States did not invite Iran to Tuesday’s UN summit on combating Islamic State and other violent extremist groups because the Department of State still designates Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism.

It is not likely that Iranian president Hassan Rouhani would have participated in the summit even if Iran were invited.

Observers note that the fact that Iran has not been invited to a meeting to discuss a coordinated strategy to defeat ISIS, a Sunni militant group Iran regards as an enemy, is yet one more illustration of the institutional and political obstacles to U.S. cooperation with Iran beyond the nuclear deal the two sides agreed to in July.

The Guardian reports that U.S. State Department officials confirmed that Iran’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism was the reason for its exclusion from the countering ISIS summit being chaired by President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

Iran was designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department in 1984. The latest State Department report said: “Iran continued its terrorist-related activity in 2014, including support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanese Hezbollah, and various groups in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.”

The United States has also accused Iran of increasing assistance to Iraqi Shia militias, one of which was designated a terrorist organization, “in response to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] incursion into Iraq, and has continued to support other militia groups in the region.”

The state sponsor of terrorism label does not preclude negotiating with a national government, as was the case on the nuclear deal. Rather, it is a tool often used to block business activities of organizations and high-level individuals in the state designated as a terrorism sponsor, impose travel bans, or freeze assets.

“These labels and lists reduce American maneuverability and flexibility at a time when agility is a critical property in foreign policy,” Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian-American Council, an advocacy group promoting diplomacy with Iran, told the Guardian. “For Iran, some of these things become a litmus test for American sincerity. It may or may not have been interested in taking part but it is enormously insulted not to be invited.”

Ilan Goldenberg, a former senior State Department official who is now Middle East director at the Center for a New American Security, said that the invocation of the state sponsor status was largely a matter of discretion and covered a host of underlying political problems.

“Politically, it is too soon for both sides,” Goldenberg told the Guardian. “We still have the Arabs to manage. If we invite in the Iranians we anger the Saudis and the other Gulf states. And for political reasons, too, since the nuclear deal, the administration has tacked to the right.” He added that in Iran, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had declared himself opposed to greater engagement with Iran beyond the nuclear deal.

On Sunday, speaking to Iran policy analysts in New York, Rouhani indicated his views on combating ISIS were closer to Russians than to the West, insisting that priority be given to fighting the extremist group first without weakening the Assad regime in Damascus. Only after that, he said, should reform in Damascus be addressed.

Leading Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf states, say that it would not be possible to gain popular support for fighting ISIS, an extremist Sunni Islamist group, if such a fight is perceived as helping Shi’a Iran in supporting its regional agents – the Shi’a government in Iraq, the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, and the Lebanese Shi’a Hezbollah –in continuing to oppress and disenfranchise Sunnis in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.