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2 SPEAKING
FREELY Iran's fate after
Assad By Richard Javad
Heydarian
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
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Like a startled
character in a Shakespearean play, Iran is
beginning to wake up to a dramatically new Middle
Eastern landscape. In a very short period of time,
Tehran's regional standing has taken a remarkable
turn.
Less than two years ago, Iran's
firebrand President Mahmud Ahmadinejad went as far
as Israel's northern doorsteps, in the Lebanese
border towns of Bint Jbeil and Qana, to express his
country's unflinching
support for the Hezbollah resistance movement.
Upon arriving in Beirut, as he exchanged
handshakes with Lebanon's top political leaders,
the Iranian leader issued an ominous warning to
his country's arch-enemy, Israel, by stating, "We
will surely help the Lebanese nation against
animosities, mainly staged by the Zionist regime
[Israel]." After 14 centuries, the Persians could
again claim a strategic stronghold on the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea.
It was a
statement suffused with an affectionate display of
solidarity as well as a reiteration of Iran's
political patronage. Moreover, it was a bold
display of Iran's growing confidence as the
chieftain of a region-wide revisionist axis,
bringing Damascus, Hamas, and Hezbollah under its
ever-spreading wings.
Benefiting from
record-high oil prices, Iran had enough
petro-dollars not only to keep its traditional
allies happy, but also to expand its ever-growing
network of patronage across the region and as far
as even Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, Iran is facing a radically
different situation. The Arab uprisings have not
turned the neighborhood any friendlier towards
Iran. While post-revolutionary Arab republics are
a cocktail of Sunni-based political Islam and
pro-Western foreign policy, the Arab monarchies
have become even more hostile towards the Islamic
Republic. Meanwhile, its economy is reeling from a
barrage of sanctions, placing tremendous pressure
on its currency and very ability to export its
economic mainstay: oil.
Most crucially, as
Syrian opposition forces struggle to hold on to
Aleppo and expand their operations against the
Syrian military, Iran is inching closer to losing
its most important ally: the Bashar al-Assad
regime.
A marriage made in
heaven In a chaotic region, where Iran
finds itself surrounded by pro-Western and/or
hostile Arab states as well as non-Arab strategic
competitors such as Turkey and Pakistan, Syria has
been a great exception.
In the early years
of the Iranian regime, while most of the Arab
world supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran,
the Syrians - wary of their Baathist competitor in
Baghdad - chose to support Tehran in the
eight-year imposed-war (Jang-e-Tahmili), providing
crucial military hardware in exchange for
petroleum products and growing strategic
cooperation.
After the conclusion of the
Iran-Iraq War, Syria remained as Iran's sole
regional ally, providing Tehran a gateway to the
Levant region. After the war, Iran sought
the favor of Arab states - and the broader Islamic
world - by taking on Israel. Subsequently, Tehran
pro-actively supported a variety of Palestinian
resistance movements (from the Palestine
Liberation Army to Islamic Jihad and Hamas), while
propping-up the Hezbollah group in Lebanon. Given
Syria's proximity to Israel, the Assad regime was
crucial to Iran's ability to project its influence
in the Greater Middle East. Otherwise, Iran would
have been confined to its immediate neighborhood.
Strategically, the two states have shared
identical external posturing based on
anti-Western, anti-Zionist principles. Although
secular and Arab, Syria's leadership is a natural
ally for another reason: as Alawites - an offshoot
of Shi'ite Islam - they share the same sectarian
roots with the clerical leadership in Tehran.
For Damascus, Iran not only served as a
great counter-weight to the Baathists in Baghdad
(until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003), it
also represented a significant source of economic
and military aid, given Tehran's relatively deep
pockets and sophisticated military-industrial
infrastructure.
The golden
year Earlier in 2010, when Assad (then
affectionately referred to by his constituents as
"Mahbub", or the beloved) arranged a
trilateral meeting to which he invited Ahmadinejad
and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to
discuss "threats" and issues of common interest.
At ease in the jovial company of his
allies, and just fresh from his apparent
"containment" of the so-called "Green opposition
movement" back home, an inspired Ahmadinejad
professed the emergence of a new Middle East
"without Zionists and without colonialists, while
calling on the West to stop " ... interfering in
the region's affairs, [and] to pack their things
and leave" - a statement that sent his companions
into a flurry of chuckles.
It was a very
important meeting that underscored the extent of
Iran's influence in the Greater Middle East. Iran
could finally claim that it had overcome decades
of regional isolation.
There is no way of
understating this apparent strategic victory when
one considers Iran's sobering national security
dilemma: it has been surrounded by more than 40
American bases, a host of hostile anti-Iranian
Sunni Arab states to the south, two nuclear-armed
states to the east and to the north (namely,
Pakistan and Russia), also to the north a
pro-Israeli Azerbaijan, and a traditional
competitor as well as a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization member country to the northwest,
Turkey.
Not to mention Iran's support for
the Palestinian cause - in a bid to gain support
among the Arab populace and re-assert its
revolutionary principles - has locked it into an
intractable confrontation with the region's most
powerful country, Israel.
Thus,
strategically, Syria has been "manna from heaven".
It has been central to Iran's survival (especially
during the nascent revolutionary years) and
gradual regional rise in the last decade or so - a
trend that has been reinforced by America's
elimination of Iraq's Saddam regime.
Overall, 2010 was an auspicious year for
Iran. While consolidating its leadership of the
so-called axis of resistance, Iran intensified its
bilateral relationship with rising powers such as
Turkey and Brazil. By April, Ankara and Brasilia
brokered a historic "nuclear swap deal" with Iran,
the so-called "Tehran Declaration", to alley
Western fears vis-a-vis the country's burgeoning
nuclear program.
When the West turned down
the deal, both Turkey and Brazil went as far as
voting against a United Nations Security Council
resolution that imposed sanctions on Tehran and
its nuclear program.
By the end of the
year, things got even more interesting for Iran.
One by one, Arab autocracies - aligned to the West
- fell apart. As revolutions swept through the
Arab world, beginning in Tunisia then spreading to
Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen, Iran was finally
witnessing the birth of a new Middle East. The
Islamic Republic was jubilant, characterizing the
Arab Spring as an "Islamic Awakening".
Ideationally, Tehran touted its own 1979
revolution as the guiding inspiration of the Arab
uprisings. Strategically, Iran reveled in the
gradual demise of pro-West autocrats such as
Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Yemen's Ali Abdullah
Saleh. Bahrain's predominantly Shi'ite-led
revolution against the Sunni "El-Khalifa" monarchy
- a client of Saudi Arabia and a Western ally -
provided Iran with a perfect opportunity to assert
its (quasi-sectarian) revolutionary leadership in
the Persian Gulf.
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