Iran is the source of much discussion and
dismay in the West. Yet it is reportedly becoming
quite popular in the world of Islam. What is the
reason for this ostensibly split vision of Western
governments and Muslims at large regarding Iran?
The simple answer is that the country's
decision to defy the United States, the lone
superpower and a leader of the "West", But the
reason is more complex than that. To be sure, no
one in the Muslim world wants Iran to become a
nuclear power. In fact, Iran itself continues to
insist that it has no such intentions.
However, the Bush administration is
equally convinced that Iran nurtures aspirations
to become the next nuclear power. For
Muslims, who are craving
some semblance of leadership from their region,
Iran's defiance of the US is gathering enormous
support, and a lot of kudos and cheers for the
role of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Iran back at the
UN
The US, France,
Britain, Russia and China - the five permanent
UN Security Council members - plus Germany on
Wednesday agreed in Paris to send Iran before
the United Nations Security Council for possible
punishment.
Tehran has refused to say
whether it agrees to terms to begin negotiations
on a package of economic and energy incentives
in exchange for at least a short-term end to its
program to enrich uranium.
Expressing
"profound disappointment", the nations said, "We
have no choice but to return to the United
Nations Security Council and resume a course of
possible punishment or coercion."
Any
real move to punish Iran at the Security Council
is a long way off, but the group said it would
seek an initial resolution requiring Iran to
suspend its uranium enrichment. Debate could
begin as soon as next
week.
Since its creation after the revolution of
1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United
States have been mostly hostile toward one anther.
The best phrase to reflect that reality was coined
by an Iranian specialist, Professor Rouhollah
Ramazani, who depicted that attitude as "mutual
Satanization".
A popular depiction of
America in Iran is the "Great Satan", while the US
regularly calls Iran a state that sponsors
terrorism. It was once described as a "rogue
state". Then, under President George W Bush, the
White House phrasemakers lumped Iran under a new
dark phrase - "axis of evil", along with Iraq and
North Korea. Most recently, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was swept away by her desire to
come up with another loathsome phrase when she
called Iran "one of the outposts of tyranny".
It is hard to be objective on the subject
of US-Iran relations (or the lack thereof), since
the friends and foes of the US and Iran are keen
on questioning the objectivity of any author on
the issue. However, it is fair to state that in
this exercise of mutual Satanization, neither side
is free from blame.
The US never got over
the humiliation that its diplomats encountered
during the hostage crisis in the immediate
aftermath of the revolution of 1979. In fact, that
very emotion drove the Ronald Reagan
administration to take sides against Iran during
the Iran-Iraq War that lasted from September 1980
to August 1988. It was because of the American
intervention in that conflict that Iraq emerged as
a "victor". Saddam Hussein decided to pay for the
American and Arab support of his aggression
against Iran (since Iraq started the war) by
invading Kuwait in July 1990.
The Islamic
Republic, in turn, continued its own policies of
anti-Americanism throughout its existence. It was
allegedly involved in the Western hostage-taking
binge of Beirut in the 1980s, a charge that Tehran
has denied. It never accepted the peaceful
negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis as a
way to resolve that conflict, and emerged as a
major supporter of the Hezbollah Party of Lebanon,
which the US depicted as a terrorist organization.
From time to time during the 1980s and
1990s, there were rumors of a potential
rapprochement between Washington and Tehran;
however, this never happened. When the US decided
to invade Afghanistan to dismantle the Taliban
regime in 2001, according to some reports, Iran
cooperated with the US by informing its officials
"of major Afghan fault lines and helped them
target Taliban sites for bombing missions".
Expectations rose then that there might be some
sort of warming between the two countries.
However, Bush put a damper on that by labeling
Iran as part of "axis of evil" in his state of
union speech in January 2002.
Iran was
initially ambivalent about the US invasion of
Iraq. It was happy to see the end of the
dictatorship of Saddam, who was one of the most
hated international figures in Iran. However, the
leaders of Iran remained wary of the potential
long-term US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan,
their country's eastern and western flanks.
The US's continued presence in Afghanistan
and Iraq has to be understood from the Iranian
perspective. When it sees the world's most
powerful country staying in those countries with
the intention of making them its client states -
America's denials notwithstanding - Iran is of the
view that it has to take countermeasures. Those
are primarily based on asymmetric warfare.
Two important aspects of this are
low-level support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban in
Afghanistan and constant endeavors to promote
instability in Iraq. However, in both instances,
Iran has purposely kept its involvement so muddled
and murky that the US has a tough time proving it
to the international community.
This is an
important point when one examines the explicit
depiction of the Bush administration of Iran as a
major threat. The leaders in Tehran know that they
remain quite vulnerable to the potential
implementation of the Bush's much-hated and
equally feared "regime change". However, not
taking any countermeasures has never been an
option for Iran. They know that the Bush
administration dismantled the regime of Saddam,
despite the fact that it was not an aggressor. The
Iranian leaders have no intention of repeating
Saddam's policy of inaction.
Ideally
speaking, it would like to develop nuclear
weapons. However, it knows that its indigenous
knowledge has not reached that stage yet. At the
same time, Iran is aware that the Bush
administration would not allow Iran to acquire
nuclear weapons under any circumstances. The
timing of developing nuclear weapons is not right,
even if Iran had the native ability to do so.
Thus, Iran has decided to play the US
depiction of its alleged nuclear ambition to the
hilt. It wishes to employ all its diplomatic power
to engage the US and other major powers to extract
ironclad guarantees from the Bush administration
that it will forthwith cease all activities
related to regime change.
Second, Iran
wants to receive from the West an elaborate
package of economic assistance and transfer of
cutting-edge technology in the realm of the
peaceful use of nuclear energy, oil-related
technology and technology in the field of civilian
avionics.
Third, it wants the Bush
administration to stop its diplomatic maneuvers
aimed at excluding Iran from future international
oil pipeline agreements.
As can be
imagined, Iran, despite the wide prevalent
asymmetry between its and the US military power,
has other options.
First, China and Russia are
determined to shelter it from any stringent United
Nations economic sanctions, although they have
agreed to refer the case back to the UN (See side
panel).
Second, it has
an elaborate network of agents in Iraq who are
ready to keep US security forces engaged for a
long time. How bloody or intractable that
engagement becomes depends on how threatened Iran
feels about the US presence in Iraq.
Third, despite the fact that al-Qaeda
maintains harsh theological perspectives toward
Shi'ites, Iran has demonstrated a remarkable
capability of engaging that organization purely on
the basis of pragmatism. In the aftermath of the
dismantlement of the Taliban regime, Iran
reportedly wanted to relinquish some high-valued
al-Qaeda functionaries - including Osama bin
Laden's son, Saad, and al-Qaeda's chief of
operations, Saif al-Adel - in exchange for members
of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an organization that
Saddam was using to terrorize Iran.
However when the Bush administration did
not show any interest in that exchange, Iran lost
interest. Finally, Iran has proved itself to be of
an enormously deft global player of
balance-of-power politics.
Iran's decision
to make the US and other powers wait until August
for its response to their elaborate economic
package and their offer to conduct further
negotiations regarding its nuclear enrichment
program is the outcome of its maneuver to drive a
wedge between the Group of Eight (G8) countries.
These countries wanted an Iranian response
by July 5, so that they could use their summit in
St Petersburg (July 15-17) to formulate a
coordinated reaction. Iran knew that an earlier
response had the potential to unify the G8
countries.
However, by making them wait
until after the meeting, it makes it logistically
difficult for them to get together and come up
with any agreement on sanctions against Iran. The
leaders in Iran are also cognizant of the fact
that the G8 had already failed to agree on how to
respond if it did not reply by July 5.
From the Muslim point of view, the Iranian
maneuvers are not that relevant. What is
pertinent, however, is the fact that a Muslim
country is standing up to the US. There is an
enormous amount of ill-will building toward
America as a result of its sustained occupation of
Iraq and Afghanistan, and regarding the enduring
sufferings of the Palestinians in the occupied
territories.
The international community
received a glimpse of the popularity of
Ahmadinejad among Muslims when he visited
Indonesia. It should be recalled that he visited
that country in the immediate aftermath of writing
his famous letter of May 8 to Bush. Even though
Washington dismissed it as not worthy of response,
it received huge publicity and captured a lot of
attention in the world of Islam. That was just
another reason why Ahmadinejad was greeted with so
much euphoria in Indonesia. Large crowds showed up
to hear him.
In an era when the Muslim
world is starving for heroes and leaders,
Ahmadinejad is certainly being perceived in that
role by young Muslims. He is young, feisty and is
willing to confront the US, when all other Muslim
leaders opt for cooperation and quiet diplomacy,
whose modalities remain secret as a matter of
tradition.
A retired Indonesian official
probably spoke for millions of Muslims when he
observed about the Iranian president, "He should
be the role model for other Muslim leaders in the
world."
The Iranian president also knows
how to couch his country's present conflict with
the US over the nuclear issue in a language with
which millions of Muslims all over the world not
only directly relate to, but also wholeheartedly
agree.
He has asked Bush, "Why is it that
any technological and scientific achievement
reached in the Middle East regions is translated
into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist
regime? Is not scientific R&D [research and
development] one of the basic rights of nations?"
And, according to Guardian of London, "Mr
Ahmadinejad's rising political fortunes run
counter to American attempts to isolate Iran,
which it brands a rogue state. US officials have
described the Iranian president as a threat to
world peace and claim that he faces a popular
insurrection at home."
The same dispatch
also quoted an Iranian observer saying, "Certainly
his popularity is increasing. People like what he
says. It's not so much because he stands up to the
West but because he's not corrupt. This is very
important."
What are the implications of
the preceding for Iran? Students of "hard power"
may not be very much impressed by Iran's penchant
for defying the United States, or Iran's decision
to make the US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq
gory, or by its sustained endeavors to drive a
wedge between the G8 countries for its own
advantage.
However, there is little doubt
that Iran's activities in all these realms are
enabling it to become a major actor in the
calculation of world powers. As such, it may yet
extract most from the US through negotiations,
including security guarantees against regime
change, and a sizeable economic package that would
also include transfer of the world-class
technology that it direly needs.
In this
entire intricate process, Iran is also winning the
hearts and minds of Muslims all over the world, an
issue on which the Bush administration remains
increasingly hapless, maladroit and, indeed,
clumsy. In the final analysis, Iran is gaining a
lot of advantages from this ostensible split
vision of it in the West and in the world of
Islam.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO
of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria,
Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be
reached at eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear
regularly in Asia Times Online. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
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