TEHRAN - As president-elect Barack Obama's national security team assesses the
challenge of Iran's role in the Middle East, it confronts a paradox: Iran is
seen as having ambitions of regional hegemony, but it lacks the military power
normally associated with such a role.
That paradox is explained by the fact that Iran's position in the
Middle East depends to a significant degree on its cultural, spiritual and
political ties with other Shi'ite populations and movements in the region. That
characteristic of Iranian foreign policy, which Iranian officials and
think-tank specialists emphasized in interviews with this writer, poses some
unique problems for the United States in opposing Iranian influence in the
region.
The pivotal development in the new Iranian position in the region has been the
emergence of Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated regime.
Hamid Reza Dehghani, director of the Center for Persian Gulf and Middle East
Studies at the Foreign Ministry's think-tank, left no doubt in an interview
that the transformation of Iraq from mortal enemy of the Islamic Republic of
Iran to a friendly state represents an epochal shift in Iran's security
position in the region.
"For the past 400 years, we've had problems with our western neighbors," said
Dehghani, "mostly from the Ottoman empire and from the Iraqi regime after
independence." The climax of that historical security problem was the
eight-year war against Iran launched by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1980.
The US removal of the Saddam regime in 2003 changed all that. But what has
turned that opportunity into a more permanent Iranian advantage is what
Dehghani calls Iran's "soft power" in Iraq - its cultural, religious and
economic relations - especially with Iraqi Shi'ites.
He cites the close connections between the Iranian and Iraqi Shi'ite spiritual
communities: the top Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, is an
Iranian; Iraqi Shi'ite scholars study in Iran's main spiritual center, Qom; and
hundreds of thousands of Iranians have made pilgrimages to the Iraqi holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala since 2003.
Relations between Iranian and Iraqi Shi'ites have also had a political-military
dimension, of course. The present close relationship between Iran and Iraq "was
not a project inaugurated by a few politicians", he said, "but is the outcome
of longstanding relations with the country".
Dehghani was referring obliquely to the history of Iranian support for Shi'ite
opponents of the Saddam regime, both before and during the Iran-Iraq war. That
support has now paid off in the form of an Iraqi government in which the
Shi'ite majority in the country controls state power. Iranian-trained political
parties and armed formations which still maintain close cooperation with Iran
have influential positions in the regime.
Ali Akbar Rezaei, the Foreign Ministry's top official on the United States,
also emphasized the importance of Iran's "soft power" in the region, based on
its ties of affinity, as the real basis for its new position of influence.
"We have a natural influence in the region," said Rezaei. "Although there are
borders, peoples in the region go back and forth, and enjoy cultural and
economic relations." Rezaei emphasized the heavy traffic across Iran's borders
with Iraq and Afghanistan and the implications for intensive trade relations
with Iran's neighbors as essential to that "natural influence".
A paper on the "Shi'ite Factor" in Iran's regional policy, published last month
by the Center for Strategic Research, a think-tank that serves Iran's
Expediency Council, acknowledges that Iran is now cultivating Shi'ite allies,
especially in Iraq and Lebanon, in pursuit of its national security objectives
in the region. The author, Dr Kayhan Barzegar, an international relations
specialist at Islamic Azad University in Tehran, argues that Iran's close
relations with the Shi'ites in the region are aimed at "building a strategic
linkage for establishing security ... "
The main strategic advantages of Iran's relationships with Shi'ite movements,
Barzegar writes, is the "installation of a new generation of friendly elites at
the level of states, who have no backgrounds or feeling of enmity toward Iran".
The Shi'ite government in Iraq, according to the author, was the "turning
point" in putting the "Shi'ite factor" at the center of Iran's foreign policy.
But Iran's Shi'ite diplomacy in the region also extends to Shi'ite movements
that either hold quasi-state power, like the Hezbollah in Lebanon, or that have
remained shut out of political power completely, as is the case in Bahrain and
Saudi Arabia.
In those countries, a transnational network of Shi'ite political activists
inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and schooled in Shi'ite seminaries
in Iraq and Iran has mobilized large-scale Shi'ite support for Shi'ite
empowerment.
Iran has provided large-scale military assistance to Hezbollah, including
thousands of rockets capable of hitting Israel. Those rockets were well known
to be part of the Iranian deterrent to an Israeli attack against Iran, which
was a major reason Israel launched its invasion of Lebanon in 2006, with US
support.
An adviser to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who agreed to be interviewed on the
condition that he not be identified, observes that the conventional Western
portrayal of Hezbollah as an instrument of Iranian power misses the role of
shared Shi'ite spirituality in the Iran-Hezbollah nexus. "Hezbollah is not just
a group of Western-style commandos," he said.
Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been able to mobilize the support of
the Lebanese Shi'ite population, according to the adviser, because he possesses
the two main sources of power in Shi'ite communities: spiritual and Islamic
legal power.
Although it is never mentioned in Western coverage, Nasrallah studied theology
in Najaf during Lebanon's civil war in the mid-1970s - well before the Islamic
revolution in Iran. And when he was about to rise to a senior military
leadership position, he interrupted his career to return to his theological
studies at the holy city of Qom in Iran.
In a striking historical parallel, Iraq's charismatic nationalist Shi'ite
political-military leader, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, interrupted his career last
year at what appeared to be a critical moment to take up intensive theological
studies at Qom.
Another case of Iranian "natural influence" through Shi'ite ties, which
officials did not bring up, is Bahrain. The Iranian revolution has also
inspired activism in the Shi'ite community there, which represents two-thirds
of the population but has been denied political power by Sunni rulers.
One hundred thousand Shi'ites, as much as one-third of the entire Shi'ite
population of the country, turned out for a protest rally over the February
2006 bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Iraq. Shi'ite demonstrators there have
displayed pictures of both Iranian and Hezbollah leaders, and the government of
Bahrain cites the pro-Iranian fervor of its Shi'ite population as evidence of
Iranian subversion.
Iranian officials view Iran's "natural influence" in the region, based on
geography and relations with fellow Shi'ite, as much more fundamental and
durable than the influence the US seeks through its troop presence. As a
result, they argue, US policy cannot avoid contributing to greater Iranian
influence in the longer run, regardless of whether it increases or decreases
troops in the region.
"Whatever the US does in the region," said the Foreign Ministry's Rezaei, "will
be in our interest: if the US withdraws troops from Iraq, we will win; if they
want to stay, we are also the winner."
The same dynamic applies in Afghanistan and to the rest of the region,
according to Rezaei. "Even if they provoke other countries against us," he
said, "we are the winner."
Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist and historian specializing in
US national security policy, has just completed a 12-day visit to Tehran to
find out how Iranian officials, analysts and political figures view possible
negotiations between the Obama administration and Iran.
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