After the US dismantlement
of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iran has emerged as a
major target of the acrimonious rhetoric of the Bush
administration and Israel's threats related to that
country's nuclear aspirations. Given the fact that
Iran's active nuclear program has been the focus of US
concern since the early 1990s, it is likely to acquire a
crisis situation in the near future.
Two other
realities are also keeping this issue on the front
burner from the American vantage point. First, there is
a high probability that North Korea will emerge as the
next nuclear power. Washington is very much concerned
about the precedent-setting nature of that development
for Iran. Second, Iran has recently demonstrated much
flip-flopping on whether it is enriching uranium, and
has lost credibility even among its friends in Europe.
What is the nature of Iran's security concerns? What is
the nature of domestic debate inside Iran regarding its
nuclear future? What are the dynamics of Arab concerns
related to this issue? These are key questions that will
be addressed.
Iran's security concerns Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, which ousted
Mohammad Reza (the Shah) as the ruler of that country,
Iran has faced numerous challenges, some of which
emanated from the very nature of the regime that
captured power, while the others are related to security
concerns and reactions of other states of the region to
the Islamic revolution.
The radical change of
government in Iran created ample consternation in the
region, since the then extant politico-economic
conditions of the neighboring states were very similar
to the ones that prevailed in Iran under the monarchy.
(It should be noted that those conditions remain very
much the same in the Persian Gulf monarchies even
today.) In addition, the very fact that the Islamic
government was established as a result of a
revolutionary change itself became a major reason for
the neighboring Muslim autocrats to fear a potential
recurrence of that phenomenon inside their own
respective borders. To further intensify their fears,
the government of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini
threatened the Gulf monarchies about exporting the
Islamic revolution. A defensive action deemed warranted
from the Arab monarchies.
The Gulf sheikhdoms
responded by establishing the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC), whose real raison d'etre was security,
even though all other declared reasons minimized that
particular objective. Autocracies are terrible liars.
One can imagine how seriously the US took the Iranian
revolution, which was happening when the Soviet Union
was also in the process of occupying Afghanistan.
America decided to create a major unified command, the
Central Command (CENTCOM), whose aim was to deter or
ameliorate security-related challenges that were then
mushrooming. In the aftermath of the Islamic
revolution, Iran saw two major enemies, the US and Iraq.
Iran and Iraq were long-term rivals. Despite the fact
that Iran is a predominantly Shi'ite state and the
majority of Iraq's population is also Shi'ite, Iraq's
ruling elite was Sunni. So there were religious and
ethnic reasons (Arab versus Persian) for rivalry, or
even hatred, between the ruling elites of the two
nations. More substantially, Saddam Hussein had his own
hegemonic ambitions in the region, which collided with
those of Iran's, even during the days of Mohammad Reza.
Iraq proved Iran's fears by invading it in 1981,
an event that lasted eight years, causing many thousands
of deaths and a waste of hundreds of millions of
dollars. Saddam calculated that a weak government and
revolutionary turbulence in Iran were ideal reasons for
invading it. His purpose was to bring an end to the
Islamic Republic and make Iran a supplicant state. The
US also convinced Iran of its own ill intentions toward
it by supporting Iraq in that war. Washington's official
explanation for "tilting" toward Iraq was that it was
only supporting the lesser of the two evils, even though
it really despised both regimes.
The Iran-Iraq
war affected the Iranian psyche so intensely that
building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and acquiring
chemical warfare capabilities became enduring
predilections of the Islamic Republic. It was only a
matter of time before Iran was to consider developing
its nuclear program. It should be recalled that in the
early days of their rule, the ayatollahs were not
interested in resuscitating the ambitious nuclear
program that Mohammad Reza had initiated. Moreover,
Saddam's own quest for nuclear weapons also convinced
the Iranian rulers that they must also seek the nuclear
know-how, just in case they were to face a nuclear Iraq.
Israel became the third enemy of Iran, largely
because of the very nature of its Islamic government.
The Khomeini government broke off diplomatic ties with
Israel and established such ties with the Palestinian
Liberation Organization as a legitimate representative
of the Palestinians. More important, the Islamic
Republic played a crucial role in politicizing the
Lebanese Shi'ites. It also supported the Hezbollah - an
Islamist party of Lebanon - politically and materially
in its ongoing battles with Israel, which occupied
southern Lebanon even after withdrawing from portions of
it in the aftermath of its military invasion of Lebanon
in 1982. Thus, Lebanon emerged as a major battleground
between the hegemonic ambitions of Israel and Iran.
Israel never forgave Iran for acutely radicalizing the
Shi'ites of that country, a development that played a
crucial role in the decision of then Israeli prime
minister Yehud Barak to withdraw his troops from
southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Iran also became
one of the foremost members of "the rejectionist front"
- Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen being the other members -
which rejected a negotiated solution of the Palestinian
question. Even after the end of the Cold War, when the
rejectionist front lost its chief backer, the Soviet
Union, Iran and Syria maintained their opposition to a
negotiated solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even
when Syria joined the negotiating process initiated by
the administration of president George H W Bush, Iran
refused to budge from its hardline position of "no
negotiations" with Israel. Iran also remained a profound
supporter of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993)
as well as the second one (2000-present). As a result of
these developments Iran and Israel viewed each other as
major adversaries.
Israel's founding father and
its first prime minister, Ben Gurion, decided in the
1950s that his country must ensure that its military
dominance - both in conventional and nuclear realms -
will never be challenged by any Arab or Muslim state.
For that reason alone, he initiated a policy of not only
purchasing cutting-edge conventional weapons, but also
acquired nuclear weapons know-how for the Jewish state.
His second objective was that no Arab or regional Muslim
state should be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, for
it would use them to destroy Israel. That principle has
been applied across-the-board to countries that are
technically still at war with Israel, but even to Egypt,
which has been at peace with the Jewish state since
1979.
Israel has had unqualified support of the
US on maintaining its superiority in conventional
weapons. Regarding Israel's possession of nuclear
weapons, no one in US official circles publicly
questioned the legitimacy of that country's possession
of nuclear weapons. That issue remained one of the
glaring double standards of America's approach to
nuclear nonproliferation. In 1981, Israel carried out
its much-heralded preemptive raid on Iraq's nuclear
reactor in Osirak. As America's resolve about nuclear
nonproliferation hardened in the following decades,
Israel became increasingly voluble about denying any
Middle Eastern states nuclear weapon capabilities.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the only Middle
Eastern countries with nuclear aspirations were Iran and
Libya. Libya has recently abandoned its nuclear
aspirations with much fanfare. Even though Iran has an
active nuclear program, it insists that it has no
intentions of developing nuclear weapons. Still, when
Iran examines its immediate surroundings, it sees US
forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are likely to
stay for the remainder of this decade. After ridding
Iraq as one of the major challenges to its dominance, as
Iran scrutinizes America's intentions, developing its
own nuclear weapons appear as an option of the last
resort, very much like it was viewed by Ben Gurion of
Israel in the 1950s and by Kim Jong-il now.
Iran's domestic debates Like all
fledgling democracies, Iran has a variety of opinions
concerning nuclear weapons. Within the unofficial, but
informed circles, one can expect thoughtful discussions
regarding whether Iran should develop nuclear weapons. A
year or so ago, those who either did not want their
country to develop those weapons, or those who wanted
Iran to postpone it to a distant future, were vocal
about airing their views. Now, as their country has been
publicly viewed as being so close to developing weapons
capabilities, one hears even from the reformists that
Iran has the right to enrich uranium. Still, reformists
also insist that enriching their stockpile of uranium
does not mean that the government will develop nuclear
weapons. Obviously, this group is under a lot of
pressure not to give in to international pressure on
this issue, especially while it is also fighting uphill
political battles to remain in power.
The
conservatives (or hardliners), on the contrary, are
split into two sub-groups. The first one, while
insisting that Iran should not ratify the protocol
agreement to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the
chairman of Iran's Supreme National Security Council,
Hasan Rowhani, has negotiated with the European Union-3
(France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Through that
protocol, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment as a
goodwill gesture. Now, even people like Rowhani are
finding themselves being taken over by the momentum
related to the International Atomic Energy Agency's
(IAEA) vote of last month, calling on Iran to suspend
all activities related to nuclear development. The
hardliners, who control the Iranian majlis (parliament),
are currently quite vocal about not ratifying that EU-3
protocol. They would like their country to abandon the
NPT a-la North Korea.
The second sub-group of
hardliners is the Iranian version of neo-conservatives.
These are young conservatives who don't seem to trust
even their conservative elders - ie, those who
personally participated in the Iranian revolution.
According to one source, these "young neo-cons
tenaciously believe in the earlier Utopian notions of
the revolution; a theocratic and authoritarian state
structure; an egalitarian and state-owned economic
system; and a messianic foreign policy". In the
tradition of the American neo-cons, they want their
country to flex its muscles in the region. They have
already attracted the backing of the Revolutionary
Guards and other conservative groups of that country's
national security establishment. Even though the
neo-cons have not yet publicly insisted that Iran should
develop nuclear weapons, they resolutely support the
proposition that their country should abandon the NPT,
which would leave their nuclear program beyond the eyes
of the IAEA.
The Arab reaction Given
the ongoing political turbulence in Iraq and Palestine,
Arab attention is not exactly focused on the threatening
aspects of Iran's potential surfacing as a nuclear
power. It is safe to state that George W Bush, through
his decision to invade and occupy Iraq, and Israel,
through its freewheeling use of military force to
suppress the Palestinian insurgency, have so enraged the
Arab and Muslim world that even a potential emergence of
a nuclear Iran does not appear as menacing to them.
Besides, in the post-September 11 era of unrestricted
use of American military power, Arab states have little
to fear from a "nuclear" Iran. Currently, the Muslim
preference (from the predominantly Sunni Arab countries
as well as Shi'ite Iran) is to see an end to the US
occupation of Iraq, the resolution of the Palestinian
question, and an end to their torment.
As a
general saying in that region goes, one must fight the
enemy beyond before one worries about differences from
within one's family. It is rare to see the emergence of
that type of espirit de corps in the world of Islam.
TOMORROW: The US-Israel tag-team
act
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an
Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
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