Home > Middle East PART I: The enemy beyond
By Ehsan Ahrari
After the US dismantlement of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iran has emerged as a major target of the acrimonious rhetoric of the Bush administration and Israel’s threats related to that country’s nuclear aspirations. Given the fact that Iran’s active nuclear program has been the focus of US concern since the early 1990s, it is likely to acquire a crisis situation in the near future.
Two other realities are also keeping this issue on the front burner from the American vantage point. First, there is a high probability that North Korea will emerge as the next nuclear power. Washington is very much concerned about the precedent-setting nature of that development for Iran. Second, Iran has recently demonstrated much flip-flopping on whether it is enriching uranium, and has lost credibility even among its friends in Europe. What is the nature of Iran’s security concerns? What is the nature of domestic debate inside Iran regarding its nuclear future? What are the dynamics of Arab concerns related to this issue? These are key questions that will be addressed.
Iran’s security concerns
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, which ousted Mohammad Reza (the Shah) as the ruler of that country, Iran has faced numerous challenges, some of which emanated from the very nature of the regime that captured power, while the others are related to security concerns and reactions of other states of the region to the Islamic revolution.
The radical change of government in Iran created ample consternation in the region, since the then extant politico-economic conditions of the neighboring states were very similar to the ones that prevailed in Iran under the monarchy. (It should be noted that those conditions remain very much the same in the Persian Gulf monarchies even today.) In addition, the very fact that the Islamic government was established as a result of a revolutionary change itself became a major reason for the neighboring Muslim autocrats to fear a potential recurrence of that phenomenon inside their own respective borders. To further intensify their fears, the government of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini threatened the Gulf monarchies about exporting the Islamic revolution. A defensive action deemed warranted from the Arab monarchies.
The Gulf sheikhdoms responded by establishing the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose real raison d’etre was security, even though all other declared reasons minimized that particular objective. Autocracies are terrible liars. One can imagine how seriously the US took the Iranian revolution, which was happening when the Soviet Union was also in the process of occupying Afghanistan. America decided to create a major unified command, the Central Command (CENTCOM), whose aim was to deter or ameliorate security-related challenges that were then mushrooming.
In the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, Iran saw two major enemies, the US and Iraq. Iran and Iraq were long-term rivals. Despite the fact that Iran is a predominantly Shi’ite state and the majority of Iraq’s population is also Shi’ite, Iraq’s ruling elite was Sunni. So there were religious and ethnic reasons (Arab versus Persian) for rivalry, or even hatred, between the ruling elites of the two nations. More substantially, Saddam Hussein had his own hegemonic ambitions in the region, which collided with those of Iran’s, even during the days of Mohammad Reza.
Iraq proved Iran’s fears by invading it in 1981, an event that lasted eight years, causing many thousands of deaths and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars. Saddam calculated that a weak government and revolutionary turbulence in Iran were ideal reasons for invading it. His purpose was to bring an end to the Islamic Republic and make Iran a supplicant state. The US also convinced Iran of its own ill intentions toward it by supporting Iraq in that war. Washington’s official explanation for "tilting" toward Iraq was that it was only supporting the lesser of the two evils, even though it really despised both regimes.
The Iran-Iraq war affected the Iranian psyche so intensely that building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and acquiring chemical warfare capabilities became enduring predilections of the Islamic Republic. It was only a matter of time before Iran was to consider developing its nuclear program. It should be recalled that in the early days of their rule, the ayatollahs were not interested in resuscitating the ambitious nuclear program that Mohammad Reza had initiated. Moreover, Saddam’s own quest for nuclear weapons also convinced the Iranian rulers that they must also seek the nuclear know-how, just in case they were to face a nuclear Iraq.
Israel became the third enemy of Iran, largely because of the very nature of its Islamic government. The Khomeini government broke off diplomatic ties with Israel and established such ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. More important, the Islamic Republic played a crucial role in politicizing the Lebanese Shi’ites. It also supported the Hezbollah - an Islamist party of Lebanon - politically and materially in its ongoing battles with Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon even after withdrawing from portions of it in the aftermath of its military invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Thus, Lebanon emerged as a major battleground between the hegemonic ambitions of Israel and Iran. Israel never forgave Iran for acutely radicalizing the Shi’ites of that country, a development that played a crucial role in the decision of then Israeli prime minister Yehud Barak to withdraw his troops from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Iran also became one of the foremost members of "the rejectionist front" - Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen being the other members - which rejected a negotiated solution of the Palestinian question. Even after the end of the Cold War, when the rejectionist front lost its chief backer, the Soviet Union, Iran and Syria maintained their opposition to a negotiated solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even when Syria joined the negotiating process initiated by the administration of president George H W Bush, Iran refused to budge from its hardline position of "no negotiations" with Israel. Iran also remained a profound supporter of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993) as well as the second one (2000-present). As a result of these developments Iran and Israel viewed each other as major adversaries.
Israel’s founding father and its first prime minister, Ben Gurion, decided in the 1950s that his country must ensure that its military dominance - both in conventional and nuclear realms - will never be challenged by any Arab or Muslim state. For that reason alone, he initiated a policy of not only purchasing cutting-edge conventional weapons, but also acquired nuclear weapons know-how for the Jewish state. His second objective was that no Arab or regional Muslim state should be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, for it would use them to destroy Israel. That principle has been applied across-the-board to countries that are technically still at war with Israel, but even to Egypt, which has been at peace with the Jewish state since 1979.
Israel has had unqualified support of the US on maintaining its superiority in conventional weapons. Regarding Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, no one in US official circles publicly questioned the legitimacy of that country’s possession of nuclear weapons. That issue remained one of the glaring double standards of America’s approach to nuclear nonproliferation. In 1981, Israel carried out its much-heralded preemptive raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osirak. As America’s resolve about nuclear nonproliferation hardened in the following decades, Israel became increasingly voluble about denying any Middle Eastern states nuclear weapon capabilities.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the only Middle Eastern countries with nuclear aspirations were Iran and Libya. Libya has recently abandoned its nuclear aspirations with much fanfare. Even though Iran has an active nuclear program, it insists that it has no intentions of developing nuclear weapons. Still, when Iran examines its immediate surroundings, it sees US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are likely to stay for the remainder of this decade. After ridding Iraq as one of the major challenges to its dominance, as Iran scrutinizes America’s intentions, developing its own nuclear weapons appear as an option of the last resort, very much like it was viewed by Ben Gurion of Israel in the 1950s and by Kim Jong-il now.
Iran’s domestic debates
Like all fledgling democracies, Iran has a variety of opinions concerning nuclear weapons. Within the unofficial, but informed circles, one can expect thoughtful discussions regarding whether Iran should develop nuclear weapons. A year or so ago, those who either did not want their country to develop those weapons, or those who wanted Iran to postpone it to a distant future, were vocal about airing their views. Now, as their country has been publicly viewed as being so close to developing weapons capabilities, one hears even from the reformists that Iran has the right to enrich uranium. Still, reformists also insist that enriching their stockpile of uranium does not mean that the government will develop nuclear weapons. Obviously, this group is under a lot of pressure not to give in to international pressure on this issue, especially while it is also fighting uphill political battles to remain in power.
The conservatives (or hardliners), on the contrary, are split into two sub-groups. The first one, while insisting that Iran should not ratify the protocol agreement to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the chairman of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Hasan Rowhani, has negotiated with the European Union-3 (France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Through that protocol, Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment as a goodwill gesture. Now, even people like Rowhani are finding themselves being taken over by the momentum related to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) vote of last month, calling on Iran to suspend all activities related to nuclear development. The hardliners, who control the Iranian majlis (parliament), are currently quite vocal about not ratifying that EU-3 protocol. They would like their country to abandon the NPT a-la North Korea.
The second sub-group of hardliners is the Iranian version of neo-conservatives. These are young conservatives who don’t seem to trust even their conservative elders - ie, those who personally participated in the Iranian revolution. According to one source, these "young neo-cons tenaciously believe in the earlier Utopian notions of the revolution; a theocratic and authoritarian state structure; an egalitarian and state-owned economic system; and a messianic foreign policy". In the tradition of the American neo-cons, they want their country to flex its muscles in the region. They have already attracted the backing of the Revolutionary Guards and other conservative groups of that country’s national security establishment. Even though the neo-cons have not yet publicly insisted that Iran should develop nuclear weapons, they resolutely support the proposition that their country should abandon the NPT, which would leave their nuclear program beyond the eyes of the IAEA.
The Arab reaction
Given the ongoing political turbulence in Iraq and Palestine, Arab attention is not exactly focused on the threatening aspects of Iran’s potential surfacing as a nuclear power. It is safe to state that George W Bush, through his decision to invade and occupy Iraq, and Israel, through its freewheeling use of military force to suppress the Palestinian insurgency, have so enraged the Arab and Muslim world that even a potential emergence of a nuclear Iran does not appear as menacing to them. Besides, in the post-September 11 era of unrestricted use of American military power, Arab states have little to fear from a "nuclear" Iran. Currently, the Muslim preference (from the predominantly Sunni Arab countries as well as Shi’ite Iran) is to see an end to the US occupation of Iraq, the resolution of the Palestinian question, and an end to their torment.
As a general saying in that region goes, one must fight the enemy beyond before one worries about differences from within one’s family. It is rare to see the emergence of that type of espirit de corps in the world of Islam.
TOMORROW: The US-Israel tag-team act
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.