The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (17 page)

Iran may have hoped that the momentum Bonn had created for improved relations would continue, or perhaps Iran was frightened by America’s determination to bring about regime change through force of arms in neighboring Iraq. Either way, Tehran seemed to be doing something that it had never done before—reach out to America with the offer of a breakthrough in relations.

The Supreme Leader gave his blessing to this ambitious offer, but with a caveat. Khamenei told Iran’s reformist president Mohammad Khatami, “I am not going to object to your plan, but mark my words: America will not agree to this offer. They will see it as a sign of our weakness.”
¹²
He was right. The Bush administration saw no value in the offer, never replied to it, and admonished the Swiss government for even bringing it to Washington.

Administration hawks calculated that Iran was weak and vulnerable. Why throw it a lifeline by talking to it? But they misjudged the situation. As Iraq turned into a quagmire, the balance of power shifted; Iran grew stronger and, rebuffed by America, took its offer off the table.

Iraq did not turn out as America had expected. Quick victory proved to be a mirage, and America found itself facing an insurgency and escalating violence bordering on full-fledged civil war. And Iran had a hand in that, supporting radical Shia factions who resorted to violence to end the American presence in Iraq. Meanwhile, Washington’s expectation that regime change in Iraq would undo clerical rule in Iran proved untrue. With its economic and political influence spreading in Baghdad and across the Iraqi south, Iran actually looked to be the winner in the Iraq war.
¹³
That provided another opening for talks.

Senior Iraqi Shia leader Abdul Aziz Hakim, who had close ties with Khamenei, made common cause with influential Iranian conservative
leader Ali Larijani for the purpose of getting Tehran to talk to the United States about Iraq. Khamenei agreed, and the Iranians approached Iraq’s president Jalal Talabani to carry a message to the Americans in Baghdad. He came back from a trip to Iran with the news that Tehran “was ready for an understanding with America from Afghanistan to Lebanon. They are ready for discussions in order to reach results that please both sides.”
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But the talks never happened. By one account, the United States scuttled the meeting shortly before it was supposed to take place because Iran was sending Larijani and Revolutionary Guard commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi—the United States was then angry over Iran’s deadly support for Shia militias, but also Washington did not want to deal with Iran seriously and at the highest level. In the end, American and Iranian ambassadors met in Baghdad but never got beyond reading aloud charge sheets in which each side lamented the other’s bad behavior.

Iran has since become a growing headache for American policy makers. At issue is Iran’s ever-expanding nuclear program, which first came into public view in 2003. Washington might have turned down two offers to negotiate a grand bargain, but it would certainly like to see an end to the nuclear program. Iran, however, sees no value in giving up the program without resolving all outstanding issues between the two countries. As former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaie has put it, “Either talks resolve all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran or there is no point in talking at all.” Iranian leaders have come to believe that what the United States wants is not just an end to their nuclear program, but an end to their regime. There is plenty of truth in that.

With mutual suspicion so high, it should not be surprising that Iran’s nuclear program has unfolded like a game of cat and mouse. As Muhammad Javad Larijani, a senior adviser to Khamenei, put it, “America will never let Iran into the nuclear club through the front door, so we will have to jump over the wall.”
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And that is pretty much what Iran has been doing: confounding diplomats and inspectors while building its program inside hidden sites, spread around the country and fortified to withstand military strikes.

Iran has all along claimed that it does not want nuclear weapons. Khamenei is on record saying in 1995 that “from an intellectual, ideological
and
fiqhi
(religious law) perspective, the Islamic Republic of Iran considers the possession of nuclear weapons as a big sin and it believes that stockpiling such weapons is futile, harmful and dangerous.”
¹⁶

Iran says that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes. It wants nuclear power, the regime insists, in order to address its growing electricity needs. That is why the Shah first invested in a civilian Iranian nuclear program in the 1970s—he wanted Iran to be the world’s fifth-largest economy by the turn of the millennium. It was he who created nuclear research facilities in Iran’s universities, built the Tehran Research Reactor, and started the construction of Iran’s only nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. He also ordered another two dozen reactors from Canada and France and sent dozens of students to study nuclear physics at places like MIT in the United States or Imperial College in England. Many of these foreign-trained students now run Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s rulers have similarly told their populace that by mastering nuclear technology, Iran can leap to the head of the development pack. The atom, they claim, can do for Iran what software has done for India. Ali Larijani told a 2007 gathering I attended in Dubai that the key technologies for emerging economies are 1) nanotechnology, 2) biotechnology, and 3) nuclear technology. Iran, he went on, has settled on number three to win its future. By denying Iran nuclear technology, argue the country’s leaders, the West wants to keep Iran backward and subservient.
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Going nuclear is a matter of claiming equal rights to progress—an issue of what Iranians routinely call “international technology democracy.”

There is an overlay of Third Worldist rhetoric in the way Iranian leaders talk about their nuclear program and the U.S. opposition to it. An Indian diplomat told me, “there is a spirit of Bandung [the Indonesian city where the non-aligned movement of Third World countries was born in 1955] at play in Iran’s conversation … they tell us ‘today it is us, tomorrow it will be you.’ ”

This line of argument plays well on the street in Iran, but there are also clear strategic reasons why Iran wants nuclear technology and perhaps the potential to build a nuclear arsenal. The Shah thought Iran would need nuclear know-how—just short of an arsenal—in order to
emerge as a great power and assert hegemony over its neighborhood. Iran’s rulers today may rail against the Shah, but they have bought into his ambitions lock, stock, and barrel. The theocracy’s current vision of grandeur, of a nuclear Persia reigning unimpeded from the Volga to the Tigris, with the Persian Gulf as an Iranian lake, is, ironically, the Shah’s vision.
¹⁸
Nuclear capability then, as now, was a passport into the global elite. The main difference between the Shah and the ayatollahs who toppled him is that the Shah was a lot better at the game of pushing toward this ambition. He skillfully used the Cold War to persuade the West to recognize Iran’s strategically supreme position in the Persian Gulf, and to give him all the nuclear technology and expertise he could buy with Iran’s considerable oil wealth.

Iran’s desire for a nuclear deterrent today has much to do with how it sees its security needs in the region. In Iran’s immediate neighborhood the main strategic threat comes from the U.S. military presence, which is far stronger than Iran’s and prevents it from asserting its hegemonic ambitions. Tehran wants the United States out of the Persian Gulf so that Iranian power can run unimpeded and make the Persian Gulf states (which currently rely on American military power) fall into line.

A senior German journalist told me that at the end of a 1974 interview with the Shah, he mentioned to the monarch that he was headed for Abu Dhabi. “When the plane gets to the other side of the Persian Gulf,” the Shah told him, “I want you to look out the window. You will see clear black circles visible in the golden desert sand. A thin black line juts out of each circle, connecting it to the next circle further inland. The chain stretches for miles. These are the remnants of the ancient Iranian irrigation system [
qanat
]. For as far as those circles and lines go is Iranian territory.”

The Shah did not intend to literally invade Abu Dhabi the way Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 (although Iran did take over three strategic islands in the Persian Gulf from the UAE in 1974). But he did mean that Iran sees the Persian Gulf as its natural zone of influence stretching back millennia. That fundamental nationalist attitude is embedded in the Islamic Republic’s view of the region. The clerical regime does not speak the language of imperial Persian glories, but it believes in them nevertheless. Iran thinks of the Persian Gulf as its “near abroad,”
and in the same way that Russia, China, and India (which for decades blamed America for enabling Pakistan to resist Indian hegemony) resent America’s shielding of their smaller neighbors, Iran sees the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf as hindering its great-power ambitions. It is for this reason that Iran peppers its statements on resolving the nuclear crisis with demands for talks about “regional security”; it is code for Iran’s role in the Persian Gulf.

Nuclear capability combined with the U.S. departure from the Persian Gulf will enable Iran to realize foreign policy ambitions going back at least to 1971, when Britain’s departure from the Gulf first allowed Iran to imagine the area as its zone of influence.

Iran also has broader ambitions to spread its influence over the whole Middle East. Before the Islamic revolution, Iran saw the Arab world as hostile territory. There may have been alliances of convenience with Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, but Iranians were outsiders to a fiercely nationalist Arab world. The Shah saw no point in trying to gain regional leadership.

But Khomeini thought Iranians could lead Arabs if it was in the name of Islam. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has spent blood and ample treasure to make its influence felt all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet Iran’s Shia faith separates it from the dominant Sunni creed that reigns supreme in the Arab world, where Shias are an often despised and even hated minority. The more Iran pushed for Islamic unity, the more the Arabs resisted by mobilizing Sunni sectarianism.
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Iran had to settle for influence over pockets of Shiism in the Arab world, in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Where the Shias could wield power—via Hezbollah in Lebanon, in conjunction with the Alawites (who stand close to Shiism and Iran) in Syria, and within the government of post-Saddam Iraq—Iran could realize its goal.

Iran achieved its greatest success with Sunnis by harping on the “secular” Islamic cause: Israel and the Palestinians. Khomeini’s strategy had always been that Iran had to be more Arab than the Arabs, and that meant straining every nerve to stand tall against Israel. Iran could and should lead the Arabs against Israel, thought Khomeini and his successors, for success there would win Arab hearts and minds and convince Arabs of the value of Iranian leadership. The strategy was at its
most successful when Iran’s Holocaust-denying President Ahmadinejad attained rock-star status on the Arab street with his rhetorical attacks on Israel. He lost no opportunity to call for the Jewish state’s demise and back the forces of Arab rejectionism.

But Arab favor proved fickle. When a rebellion against Syria’s Assad regime erupted into a thinly disguised sectarian knife fight in 2011, the Arab world stopped lauding Iran for opposing Israel and took up denouncing the Persian Shia outsiders for foisting a minority Alawite regime on Syria’s mostly Sunni populace.

Part of the problem feeding this regional wavering toward Iran is that its political ambitions lack economic legs. Iran does not have the checkbook power of Qatar or Saudi Arabia, or the commercial muscle of Turkey. Islamic unity and anti-Israeli posturing go only so far. They cannot build the kind of interdependencies that bind countries and amount to real and long-running influence. The catch is that the more Iran tries to win influence in the Arab world, especially by baiting Israel, the more it invites international isolation and thereby undermines its economy.

Nuclear capability is in many ways a solution to these problems. It pushes back against American intervention and reinforces Iranian claims to be fighting the real battle against Israel. Nuclear capability, Tehran calculates, will cow the Arabs and compensate for Iran’s economic weakness.

The Islamic Republic first dusted off the Shah’s nuclear program when it was worried that Saddam Hussein was going to resume his war against Iran, possibly with chemical weapons. The West would not stand in his way; only a credible deterrence could dissuade Saddam from carrying out such savagery.
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Saddam is gone, but the strategic threat facing Iran remains. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2011 Iran spent $8 billion (2 percent of GDP) on military purchases. In the same year, Saudi Arabia spent more than six times that sum ($43 billion, or 11.2 percent of GDP); the United Arab Emirates spent almost twice as much ($15.7 billion, or 7.3 percent of GDP), and Israel spent 1.5 times as much ($13 billion, or 6.3 percent of GDP). Nor is the disparity merely one of dollar amounts; Iran’s regional rivals have weaponry that is technically superior and more advanced.

International sanctions—which began right after the 1979 revolution—have
cost the Iranian military access to the latest technology. Iran’s air force, for instance, is hopelessly outdated. It relies heavily on old F-14 Tomcats (the plane made famous by the 1986 Tom Cruise movie
Top Gun
) and F-4 Phantoms that the Shah bought from the United States decades ago. Iran will not be able to close the yawning technology gap anytime soon. And the lesson of the two Gulf wars is clear: Middle Eastern militaries are no match for what the United States and other Western militaries can bring to a fight.