IRAN’S OMNIOUS WAITING GAME
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
WASHINGTON 14 Mar. (IHT) It is a remarkable study in Middle Eastern contrasts: As Saddam Hoseyn scrambles to confuse the West about his illegal weapons, Iran, like the proud father of a precocious child, decides to show the world that it has a new underground uranium enrichment lab.
Take this as a worrisome reminder that Iraq isn't the only variable in the Persian Gulf.
How will the mollahs in Tehran react to an American military victory in Iraq? Will they threaten American soldiers and meddle with a postwar Iraqi administration?
After all, in 1983 the clerics and their Lebanese allies used truck bombs to blow the United States out of Lebanon when it appeared that Washington intended to establish a political order opposed to Tehran's interests. Since then Iran has repeatedly used terrorism as statecraft.
The virulently anti-American bulwark of clerical power, Iran's Revolutionary Guard corps, and crosses the long Iraqi-Iranian border at will. The corps also maintains a small standing army of Iraqi exiles, the Badr Brigade; many of them share their patrons' loathing of the United States.
Confronted at home by dissident populist clerics and a student-led democratic reform movement, Iran's theocracy undoubtedly isn't happy about the prospect of a democratic Iraq born through the intervention of the Great Satan.
Yet despite all this, the odds are good that Iran won't interfere with Washington's plans, at least not for now. There are several reasons, but first and foremost is Tehran's intention to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran's first program to develop nuclear energy and weaponry, under the shah, was derailed in 1979 by the Islamic revolution. After Saddam Hoseyn's invasion of Iran in 1980, many mollahs who had thought the shah's program was a waste of money began to reconsider.
But it was America's easy eviction of Saddam from Kuwait in 1991 that finally turned the debate and restarted Iran on nuclear research.
This was because a clerical consensus had developed: If Saddam had possessed the bomb, the mullahs agreed, the United States would not have kicked him out of Kuwait. Thus, they decided, if the Islamic Republic could develop an atomic weapon, it would not have to worry about the Americans one day doing to it what they had just done to Iraq.
This view was recently echoed by the official Iranian news service when it reported on the unveiling of the new factory by saying, "The use of nuclear technology would reinforce the authority of Iran's system."
Iran has loads of oil and gas, so electricity produced by nuclear means does nothing to advance the "authority" of the regime - but in the realpolitik Middle East, nuclear weapons do. And the country's program is likely within two years of building them.
Today, Iran's leaders are much less worried about what happens in Iraq than about the Bush administration's Axis of Evil doctrine. There has been non-stop discussion about whether the Islamic Republic will be "next on the list." Increasingly visible pro-American sentiment, particularly among Iran's youth, only encourages Iran's leadership to expect the worst.
Thus the mollahs' decision to go public with their nuclear technology seemed intended not only to impress the neighbourhood, but also to curtail the chance that Washington might, as a pretence for military action, accuse them of working clandestinely.
The program was probably designed so that it could be made public at an expedient moment, since the centrifuge-based system at the lab allows for progress to be made towards weapons manufacture without technically being in violation of International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines.
The last thing Tehran wants now is for actions by its Revolutionary Guards or their Iraqi proxies to do anything in Iraq that would make the Bush administration's temper flare.
Once the clerics have a nuclear weapon, of course, they could more confidently try to influence Iraq's political system, which will hardly be set in stone two years from now.
And even if the Iranians aren't as worried about American strikes as I suspect, they would probably sit tight for now anyway - to assess how serious Washington is about abetting the birth of Iraqi democracy and how the various principal Iraqi players, the Sunni and Shiite Arabs and the Kurds, are going to get along after Saddam's downfall.
The worst outcome for Iran would be a dedicated American effort to destroy the Sunni Arab power structure and to give Iraq's Shiite majority real political muscle.
Iran's clergy, which is also Shiite, would see a democratic Iraq dominated by secular Shiites as a worrisome model for their country's restless youth. And the Iraqi Shiites, who have often looked askance at the hubris of the Persian divines, could start offering refuge and pulpits to Iran's dissident clerics.
But even in this situation, the Iranian mullahs wouldn't panic. They have reluctantly grown accustomed to American soldiers in their midst - in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Gulf - and they look down on the Iraqis as culturally and politically unsophisticated.
Besides, they know that time is on their side. All they need is a few years
and they'll have the bomb. At that point, a democratic Iraq would still be
something very much in the making. And challenging America in Iraq would
probably be much more strategically rewarding. ENDS IRAN ABMBIGUOUS POLICY 14303
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Editor’s note: The writer a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
The Paris-based International Herald Tribune published this article on its 14 March issue
Highlights are phonetisation of names are by IPS