Iran: strategic threat or strategic opportunity?

The nuclear deal between the US and Iran presents a unique strategic opportunity to change the nature of the West’s involvement in the Middle East

As talks between Iran and the West over its nuclear capability seem to have reached a positive conclusion, it seems an opportune time to consider David Frum’s proposition that Iran is the USA’s primary strategic threat (http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/iran-world/17927-iranian-regime-not-isis-is-main-strategic-threat-david-frum). Frum, a man for whom Iran seems to represent an obsession, maintains that Iran is still the most dangerous threat to the United States, more than any of the Arab-based and financed groups such as Al Qaeda and IS who have actively and directly targeted the United States and their interests. The assertion seems an odd one.

Evil is as evil does

Mr Frum is probably best known for having coined the phrase “axis of evil” as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. This was a phrase of rare genius with its combination of binary, populistic dumbing down of complex geo-political relations that handily split the US into a country of patriots and traitors, with bridge-burning, sledgehammer diplomacy, which ensured that once the path had been set, however poorly informed, there was no going back. This is the type of language that can (and did) set the tone of a relationship for a generation.

There were three strange things about the “axis of evil” concept. First was the use of the word “axis” that implied some association between its three members, as if they were Marvel’s latest dark consortium, pooling their collective demonic resources to overthrow the Western forces of wholesome Christian living. Given that North Korea has not spoken to anyone other than China since 1948, and Iraq and Iran are hardly bosom buddies, the State Department demurred from explicitly proposing this link but the implication seemed there for the ignorant to draw.

Second was the use of the word “evil”, an irrational and emotive word with religious overtones that really has no place in modern, secular political discourse. A word that implies there is no rational way to justify a party’s actions and therefore we must assume they are just born bad. At best this is lazy and manipulative thinking, at worst it’s just stupid.

However, what was perhaps most interesting about this phrase, and the speech in which it was used back in 2003, was the inclusion of Iran in this axis.  North Korea and Iraq were obvious candidates. The former as a tin-pot, crack-pot throwback to the days when autocratic communist regimes were de rigueur, and one which was already blackmailing the US with its nuclear capability. The latter as a result of Saddam Hussein’s long-running personal feud with the Bush family, an itch that had needed to be scratched since the first Gulf war when the Democratic Republic of Kuwait (ahem… sorry, Kuwait) had been invaded by the barbarous Saddam as he struggled to repay the billions of dollars he’d borrowed from said Kuwaitis (and the US) in the previous decade in his failed efforts to invade Iran.

US-Iraq relations: a love story gone sour

The relationship between the US and Saddam degenerated with the tragi-comic overtones of a neighbourly dispute over party walls. First, the United States decided to support Iraq (obviously in the days before it turned “evil”) in its attempted invasion of Iran in 1980, a war that became the longest of the 20^th century, lasting until 1988. This support included both financial and military assistance, even including materials for chemical and biological weapons that were subsequently used against Iranian civilians. When Iraq failed to win this war, and in the absence of the associated booty, it struggled to pay its debts on military loans from Kuwait and the US. As a result, rather than pay these debts it instead decided to invade Kuwait (1990-91) and the US felt obliged to get them out again. So the question as to why they didn’t get rid of Saddam then, when they had the chance, has an obvious answer: he had been a long-time friend, and while they’d now fallen out, it was just too hard to cut the cord completely. Both the Reagan and (original) Bush administrations had supported him and, after all, he was an honorary citizen of Detroit (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/guess-who-got-the-key-to-detroit/)!

Saddam continued misbehaving more and more, thinking his old friends must still like him deep down, but the trust in the relationship was lost. The junior Bush still held a grudge from years past, the irony being that the chemical, biological and nuclear materials that they didn’t find in 2003 were the same ones that the 1994 Riegle Report (to the Senate Committee) stated the US had manufactured and exported to Iraq. Saddam hadn’t even bothered to look after all the gifts he’d been given, no wonder George W was angry!

So when Bush said “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children.” He forgot to mention that materials had been supplied by the US and their European friends. Presumably had it been Iranian mothers and children involved, the US would have been more forgiving.

Back to the axis

So why was Iran included at all? The US had just suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history, perpetrated by Arab terrorists, and funded and supported by Arab states. Even the US State department would admit that there were no Iranians involved. And yet the only Arab state included in the axis was Iraq, and they were in the clear with regards to terrorist involvement. Also not included were any of the countries other than N. Korea that had actually developed nuclear weapons outside of the NPT: India and Pakistan, though doing so had created the planet’s most dangerously volatile nuclear stand-off, while Israel’s ‘secret’ warheads were a constant source of antagonism in the Middle East.

Instead Iran was targeted as an “evil” threat to the West. But was it the West that felt this or was the US really reflecting the concerns of countries with much more to lose from a strong Iran?

A history of Western bumbling in Iran

Once again, the US (and to be fair the West’s) policies with regard to Iran have been sorely lacking in moral fibre and long-term strategic insight. The roots of the dysfunctional relationship between Iran and the US can be traced back to actions taken in the early 1950s. In 1951 the popular and secular Mohammad Mosaddegh was democratically elected as the Prime Minister of Iran and named Time magazine’s man of the year. By August 1953 he had been overthrown by a coup (Operation Ajax) engineered by the CIA at the request of Britain’s MI6.

The reason was that he tried to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, which at the time was controlled by the British through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later to become BP). Of course, in British eyes, the desire of Iranians to retain their oil wealth in order to help their own development rather than letting the British gorge on its profits was certainly an ‘evil’ and presumptuous act that fully deserved the Iranian leader’s very undemocratic removal (democracy in other countries apparently only being justified when it provides the ‘right’ result in Western eyes). Mossadegh was subsequently imprisoned and then placed under house arrest until his death in 1967, he remains an Iranian hero to this day and a potent nationalist symbol.

Unfortunately for the US and Britain, they hadn’t really thought through the long-term implications of ending Iran’s last fully democratic government. Following Mossadegh’s removal, the Shah (the head of Iran’s decidedly undemocratic monarchy) was propped up as the leader of the country by the Western allies, with far more power than he had previously, effectively an autocratic puppet having his strings pulled by the US. Unsurprisingly this did not go down well with the Iranian people, especially given the popular support for Mossadegh. After 26 years of tensions slowly building, they reached a crescendo in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, and there would be no return for democracy. Instead the revolution was hijacked by the clerics, and the charismatic Ayatollah Khomenei led the establishment of the region’s first Islamic Republic. Doh!

So who are the evil ones again?

Combine this with America’s subsequent support for Iraq’s invasion of Iran and you start getting a good feel for why Iranians, regardless of whether they support the current regime or not (and most don’t), still don’t trust America. Indeed, you may even argue they have more reason to view the US as ‘evil’ than vice versa. It’s certainly very difficult to think of anything that Iran has done to the US that is worse than what the US has done to Iran. The US even blew up one of Iran’s civilian airliners in 1987 when the USS Vincennes shot down a passenger plane that killed 290 innocent Iranians. The captain subsequently being given a medal for his conduct. Of course the US says this was an accident, but, following the recent first anniversary of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, this feels a weak excuse.

So why is Iran so ‘evil’? Why is Iran, as Mr Frum so concisely put it, America’s biggest strategic threat? Well, largely because of Israel, and it is Israel who has been the loudest and most outspoken opponent to any nuclear deal.

There are two issues to consider here: firstly, why the enmity between Iran and Israel? Secondly, does it make good strategic sense for US foreign policy towards Iran to be defined by it?

The Jewish question

The Jewish people were the subject of ongoing debate in Europe from the 18^th century up until the despicable denouement of the Nazis’ final solution. The reason was the continuing persecution of the Jewish minority, including exiles and massacres across all European countries going back hundreds of years, because of their desire to practice their faith and refusal to adopt prevailing Christian theology. This collective failure by European Christian regimes to treat the Jews fairly and equally, led directly to the horrors of the Holocaust. While the Nazis committed the atrocities, the blood was on everyone’s hands.

The collective guilt felt by the Western allies following the Second World War, combined with Britain’s war weariness and the outstanding terrorist efforts of the Zionist movement (in particular the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel which killed 91) led in 1948 to the setting up of the Jewish state of Israel in the British protectorate of Palestine. A neat solution for the Europeans; unfortunately though, there was already a group of people living there who weren’t overly happy about the imposition.

The rest is common knowledge, but the important point to recognise is that the setting up of Israel can be seen as the exporting of a European problem into the Middle East. This is not the fault of the Jews, but of the European countries who were unable to accept and protect them. It is also clear that whatever one’s view on the matter, there is clearly an argument that can be made that the forced creation of this state in that location was not fair on the people that already lived there.

All intelligent people should be able to appreciate, not only the clear justification for why the decision to create the State of Israel was taken, but also why legitimate grievances exist about how it was done. Both sides of this argument are self-evident, yet it never ceases to amaze that so many seem capable of only seeing one side of it. Yet this is the case. The desire of people to take a side in any argument leads them willingly into one-eyed thinking, while their engagement with those of opposing views pushes them further and further away from each other as they each argue their case, pursue their self-interest and self-fulfil their own prejudice. The inevitable result is that their positions become so polarised that they are incapable of reasoned and objective thought.

Iran vs. Israel… and the rest

Iran sits on one side of this polarised debate and has long supported the reactionary terrorist movement against Israel’s existence, in the form of Hamas and Hezbollah. In their view they are terrorists/freedom fighters in the same way that the Zionist movement’s Irgun and Haganah were terrorists/freedom fighters. They would argue that each is as justifiable/unjustifiable as the other.

The Iranian regime has made clear their belief that Israel should not exist as a country through its numerous rather childish threats to that effect. Israel for its part repeatedly threatens Iran with attack to prevent its nuclear development. The reality is that for all the posturing, Iran has no interest in really attacking Israel and any nuclear weapon would certainly not be used for that purpose. While the regime has some controversial views, they are rational actors and not a suicide cult. They are fully aware of what would happen if they attacked Israel directly. Instead, Iran quite sensibly wants a nuclear capability as a method of self-defence in a hostile world, exactly the same reason that Israel developed its own and why all the other nuclear powers continue to maintain theirs.

It should be remembered that Iran is a lonely actor in the region, threatened by the Sunni Arab states who despise it, Israel who wants to attack it, and the US who have stated that they think it is evil and have already overthrown two regimes that neighbour it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed it would be poor geopolitical strategy if Iran was not trying to develop its own nuclear deterrent. They are simply, like every other country, participating in the ongoing game of self-interest and self-preservation where morality is just for public justification rather than a motive in itself.

And so now we come to the nub of the matter. The real threat that Iran poses is not actually a physical or military one. It is instead an economic and political threat to the interests of Israel and the Sunni Arab states, in particularly Saudi Arabia. The reason is that Iran should and could be a political and economic superpower. It has a young population of nearly 80m, the largest combined oil and gas reserves of any country in the world, a strong identity that comes from a cultural history lasting 3,000 years, and a well-educated and Western-facing population (even under the current regime). If Iran opened up as a trading partner on the world stage and was allowed to participate as a political actor, it would clearly impact negatively on both Israeli and Saudi interests in a variety of ways (not to mention a state like Dubai and its vested interests, which are built on acting as the trading hub between the West and Iran as a pariah state). It is no coincidence that both these countries are key allies of the US and have been the most vocal opponents of any nuclear deal with Iran.

So what makes a good strategy Mr President?

With regards to Iran and Iraq, the US approach has shown a startling lack of strategy. Strategy is about understanding your long-term objective, developing your guiding principles, and plotting a focused and coherent path to achieve that objective. Instead the US has allowed itself to be steered by short-termism and tactical manoeuvring, tying itself up in knots with no clear sense of what long-term objectives are driving its foreign policy. This has led to a series of bumbling misadventures on the basis of immediate concerns with little understanding or regard for the negative consequences further down the line.

Examples range from the organised coup in Iran that laid the ground for the Islamic regime coming to power 26 years later, to the invasion of Iraq that not only created the conditions for IS to develop (indeed the IS leadership are reputed to have met and formulated their plans in Abu Ghraib, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story), but also removed one of Iran’s main adversaries and allowed them to dramatically improve their power and influence in the region.

Of course Iran has its own strategic interests in the Middle East but this does not have to be bad news for the West; a successful Iran does not have to be a threat to Western interests. Indeed it could very well help to stabilise the situation in the Middle East, it would certainly be difficult to make it any worse.

The reality is that Iranian interests are in many ways strategically aligned with those of the US, in particular they both want stability in the region, and to counter the increasing threat from IS and other Sunni jihadist groups. Working together could benefit both parties, while the opening up of Iran as a trading partner would be a welcome fillip for a global economy that continues to stutter.

The current sanctions don’t benefit the US or Iran. However, both Israeli and Saudi interests have been satisfied as Iran is ruled out of the global game politically and economically, Saudi is particularly happy to see Iran’s energy resources go unexploited. Corrupt hard-liners in Iran also benefit as they skim the cream from the inefficiencies and opportunities for corruption that sanctions create. Sanctions maintain the status quo in Iran by ensconcing hard-line opinion against the West and allowing the regime to blame external factors for internal problems.

There is a significant and realistic opportunity for Iran’s future development if relations can be repaired. While some on the right in the US like to talk of regime change, Iran’s political set up already closely reflects that in operation in Western democracies like Britain and the US. It has a democratically elected Parliament (the Majlis) and President with oversight provided by the unelected Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader acting as figurehead. In terms of structure this is no different to that in the UK which has the elected House of Commons and Prime Minister overseen by the unelected Lords and the Queen as figure head.

The problem is simply that power in Iran is still too concentrated in the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader who have final veto over new legislation, while in the UK that power is limited. However over time this is changing and will continue to, it just needs to be allowed to do so without interference. What Iran needs is evolution, not revolution, and the nuclear deal is a massively helpful step.

Iran has the history, capabilities and characteristics to make it both successful on the global stage and aligned with ‘western values’. Perhaps we should encourage them to achieve this and stop backing them into a corner? Now that would be strategic.