With a newly elected pro-American
president in Paris and an Atlanticist chancellor
in Berlin, the Iranian leadership cannot count on
discord in the West. Russia also seems less
willing to play the spoiler where Iran's nuclear
ambitions are concerned, not
surprising given the fact
that Russia and its Muslim minority are in the
first line of any potential conflict. Moubayed
reported on May 18 that Iran's Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants to "rein in" the
country's bumptious President Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
especially after the ill-fated seizure of British
sailors and marines turned against Iran's
advantage.
Tehran signaled its shift in a
number of ways; one is the fact that Ayatollah Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad's rival in
the 2005 presidential elections, gave the
important Friday sermon two weeks in a row.
Rafsanjani has close links to the Europeans,
particularly the Germans, and German diplomats
have been working hard behind the scenes to
promote Rafsanjani as the prospective arbiter of a
compromise solution to the nuclear issue. Another
signal was an Iranian gesture toward Iraq's Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, on whom Washington has
placed much of its hope for stabilizing Iraq. That
is the background to Washington's new willingness
to speak officially with Iran about Iraqi
stability; high-level talks are scheduled for June
28.
So much for the silly thesis that
messianic visions of the imminent return of the
Twelfth Imam motivated Iran's aggressive stance of
the past year. Whether Ahmadinejad actually
believes that the Mahdi will arrive shortly is a
moot point; if he is mad, there are others in
Tehran who are not. Iran seeks regional hegemony
because its domestic position gradually is
becoming desperate. Within a few years it will
become a net importer of oil, and the oil subsidy
to its underemployed population will disappear.
The Persians are chess players, and if the
constellation of forces (to use the old Soviet
term) is against them, they will pull back and
wait for another opportunity. That does not imply,
however, that they have abandoned the game.
Real conflict, though, is not a
chessboard. The pawns have an unpleasant tendency
to move on their own and spoil the game. We know
from the admissions of both sides in last summer's
Lebanon war that blunders on both sides provoked
the conflict, which nearly spilled over into a
regional war. Hezbollah did not anticipate the
massive Israeli response to its kidnapping of
Israeli soldiers, and Israel did not anticipate
Hezbollah's tenacity in response to its bombing
campaign, as we know from the Winograd Report. [1]
Israel was not prepared to commit the resources
and sacrifice the soldiers' lives required to put
down a dug-in force officered by Iranian regulars.
In the current round of negotiations
between the United States and Iran, Hamas rather
than Hezbollah is the odd man out. Iran attempted
to insert itself into Palestinian politics by
taking over subsidies to the irredentist wing of
the Palestinian movement, to the chagrin of
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Hamas appears able
to make a nuisance of itself great enough to force
the Israelis to take action, which in turn will
make it extremely difficult for its sponsors to
abandon it. In response to Hamas' shelling of the
town of Sderot from Gaza, the Israeli Air Force on
Sunday destroyed the home of Sheikh Halil al-Haya,
a Hamas parliamentarian, killing several members
of his family.
As I wrote last July, "Dogs
of war incline toward caution, which after all is
how they grew up to be dogs. More worrisome are
puppies, who do not know what danger is. Gavrilo
Princeps, the Serbian gunman who shot Archduke
Franz Ferdinand dead in June 1914, was a puppy ...
Wars start because no one wants to disown his dog.
If your dog bites a neighbor, your neighbor well
might come after you with a shotgun." [2]
It is even possible that the fighting in
Gaza was provoked by Egypt, the United States,
Israel or others who wanted to draw Hamas out and
crush it. Writing in the Jerusalem Post on May 17,
Khaled Abu Toamed reported, "Some Hamas and Fatah
operatives in the Gaza Strip have accused
followers of PA [Palestinian Authority] National
Security Adviser Muhammad Dahlan of instigating
the latest cycle of violence.
"They
claimed that Dahlan's supporters in Fatah and some
of the PA security forces were trying to drag
Hamas into an all-out confrontation with the help
of the US and Israel."
If the Palestine
Liberation Organization crushes Hamas with arms
supplied by the US and Israel, Iran's bid for
leverage in the Israel-Palestine dispute will come
to nothing. That will leave the supposed moderates
in Tehran in a dilemma. It is one thing for Iran
to offer transient cooperation to the United
States in Iraq, in the expectation that the
Shi'ite majority ultimately will prevail and
become a regional ally. It is quite another for
Iran first to proclaim itself the champion of
Palestinian irredentism, and then hang its clients
out to dry.
By the same token, Iran's
position in Lebanon is unstable. Although Iran and
Syria have rearmed Hezbollah, it seems clear that
Hezbollah is under orders to keep its head down.
Hezbollah has the support of Lebanon's Shi'ites,
but not of the 400,000 or so Palestinians living
in United Nations refugee camps in that country.
Fighting over the weekend at the Nahr al-Bared
camp near Tripoli, which left 22 Lebanese soldiers
and 17 Palestinians dead, refreshed the world's
attention to the volatile Palestinian element in
the mix.
With only a few dozen deaths in
Gaza and Lebanon during the past week, the latest
fighting barely merits the term "crisis".
Palestinians can shoot one another in Gaza
indefinitely without consequences - or could, that
is, if it were not for the fact that the region's
powers have dogs in the fight. Iran's hope for a
way out of its terminal case of domestic sclerosis
lies in becoming the champion of the region's
underclass against the more conservative powers in
the region, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It cannot
easily abandon them.
The parallels to 1914
are noteworthy. It was not the Imperial Court in
St Petersburg that drove the Balkans toward war,
but rather the Serbs, who so thoroughly crushed
the Turks during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 as to
force Turkey's German ally to insert itself into
the Bosporus. Serbian refusal to accept Austria's
control of Bosnia produced the assassination at
Sarajevo. The Serbian puppy dragged the Russian
dog into war. I reviewed these improbable events a
year ago, in an essay called Why war comes when no
one wants it. [3]
It is very difficult to
tell when the puppy-fights might become a broader
conflict. From the Russo-Japanese War to July
1914, European diplomats extinguished a half-dozen
sparks that might have provoked a general war,
until one spark forced them into open hostilities,
against the intent and expectations of almost all
the participants. It is hard to believe that a few
dozen deaths in Gaza will upset the diplomatic
maneuverings of Washington and Tehran. Whatever
the spark turns out to be that ultimately lands in
the gunpowder, it will seem no less trivial.
Note 1. The Israeli
government's Winograd Commission, chaired by
retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, investigated last
summer's war and issued a report on April 30 that
harshly criticized key decision-makers. 2. Cry havoc, and let slip the puppies
of war, Asia Times Online, July 11,
2006. 3. Why war comes when no one wants
it, ATol, May 2, 2006.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
