Omid and his article in NewYork timesbest luck ...A Firebrand in a House of Cards
By DARIUSH ZAHEDI and OMID MEMARIAN
Published: January 12, 2006
Berkeley, Calif.
IN defying international monitors and breaking the seals on its nuclear facilities, Iran seems to be courting confrontation. But Western leaders would do well to consider what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bravado really says about Iran's likely posture in the region and at the nuclear talks that are scheduled to resume at the end of January. To continue down the path of conflict could be very costly, both for the regional interests of the United States and most of all, for the territorial integrity of Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is surely motivated by ideology and the desire to solidify the position of the security faction within Iran's ruling elite. But he also appears to be acting on the perception that the United States is in a position of considerable, indeed unprecedented, weakness. America's military is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington has focused on monitoring North Korea's nuclear program rather than Iran's. If threatened, Iran could wreak havoc in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel. These observations may lead Mr. Ahmadinejad to an incorrect assessment of Iran's strength relative to any American threat.
In fact, Iran has serious domestic frailties, including a shaky economy and its attendant unemployment and popular resentment, not to mention soaring levels of drug abuse and a brain drain. But President Ahmadinejad no doubt takes comfort not only in his belief in divine protection but also in the knowledge that Shiite religious parties aligned with Iran are now the dominant political forces in Iraq, while the American public hardly seems amenable to waging another war in the region. Moreover, Mr. Ahmadinejad very likely believes that the best way to guard against regime change from without is to emulate North Korea by swiftly advancing Iran's nuclear capacity.
The new president also surely knows that even if Iran's nuclear dossier is referred to the United Nations Security Council, meaningful multilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic will most likely be vetoed by Russia or China. Flush with petrodollars, Iran has become a major purchaser of Russian technology, including roughly $1 billion worth of allegedly defensive weapons that Moscow recently agreed to sell to Tehran. Meanwhile, China, seizing on Iran as a key producer of oil and gas not beholden to the United States, has quickly emerged as one of Iran's largest trading partners.
Given this favorable strategic picture, Mr. Ahmadinejad might even welcome an American or Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Tehran could then retaliate against American and Israeli interests by mobilizing its Shiite allies in Iraq, the Persian Gulf countries and Lebanon - or even by making common cause with some Sunni rivals. All the while, Mr. Ahmadinejad's faction in government would make full use of the war footing to marginalize its rivals at home and crush the remnants of Iran's civil society.
But the Iranian regime is not invulnerable, and Washington knows this. Just as Iran can use the Shiite card to create mischief in the region, the United States could manipulate ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iran, which has significant, largely Sunni, minority populations along its borders.
Many of Iran's ethnic and religious minorities see themselves as victims of discrimination, and they have not been effectively integrated into Iranian economic, political or cultural life. Some two million disgruntled Arabs reside mainly in the oil- and gas- rich province of Khuzestan. The United States could make serious trouble for Tehran by providing financial, logistical and moral support to Arab secessionists in that province. Other aggrieved Iranian minorities would be emboldened by the Arabs' example - for example, the Kurds and the Baluchis, or even the Azeris (though the Azeris, being Shiites, are better integrated into Iranian society). A simple spark could suffice to set off centrifugal explosions.
Furthermore, the plummeting Iranian economy will only worsen if the United States succeeds in referring Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, whether or not meaningful sanctions follow. Such a referral would accelerate capital flight, deal a blow to the country's already collapsing stock market, devastate its hitherto booming real estate market, and wipe out the savings of a large part of the middle class. It would also most likely result in galloping inflation, hurting Iran's dispossessed, whom the Ahmadinejad administration claims to represent.
In light of these ominous possibilities, both Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Bush would do well to avoid overplaying their hands. They should take a leaf from the book not of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the ideologue, but of Ayatollah Khomeini the pragmatic politician. Like Mr. Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khomeini argued that the "Zionist entity" should be wiped off the map. But he chose regime preservation over ideology when he ended the Iran-Iraq war and even bought weapons from Israel.
IRAN should endeavor to regain the trust of the international community by engaging in compromise, and the United States should allow this compromise to be sufficiently face-saving for Iran's ruling elite. To regain the confidence of the international community, Iran should accept the Russian offer to process Iranian uranium gas into fuel and voluntarily stop, for a specified time, insisting on its right to do so at home.
In return, the United States should lift its unilateral sanctions from Iran. These sanctions, which include a ban on the sale of aircraft and spare parts to Iran, have absolutely no effect on the regime's nuclear capacity, but they harm Iranian civilians.
Today the incentive for both sides to step away from the brink of conflict is even greater than it was at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. If the United States responds to a perceived Iranian threat by exploiting Iran's ethnic, sectarian and economic cleavages, it is not just the Islamic Republic that will be threatened - Iran itself could be dismembered as well.
Dariush Zahedi is a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist and blogger, is a visiting scholar at the university's Graduate School of Journalism.
