Once upon a time, an ex-soldier with no
credentials but his belief in his own destiny
joined a fanatic movement. Against all odds, he
won an election, purged his opponents, and
outfoxed the powers that surrounded his country.
Western elites have not yet accepted that an
Austrian corporal bested them, preferring to
regard the events of 1933-1945 as an inexplicable
aberration. What will they make of the
blacksmith's son and Revolutionary Guard bully-boy
Mahmud Ahmedinejad of Iran?
In just five
months, Iran's president has seized the balance of
power in Mesopotamia, foiled a global campaign to
slow its
nuclear weapons program, and
forced Washington to entreat Iran for negotiations
cap in hand. After Tehran rejected a first
American offer, US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad repeated the request on December 1.
As I wrote on October 25 (A Syriajevo in the
making?), the US depends on Iran to
maintain stability in Iraq, giving Iran in turn
sufficient leverage to thwart American efforts to
stop its nuclear weapons program. Asia Times
Online's correspondents have provided compelling
evidence to support this conjecture in the
meantime. [1] Israel's military leaders now take
it for granted that Iran will become a nuclear
power, Stratfor reported on December 1. [2]
Just after September 11, I picked a bone
with Sir John Keegan's claim that "in this war of
civilizations, the West will prevail" (Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical
Islam might win, October 12, 2001):
Readers who reproached me for using
the word "racism" to qualify Washington's
orientation toward the Islamic world should read
Keegan's essay carefully. Here we have the
upright Westerner against the underhanded
Oriental. Kipling (who wrote vividly about the
sneakiness of the British in the Great
Game) would blush. It's all completely,
totally, revoltingly wrong. The West confronts
not a throwback to medieval Islam, but a
Westernized version of Islam transformed into a
totalitarian political ideology.
Until Ahmedinejad's ascent, however,
no Islamist leader had emerged with the cunning
and capacity to exploit the West's confusion. Iran
seemed the least likely venue for Islamist
leadership. With 15% inflation and 11%
unemployment, Iran seemed vulnerable in early 2005
- almost as vulnerable, one might add, as Germany
was in early 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed
chancellor.
American regional experts
without exception expected Iran's regime to
crumble from within. Daniel Pipes, for example,
stated in 2003, "I compare Iran today to the
Soviet Union under [Leonid] Brezhnev. Yes, the
state is strong and threatening, but the people
don't believe in it anymore. It's a hollow, hollow
regime, in other words." [3]
As late as
April, Michael Ledeen forecast political
disintegration "in Iran, where near-constant
demonstrations, protests, and even armed attacks
against the institutions of the Islamic Republic
have raged ... Iranians no longer require excuses
to show their hatred of the mullahcracy." [4]
Reuel Marc Gerecht, the American
Enterprise Institute's resident Iran scholar,
insisted throughout that America had nothing to
fear from the Shi'ites. With just a bit of covert
support for Iranian dissidents, Ledeen insisted,
the regime would collapse. Western analysts spent
their time with the intellectuals of Tehran, who
party at Western-style clubs and wear lipstick
under their burkhas - the equivalent of
judging Germany's temper in 1933 from the vantage
point of Berlin cabarets.
They ignored the
groundswell of support from the rural poor and the
Tehran slums that gave Ahmedinejad an overwhelming
margin of victory in the June presidential
elections. It took the new president just a few
months to put paid to dissidents and moderates,
placing hundreds of his Revolutionary Guard
comrades in the key positions of Iran's
bureaucracy, and purging 40 ambassadors from the
diplomatic corps. Hitler was no more ruthless in
consolidating power during the weeks following his
ascension to the Kanzleramt in March 1933.
It is with grudging respect that I compare
Ahmedinejad to Hitler, who bluffed a weak hand
into a nearly winning game. Like Hitler,
Ahmedinejad evinces a superior cunning born of the
knowledge that he has nothing to lose. The
position of the Iranian regime is weak; in the
long term, it is hopeless.
Within a
generation, both Iran's oil and demographic
resources will be exhausted. Impending demographic
collapse, I have argued in the past, impels Iran
towards an imperial design (Demographics and Iran's imperial
design, September 13). Iran's elderly
dependent population will soar to nearly 30% from
just 7% today by mid-century, the consequence of
the country's collapsing birth rate. The
demographic disaster will hit just as oil exports
dry up during the 2020s. To break out of the trap,
Iran must make an all-or-nothing bet during the
present generation.
Western historians
typically portray Hitler as a megalomaniacal
lunatic who nearly conquered the world through a
series of regrettable accidents. But Hitler took
into account his own weakness with greater clarity
than the British or Russians. Three weeks after he
provoked World War II by invading Poland, Hitler
told German military commanders:
We have nothing to lose, but much
indeed to gain. As a result of the constraints
forced upon us, our economic position is such
that we cannot hold out for more than a few
years. [Hermann] Goering can confirm this. We
have no other choice, we must act ... At no
point in the future will Germany have a man with
more authority than I. But I could be replaced
at any moment by some idiot or criminal ... The
morale of the German people is excellent. It can
only worsen from here. [5]
Hitler
knew very well that his command economy could
crack. He coveted the industrial capacity of
Western Europe, the granaries of Eastern Europe
and the oil of Romania. Iran covets the oil of
southeastern Iraq, western Saudi Arabia and the
Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union and
proposes to annex or at least control it through
satrapies on the ancient Persian model. Asia Times
Online's Pepe Escobar outlined the Iranian
strategy in a September 10 dispatch from Tehran
(Iran takes over
Pipelineistan).
Thanks to
America's ideological obsession with democracy,
Iran is close to control of Iraq's oil-rich
Shi'ite regions. On December 4, Iraq's Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani issued a de facto endorsement of
the pro-Iranian religious coalition, the United
Iraqi Alliance, pushing his country further into
the Iranian sphere of influence. Sistani's appeal
for support for religious parties ruins the
prospects of Washington's favored politicians, the
secular Shi'ites Iyad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi.
Iran's proxy warrior Muqtada al-Sadr,
meanwhile, now holds the balance of military power
in Iraq, as I predicted in the October 25 article.
As the New York Times' Edward Wong reported on
November 27:
Wielding violence and political
popularity as tools of his authority, Mr Sadr,
the Shi'ite cleric who has defied the American
authorities here since the fall of Saddam
Hussein, is cementing his role as one of Iraq's
most powerful figures. Just a year after Mr Sadr
led two fierce uprisings, the Americans are
hailing his entry into the elections as the best
sign yet that the political process can co-opt
insurgents. But his ascent could portend a
darker chain of events, for he continues to
embrace his image as an unrepentant guerrilla
leader even as he takes the reins of political
power. Mr Sadr has made no move to disband his
militia, the thousands-strong Mahdi Army. In
recent weeks, factions of the militia have
brazenly assaulted and abducted Sunni Arabs,
rival Shi'ite groups, journalists and
British-led forces in the south, where Mr Sadr
has a zealous following.
A year ago,
America still had the option to partition Iraq
into a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shi'ite
south. Now that Iran has reinforced Muqtada's
militia with evident American tolerance, partition
might well lead to Iranian control of the
resulting Shi'ite rump state. Iran's leaders are
the same hard men who did not blink at a million
casualties during Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and
such tactics as driving hordes of boys into
minefields. America simply does not have the
stomach for this sort of warfare.
The only
potentially successful maneuver at Washington's
disposal would be to repeat Britain's colonial
policy of the 1920s, enlisting and arming elements
of the old Ba'ath regime to battle it out with the
Shi'ites until both sides are bled white. But I do
not think Washington has either the intent or the
competence to execute an imperial scheme of this
nature.
Under the circumstances, does
anyone seriously doubt that Iran will develop
nuclear weapons capability? Not the Israelis, it
appears. Stratfor, an Internet-based intelligence
service, cites "a report in the daily newspaper
Maariv, which quoted a senior security source as
saying, 'We shall have to put up with a nuclear
Iran'. The unnamed source added that, 'I do not
see any force in the world today that could
reverse the situation - namely Iran becoming
nuclear ... and there will be no alternative but
to put up with the emerging situation'."
Despite Tehran's anti-Israel rhetoric, a
nuclear Iran does not necessarily represent an
existential threat to the Jewish state. Israel
almost certainly possesses thermonuclear weapons
hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima
bomb, as well as the capability to deliver them
via submarine-launched cruise missiles.
Nor do the Tor M-1 anti-aircraft and
anti-missile missiles that Iran reportedly ordered
from Russia last week represent a decisive threat
to American or Israeli capabilities. Nonetheless,
Russia's evident willingness to upgrade Iran's
weapons capability reflects another unintended
result of Washington's ideological campaign for
democratization. America has offered open support
for the "color revolutions" in parts of the former
Soviet Union, beginning with Ukraine's "Orange"
revolution last year and continuing through the
"Yellow" revolution in Kyrgyzstan last spring. The
unpleasant regimes Washington helped replace gave
way to equally unpleasant regimes, except with
greater instability.
Russian President
Vladimir Putin fears instability on Russia's
borders, but he cannot persuade Washington to
desist from stirring the pot. Russian military
cooperation with Iran provides him with a
bargaining chip to use against Washington's
designs on what Putin considers a Russian sphere
of influence. Even though Russia has more to fear
from an imperial Iran than Washington, American
blundering in the former Soviet Union has given
Tehran additional room to maneuver. And Iran's
leaders have played the divisions among their
prospective enemies masterfully, again calling to
mind the Austrian corporal who nearly destroyed
the West.
