Why War Against Iran Remains Unlikely

A giant awakes

The major powers yesterday ruled out military action against Iran, but in truth it has never been an option against the Middle East's most influential force

Essay by Reza Aslan
Saturday June 3, 2006
The Guardian

After months of pressure from both sides of the political divide in Washington DC, the Bush administration on Wednesday announced that it would join Europe in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme. The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, presented the decision as proof that the United States is serious about pursuing all avenues of diplomacy before resorting to a military option. But if this week's announcement indicates anything, it is that the White House has finally begun to recognise what its own policy advisers and military analysts have been privately saying for some time: there is no military option with regard to Iran.

That's because the invasion of Iraq has completely reshaped the dynamics of the region, making Iran the new political power in the Middle East. With its two nearest enemies - Saddam Hussein and the Taliban - gone, Iran has firmly secured its interests in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Through its ties with Hizbullah, Iran has managed to fill the power vacuum left by Syria's abrupt withdrawal from Lebanon. At the same time, Iran has taken advantage of the cut in international funding to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian authority to make up its economic shortfall, thus gaining an even firmer foothold in the Palestinian territories. Meanwhile, record oil prices and booming trade with Russia, China and India have allowed Iran to shrug off any economic pressure to give up its nuclear program.

Not since the takeover of the American embassy in 1979-80 has Iran been in a more favourable bargaining position vis-a-vis the United States. In fact, one could argue that when it comes to the nuclear issue, Iran is holding all the cards. After all, while it is clear that for years Iran has been hiding the size and scope of its nuclear programme so as not to attract unwelcome attention, technically it has yet to violate the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (a testament to the inherent weakness of the treaty).

That partly explains why the International Atomic Energy Association has been loath to issue anything more than a few tepid appeals for Iran to voluntarily suspend its nuclear programme and return to the negotiating table. It is also why there has been so much hesitation from the international community to refer Iran to the UN security council. Russia and China are not the only countries resisting calls to punish Iran. Brazil, South Korea, Japan, and other signatories of the non-proliferation treaty are rightly concerned about what effect sanctioning Iran would have on their own burgeoning nuclear programmes.

Given the relative weakness of the US bargaining position, it is no wonder that there are some in the Bush administration - notably the vice-president, Dick Cheney - who continue to insist that a military solution to America's Iran problem is not just a viable option, but the best option available to the US. (Last month, presumably as the administration was mulling over the decision to hold direct talks with Iran, a number of reports surfaced claiming that the Pentagon, under specific instructions from the vice-president's office, has been using an Iranian terrorist organisation called the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to conduct stealth military and intelligence operations in Iran in anticipation of a possible military attack).

As Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker, there are even those in the US government who are convinced that a sustained bombing campaign would not only halt Iran's nuclear programme; it would, apparently, so weaken the clerical regime that Iranians would be compelled to rise up and overthrow it. Putting aside the fact that the US has neither the military resources nor the domestic support to fight a second pre-emptive war in the region (much less one directly on Iraq's borders), and ignoring, for a moment, the almost unanimous conviction among American security analysts that military strikes would delay Iran's nuclear programme by a few years at most, what Dick Cheney and other proponents of an American invasion generally fail to address in their drumbeat for war is Iran's unprecedented ability to retaliate against US interests by using its proxies in the Middle East.

Iran's military reach in the region has never extended so far. In Lebanon, Hizbullah has vowed to respond to any attack on its benefactor by launching its own missiles into Israel. (Such an attack would undoubtedly prompt a fierce Israeli response, which would destabilise Lebanon's fragile government and lead to another decades-long civil war.) In the Palestinian territories, Iran has long had a ready-made militia in the form of Islamic Jihad. Now, thanks to the tens of millions of dollars Iran is pouring into the new Palestinian Authority, Iran can also rely on Hamas to act as an extension of its military forces.

But Iran can do the most harm in Iraq, where Iran's infiltration of Shia militias, especially the ruthless and well-equipped Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, gives it the ability to attack not just American interests, but American soldiers. Indeed, Iran's influence over its neighbour is such that any hope of salvaging a stable, viable government in Iraq would vanish with the first bomb to fall upon Tehran.

Furthermore, those who imagine that bombing Iran would somehow lead to regime change are merely confirming the almost wilful ignorance displayed by the Bush administration when it comes to the Middle East. Unlike the people of Iraq, who were forced together by artificial borders and fabricated nationalities, Iranians are united by an almost exaggerated sense of nationalism that transcends all boundaries of politics or piety. Perhaps the only way to rally the Iranian people around a regime that the vast majority of them despise is to rain bombs on the country. That is precisely what happened in 1980, when Hussein, spurred by the United States, launched a surprise invasion of Iran.

At the time, Iran was in the midst of profound political and social turmoil as a host of competing factions - from the Marxists to the Social Democrats to the clerical establishment - vied with one another for control over the new government. Hussein believed that this post-revolutionary chaos would allow him a quick victory over his enemy. Instead, Iranians immediately put aside their differences and united behind their charismatic spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, who then used the emergency powers he had been granted to push aside the democratically inclined transitional government and transform what began as a vibrant experiment in indigenous Islamic democracy into a fascist clerical oligarchy.

Despite its new found position as a potent regional power, however, Iran is even more fragmented today than it was three decades ago. The clerical regime likes to proclaim that all Iranians are unanimous in insisting on their inalienable right to pursue nuclear technology, whatever the costs. But underneath the facade of a unified Iran is a raucous debate over how best to proceed with the country's nuclear ambitions. A great many Iranians, including some powerful conservatives, are incensed with the way negotiations with Europe have broken down under the leadership of Iran's bellicose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The merchant class is up in arms at the prospect of suffering even greater international isolation. And Ahmadinejad's main opponent in the last presidential elections, the pragmatic cleric and wily politician Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has even gone so far as to publicly denounce the president (something unheard of in Iranian politics) for essentially destroying any hope Iran may have had to pursue its nuclear research in peace. In the meantime, the chorus of voices in Iran calling for a negotiated settlement is growing louder by the day.

But the moment the bombs start to fall on Iran, this debate would come to a halt. As happens in times of national security, political dissent would be stifled and the regime given unchecked wartime authority to do whatever it thought best to "protect" the country. Already those activists, like the Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who call for an end to the nuclear showdown with the west, have been labelled American stooges and possible threats to Iran's national security.

Fortunately, despite the machinations of the vice president, the Bush administration seems to be slowly coming to terms with the fact that it may have no choice but to fully engage Iran in diplomacy. And while Ahmadinejad continues to scoff at any conditions placed upon Iran by the US for direct dialogue, the truth is he has no say in the matter. It is one of the peculiar hallmarks of the Iranian government that the country's democratically elected president is responsible for virtually no foreign or domestic policy decisions. All such determinations are made solely by the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamene'i, who, on more than one occasion, has indicated his willingness to pursue dialogue with the US.

Direct negotiations between the US and Iran have the potential not only to put an end to the nuclear impasse, but also to open the door for further dialogue on other issues of mutual concern, including the security situation in Iraq. No one can doubt that the last three decades of US policy toward Iran have failed to either bring down the clerical regime or make Iran more democratic. Indeed, it has done the exact opposite, so that the regime is now stronger than ever and the democratic opposition on the verge of collapse.

It's time for a new approach to Iran, one that replaces America's failed sanctions policy with a package of security guarantees and economic incentives in exchange for international cooperation with its civilian nuclear programme. In other words, the same package being offered to North Korea. Of course, unlike North Korea, Iran is a sophisticated and technology-savvy country that boasts adult literacy rates approaching 90%. The vast majority of Iranians - nearly 70% of whom are under 30 years old - are fiercely pro-American and would like nothing more than an end to the clerical regime. But in a country in which nearly a third of the population is unemployed and the average annual rate of inflation is 24%, most Iranians are far too concerned with eking out a living to consider rising en masse against their government.

Neo-conservative fantasies notwithstanding, Iran is no longer a rogue state teetering on the brink of a popular revolt. For better or worse, Iran is now a sturdy and stable political powerhouse in an increasingly volatile region. It is long past time for the Bush administration to begin treating it as such. If the US can put aside its ideological reservations and confront Iran the way it confronted the Soviet Union and China - with an aggressive policy of interdependent trade relations in the hope that economic growth will foster democratic change - it could do so much more than reign in Iran's nuclear ambitions. By forcing the country out of its isolation and giving Iranians access to the global market, the US could achieve the very regime change it has been striving for all these years.

• Reza Aslan is the Iranian-born author of No god but God