More
than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how
George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran.
Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a
relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and
semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the
Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.
The
campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are
building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American
soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the
Persian Gulf -- Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state
aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the
American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this
orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
Here are just a few recent
instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm.
Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the
Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it
comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David
Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign
influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of
an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no
smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is
involved."
But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam
Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end,
irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second
aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.
But what
of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make
of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to
think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian
chessboard.
- 1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam:
Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian
Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is
an eschatological -- and revolutionary -- religion, fueled by a
passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may
instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a
certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea
towards the vacuous material world.
For more than a thousand
years Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms -- a kind
of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political exclusion and
implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an immensely
dramatic view of history with it.
It's impossible to
understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that the Iranian
religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation
state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of
the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts
from the umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they
see it, is but a way station on the road to the final triumph of
Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond the present stage of history,
however, they also recognize the necessity of reinforcing the
nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary -- and that, of course,
happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs, the concept of
nation-state -- a heritage, in any case, of the West -- will disappear,
replaced by a community organized according to the will of Prophet
Muhammad.
In the right context, this is, believe me, a
powerful message. I briefly became a mashti -- a pilgrim visiting a
privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in
Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only
foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans
occupying every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a
tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple
infidel.
- 2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy
city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always
reminded, in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs
are concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to
the original purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism -- a religion
invariably critical of the established social and political order.
Even
a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and
conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the
crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian
worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian
Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies
between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of
Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of
Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the
country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and
Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a
Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling
Stones).
Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North
Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of
influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky,
Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will
assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a
major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with
the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a
sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is
now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S.
military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and
lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a
continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible
air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.
The
Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a
rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy
that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the
Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India.
While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan,
it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American
neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists --
a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.
Iran's
diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia
early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had
taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador
reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the
influence of "American imperialism."
Meanwhile, a fierce
energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians,
Chinese, and Americans -- all placing their bets on which future trade
routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of
Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the
unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road -- the
backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could
recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of
Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold
Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are
throwing such a collective -- and threatening -- fit.
- 3. What
is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days
when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of
civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official
position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military
development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic
weapons; and Iran -- unlike the US -- has not invaded or attacked any
nation for the past quarter millennium.
Think of George W.
Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues
Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are
religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the
imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared"
and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes
fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only
Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort
of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad
is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad
is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating,
Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the
map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context,
comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student
conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from
Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the
pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic
Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s.
Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be
replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however,
threatening to nuke Israel.
In the 1980s, in the bitterest
years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the
production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa -- a
religious injunction -- under the same terms. For the theocratic
regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of
independence vis-à-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of
all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon
colonialism.
Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear
program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity.
During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding
anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with
"Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many
presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is
rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force,
an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus
the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as
"the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and
their faction of it.
Reformists refer to Russian President
Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by
the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to
resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear
enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation
and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.
Iran's
top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of
Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known
that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad
immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more
startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked
Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an
ideological hardliner.
- 4. A velvet revolution is not around
the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level
meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader
concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his
populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very
appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's
campaign motto was: "We can.")
But the ruling ayatollahs
miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power -- the
Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the
Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections
of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by
Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the
Bush administration), the media -- they assumed they would also control
the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have
been.
For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18
years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of
executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the
Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.
Ahmadinejad,
for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged the
Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to
crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from
entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for
women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the
Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as faithful as
administratively incompetent -- especially in terms of economic policy.
Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader
Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular
ruling elite.
Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's
economic incompetence has not translated into street barricades and it
probably will not; nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would
an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising.
Every single political faction supports the nuclear program out of
patriotic pride.
There is surely a glaring paradox here. The
regime may be wildly unpopular -- because of so much enforced austerity
in an energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility --
but for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote
provinces, life is still bearable. In the large urban centers --
Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz -- most would be in favor of a move
toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a progressive
liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other
way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.
At
least four main factions are at play in the intricate
Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics -- and
two others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though
thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.
The
extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically
socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.
The
clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious
figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme
right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial
internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads -- the Islamic
foundations, active in all economic sectors -- badly want a
reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure of
Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains is
working against the national interest.
Economists in Tehran
project there may be as much as $600 billion in Iranian funds invested
in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the
brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic foundations
also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's
power.
The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps, a
key component of government with vast economic interests, transits
between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what they
define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni Arab
states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In fact,
substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter
the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan,"
but to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and
Southwest Asia.
The current reformists/progressives of the
left were originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad
Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style
socialism to some sort of religious democracy, their new icon became
former President Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here,
after all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and
the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher
Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility
of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring" didn't
last long -- and is now long gone.
The key establishment
faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former
two-term President, current chairman of the Expediency Council and a
key member of the Council of Experts -- 86 clerics, no women, the Holy
Grail of the system, and the only institution in the Islamic Republic
capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported
by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The
Shark," Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains
privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the
ultimate survivor -- moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and
Khamenei as power in the country shifted.
Rafsanjani is, and
will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime's
de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the Islamic
Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile
the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an
anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major
cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global
modernity.
If the Bush administration had any real desire to
let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an
entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.
- 5. Heading down the New Silk Road
Reformist
friends in Tehran keep telling me the country is now immersed in an
atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or
the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba -- and nothing "velvet" or
"orange" or "tulip" or any of the other color-coded Western-style
movements that Washington might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.
Under
such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The
Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in
2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly
powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere in the world.
From
American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of
Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the
ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests -- and
certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war"
would clearly be a disaster for everyone.
The Iranian
theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush
administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs.
Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is
bearing fruit.
Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South
Asia and, to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security
Grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum
Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total
"interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This
year Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The
framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known
as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S.
allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering
their economic, political, cultural, and -- crucially -- geostrategic
connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed
as an attack against Asia.
What a disaster in the making, and
yet, now more than ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in
Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems
ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself -- in his occult wisdom -- is
betting on a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
