Washington expects Iran to accept a
package of concessions in return for abandoning
uranium enrichment, for an unsettling reason:
American analysts believe that Iran can accomplish
its strategic objectives without nuclear weapons.
In Iraq, pro-Iranian politicians backed by Shi'ite
militias already hold the balance of power.
Iranian subsidies to Hamas as well as Iran's
control over Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon ensure
that the Islamic Republic will have a veto over
any prospective change in the status of the
Palestinian territories.
If the Middle
East merely were a chessboard, Iran would accept
Washington's offer in return for demands such as
those
suggested by Ehsan Ahrari in
Asia Times Online on June 2: security guarantees,
acquiescence to an Iranian oil pipeline to
Pakistan and India, and so forth (Tehran wants more than
talks). Rational calculation suggests
that Iran is better off taking the US offer (along
with economic incentives from the European Union)
and waiting to see who replaces President George W
Bush in January 2009. The next US administration
may be less inclined to use force to prevent Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, there will be war, and
Washington will strike Iranian nuclear
installations, probably before the end of 2006
(see Why the West will attack
Iran, January 24). Western analysts
think President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a madman, and
hope that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will evince
more rational behavior. Reading the Iranian
president's Der Spiegel interview last week, in
which he dismissed German indignation over his
threat to wipe out Israel as the result of a
"Zionist plot", it is easy to believe that his rug
is missing a few knots. But madness is an
occupational hazard of becoming the leader of
desperate men fighting against inevitable ruin.
Napoleon Bonaparte, after all, was a lunatic who
thought he was Napoleon.
The tragedy will
proceed more or less as follows:
In
Washington, the State Department has the cabinet's
grudging authorization to persuade the Iranians to
abandon their imperial ambitions peacefully in
return for economic concessions.
In
Tehran, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has
the government's grudging authorization to
persuade the Americans to concede to Iran a
dominant position in the Persian Gulf without a
fight. The Bangalore-educated Mottaki was the
campaign manager for one of Ahmadinejad's
opponents in the 2005 presidential elections and
is identified with the supposed moderate Hashemi
Rafsanjani.
Both Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Mottaki
sincerely believe that a compromise is in their
mutual interest, and have every hope of reaching
such a compromise. Nonetheless they will fail,
just as the diplomats of Europe failed to prevent
war in July 1914 despite the near-universal
conviction that war could and should be avoided at
all costs.
Iran stands at the precipice of
a demographic and economic tailspin. At current
depletion rates Iran no longer will export oil a
generation hence, and its subsidy-heavy economy
will fail just as an entire generation of Iranians
retires. By mid-century Iran's demographic profile
will resemble the inverted pyramid of the aging
Western countries. For this reason, I have argued
before, Iran has embarked upon imperial expansion
(Demographics and Iran's imperial
design, September 13, 2005).
With oil trading in the mid-US$70 range
and foreign-currency reserves above $50 billion,
though, Iran theoretically could bide its time and
wait for opportunities. Western resolve in the
Persian Gulf is failing rapidly, as the American
public repudiates the administration's Quixotic
effort to build democracy in Iraq.
From a
game-theoretical standpoint, therefore, Iran could
postpone nuclear-weapons development with little
prejudice to its ambitions. When Mahmud
Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the map,
he is expressing a heartfelt sentiment rather than
a practical policy, for Israel has a nuclear
arsenal large enough to make Persian an extinct
language overnight. Mutually assured destruction
is a frightful policy, but it did keep the peace
between the United States and the Soviet Union
through 40 years of Cold War, and it is
conceivable at least that a similar uneasy peace
might prevail between Iran and Israel.
Iran's main strategic objectives are the
Iraqi, the Azerbaijani, and eventually the Saudi
oilfields, but its preferred and most successful
methods are infiltration and subversion through
the Shi'ite majorities who inhabit oil-rich
regions on its borders. A collateral objective is
to keep pressure on Israel through Hezbollah in
Lebanon, which has sufficient rockets to destroy
the Haifa refineries and other important Israeli
targets.
Nuclear weapons, therefore, have
little offensive value for Iran at the moment. To
achieve its long-term ambitions, though, Iran
cannot do without nuclear capability. In the event
that the United States and its allies (if it still
has any) were to attack Iran to forestall a
regional oil grab, nuclear weapons would be of
great use to Iran, either as a way of attacking
enemy staging areas, or as a terrorist device.
If Iran were offered (1) subsidies for
civilian nuclear technology, (2) research
capability that kept the nuclear option open for
the future, (3) a free hand among Shi'ites in
neighboring countries, (4) endorsement of an oil
pipeline to Pakistan and India, and (5) security
guarantees from the United States, the Iranian
government would agree to abandon the enrichment
of uranium to weapons grade, at least for the time
being.
Europe happily would make such an
offer, for the present generation of Europeans
wants nothing more than to pass away in peace.
"Apres moi le deluge!" does not begin to
express Europe's aversion to conflict. But the
United States will veto the concessions that Iran
demands unless Iran abandons its Shi'ite
co-religionists in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Indicative was National Intelligence Director John
Negroponte's accusation that Iran remains the
world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.
President Ahmadinejad already has boasted of
Iran's ability to hurt Western countries if Iran
comes under attack. Iran's influence among
terrorist organizations constitutes a retaliatory
weapon against the Western nations. The United
States will not tolerate an agreement that leaves
an Iranian knife at its throat.
But Iran's
leverage against the West depends on the Shi'ites'
enormous capacity for self-sacrifice (The blood is the life, Mr
Rumsfeld!, October 12, 2005). It cannot
betray allies with whom it has ties of religion as
well as blood without undermining its capacity to
deploy such forces in the future. After more than
a millennium the Shi'ite moment in history appears
to have come, and no government can rule the major
Shi'ite country without offering a path to victory
for its denominational allies.
That is why
it is so hard for Iran to bargain away its nuclear
ambitions. As long as Iran lacks nuclear weapons,
the Western powers (as well as Israel) have the
option to scotch its plans at will. Without
nuclear capability, Iran must live under the
constant threat of an attack against which it
cannot defend. Ahmadinejad's generation of
Iranians, who came to adulthood in the Islamic
Revolution of 1979 and bled for their cause
through the terrible Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s,
is determined to secure Iran's greatness for the
ages.
If I were running a branch of US
military intelligence (let us not speak of that
asylum for unemployable academics, the Central
Intelligence Agency), I would suspend all the
game-theory exercises and order the senior staff
to read classic tragedy. It is a fair bet that not
a single senior US officer knows the German
national tragedy, namely Friedrich Schiller's 1797
drama on the death of the Imperial Generalissimo
of the Thirty Years' War, Albrecht von Wallenstein
(1583-1634). Despite its theatrical flaws and
lapses into sentimentalism, Schiller's
Wallenstein presents an astonishing double
portrait of a commander paralyzed by superstition
and an army driven by impossible ambitions.
Wallenstein very nearly became a Napoleon
a century and a half before the Corsican's brief
career. He created a new kind of army in the
service of the Catholic cause, composed of
adventurers attracted from all of Europe by the
promise of loot and advancement, living off the
land with disastrous consequences for settled
populations. Ultimately the Thirty Years' War
killed off half or more of the people of Central
Europe. Wallenstein sought a separate peace with
the Protestants that would have left him and his
locust-horde as the arbiter of European power. But
he vacillated long enough for the emperor to
divide his forces and arrange his assassination.
Schiller's brilliant portrait of
Wallenstein's winter camp reveals an army whose
success also must be its downfall. Its existence
is an affront to civil society, which must find
means to expunge it or perish. The secret of
Wallenstein's mysticism and paralysis of will was
to be found in the ill-fated character of his
soldiery. They had nowhere to retreat to, and
nothing to lose. Jacques Callot's 1633 prints,
Miseries of War, show peasants wreaking
horrible vengeance on discharged soldiers.
Wallenstein may have been mad, but his madness was
existential, for the Generalissimos's existence
was at odds with the order of things.
The
same is true of the Iranian leadership. Iran has
failed as a society in the face of the modern
world. It embodies a fatal combination of modern
demographics, that is, a rapidly aging population,
without having assimilated modern productivity.
The forces that have rallied to the banner of the
Islamic Revolution both at home and abroad have no
more hope than Wallenstein's soldiery. Away from
their jihad, they can look forward only to a
relentless pulverization of the traditional
society whence they came. Such is the stuff of
strategic mysticism. When there is no retreat,
nothing to which to return, Destiny beckons from
the enemy's lines and the army leaves its trenches
and flies forward into the cannons.
That
is why I do not expect a deal with Iran, despite
the best intentions of the diplomats, and their
terrible knowledge of what lies ahead should the
West use force against Iran's nuclear
capabilities. What the West euphemistically calls
a "war on terror" is, in fact, a religious war. It
must be fought like the Thirty Years' War. What
the West requires, sadly, is not Condoleezza Rice,
but a Cardinal Richelieu.
(Copyright 2006
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