The Iranian Chessboard
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Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).
Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.
The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists—a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.
Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."
Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans—all placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road—the backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are throwing such a collective—and threatening—fit.
3. What is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran—unlike the US—has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.
Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.
In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa—a religious injunction—under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.
Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and their faction of it.
Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.
4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")
But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power—the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media—they assumed they would also control the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.
For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.
