The Revenge of Geography (41 page)

To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies an acceptance of fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran’s geography, history, and human capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East, and by extension Eurasia, will be critically affected by Iran’s own political evolution, for better or for worse.

The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a destiny lies in what has not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me explain. Iran’s geography, as noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the same extent that it has on Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union has brought limited gains to Iran, when one takes into account the whole history of Greater Iran in the region. The very suffix “istan,” used for Central Asian countries and which means “place,” is Persian. The conduits for Islamization and civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and
culture. The language of the intelligentsia and other elites in Central Asia up through the beginning of the twentieth century was one form of Persian or another. Yet as Roy and others recount, after 1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and turned to Turkey for tutelage. As for the republics to the northeast of Iran, Sunni Uzbekistan oriented itself more toward a nationalistic than an Islamic base, for fear of its own homegrown fundamentalists: this makes it wary of Iran. Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but Iran is constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many Turkic-speaking Muslims elsewhere in Central Asia.
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What’s more, being nomads and semi-nomads, Central Asians were rarely devout Muslims to start with, and seven decades of communism only strengthened their secularist tendencies. Having to relearn Islam, they are both put off and intimidated by clerical Iran.

Of course, there have been positive developments from the viewpoint of Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is among the most technologically advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with its culture and politics), and as such has built hydroelectric projects and roads and railroads in these Central Asian countries that will one day link them all to Iran—either directly or through Afghanistan. Moreover, a natural gas pipeline now connects southeastern Turkmenistan with northeastern Iran, bringing Turkmen gas to Iran’s Caspian region, and thus freeing up Tehran’s own gas production in southern Iran for export via the Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a rail link built in the 1990s connecting the two countries.) Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth largest natural gas reserves, and has committed its entire gas exports to Iran, China, and Russia. Hence, the possibility arises of a Eurasian energy axis united by the crucial geography of three continental powers all up through 2011 opposed to Western democracy.
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Iran and Kazakhstan have built an oil pipeline connecting the two countries, with Kazakh oil being pumped to Iran’s north, even as an equivalent amount of oil is shipped from Iran’s south out through the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran will also be linked by rail, providing Kazakhstan with direct access to the Gulf. A rail line may also connect mountainous Tajikistan to Iran,
via Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the shortest route for all these natural-resource-rich countries to reach international markets.

So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along with its substate, terrorist empire-of-sorts in the Greater Middle East. Clearly, we are talking here of a twenty-first-century successor to Mackinder’s Heartland Pivot. But there is still a problem.

Given the prestige that Shiite Iran still enjoys in some sectors of the Arab world, to say nothing of Shiite south Lebanon and Shiite Iraq—because of the regime’s implacable support for the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-Semitism—it is telling that this ability to attract masses outside its borders does not similarly carry over into Central Asia. One issue is that the former Soviet republics maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, and simply lack the hatred toward the Jewish state that may still be ubiquitous in the Arab world, despite the initial phases of the Arab Spring. But there is something larger and deeper at work: something that limits Iran’s appeal not only in Central Asia but in the Arab world as well. That something is the very persistence of its suffocating clerical rule that while impressive in a negative sense—using Iran’s strong state tradition to ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and rape people—has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan appeal that throughout history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense. The Technicolor disappeared from the Iranian landscape under this regime, and was replaced by grainy black-and-white.

Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian Khorasan have always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan’s own sparsely populated, nomadic landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded apace, Iran held no real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly secular and were put off by the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its in-your-face challenge to America and Israel, I don’t believe we will see the true appeal of Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or is toppled. A democratic or quasi-democratic Iran, precisely because
of the geographical power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize hundreds of millions of fellow Muslims in both the Arab world and Central Asia.

Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only because of the example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq, but also because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and historically eclectic Shiite Iran. And such an Iran might do what two decades of Post Cold War Western democracy and civil society promotion have failed to, that is, lead to a substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions in former Soviet Central Asia.

Iran’s Shiite regime was able for a time to inspire the lumpen Sunni faithful and oppressed throughout the Middle East against their own tired, pharaonic governments, some of which have since fallen. Through its uncompromising message and nimble intelligence services, Iran for a long time ran an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities including Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Mahdi movement in southern Iraq. And yet the Iranian regime was quietly despised at home in many quarters, where the concept of Islamic Revolution, because Iranians have actually experienced it, has meant power cuts, destruction of the currency, and mismanagement. The battle for Eurasia, as I have explained, has many fronts, all increasingly interlocked with one another. But the first among equals in this regard is the one for the hearts and minds of Iranians, who comprise, along with Turks, the Muslim world’s most sophisticated population. Here is where the struggle of ideas meets the dictates of geography: here is where the liberal humanism of Isaiah Berlin meets the quasi-determinism of Halford Mackinder.

For as irresistible and overpowering seem the forces of geography, so much still hangs on a thread. Take the story of the brilliant eighteenth-century post-Safavid conqueror Nader Shah. Of Turkic origin, from Khorasan in northeastern Iran, Nader Shah’s Persian Empire stretched from the Transcaucasus to the Indus. His sieges numbered Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, and Kabul, places that bedevil America in the early twenty-first century, and which were rarely strangers to Iranian rule. Had Nader Shah, as Michael
Axworthy writes, not become deranged in the last five years of his life, he could have brought about in Iran “a modernizing state capable of resisting colonial intervention” from the British and Russians in the nineteenth century. But rather than be remembered as the Peter the Great of Persia, who might have dramatically altered Iranian history from then on for the better, his regime ended in misrule and economic disaster.
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Or take the fall of the Shah in 1979. Henry Kissinger once told me that had Jimmy Carter’s administration handled the rebellion against the Shah more competently in the late 1970s, the Shah might have survived and Iran would now be like South Korea, a dynamic regime, with an imperfectly evolved democracy, that always has its minor disagreements with the United States, but which is basically an ally. The Shah’s regime, in his view, was capable of reform, especially given the democratic upheaval in the Soviet Empire that would come a decade later. Though blaming President Carter for the Shah’s fall may be too facile, the possibilities raised by even a slightly different outcome to the Iranian Revolution are still intriguing. Who knows? I do know that when I traveled throughout Iran in the 1990s, having come recently from Egypt, it was the former that was much less anti-American and anti-Israeli than the latter. Iran’s relatively benign relationship with the Jews stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah. Iran’s population contains hope and possibilities.

Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran, even as crowds in parts of the Arab world cheered on the attacks; or the help Iran gave to the U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003. These are all indications that history, up to this point in time, did not need to turn out as it did. Other outcomes were possible.

Geography dictates that Iran will be pivotal to the trend lines in the Greater Middle East and Eurasia, and it may dictate how it will
be pivotal, but it cannot dictate for what purpose it will be pivotal. That is up to the decisions of men.

As I write, true to the innovative imperialist traditions of its medieval and ancient past, Iran has brilliantly erected a postmodern military empire, the first of its kind: one without colonies and without the tanks, armor, and aircraft carriers that have been the usual accompaniments of power. Rather than classic imperialism—invasion and occupation—Iran, notes author and former CIA field officer Robert Baer, is a superpower within the Middle East by virtue of a “three-pronged strategy of proxy warfare, asymmetrical weapons and an appeal to the … downtrodden,” particularly legions of young and frustrated males. Hezbollah, Tehran’s Arab Shiite proxy in Lebanon, Baer points out, “is the de facto state” there, with more military and organizational heft, and more communal commitment, than the official authorities in Beirut possess. In Gaza, Shiite Iran’s furtive military and financial aid, and its “raw anticolonial message,” seduced poor Palestinians trapped in Soweto-like conditions, who were alienated from contiguous Sunni Arab states run by the likes of the former dictator Mubarak.
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Iran, a thousand miles away to the east, felt closer to these downtrodden Palestinians than did Gaza’s border with Egypt under Mubarak’s rule. This, too, was the Iranian genius. Then, at least through 2011, there were the friendly governments in Syria and Iraq, the former of which clung to Iran for dear life as its only real ally, and the latter of which has a political establishment enmeshed with the Iranian intelligence services, which can help stabilize the country or destabilize it, as they wish. Finally, there is the Persian Gulf itself, where Iran is the only major power with its long and shattered coastline opposite small and relatively weak Arab principalities, each of which Tehran can militarily defeat on its own, undermine through local fifth-column Shiite populations, especially in Bahrain as we have seen, or economically damage through terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz.

Though forbidding and formidable, that most important element,
again, having to do with enlightenment, is absent. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid, Safavid, and other Iranian empires of yore, which were either benign or truly inspiring in both a moral and cultural sense, this current Iranian empire of the mind rules mostly out of fear and intimidation, through suicide bombers rather than through poets. And this both limits its power and signals its downfall.

Iran, with its rich culture, vast territory, and teeming and sprawling cities, is, in the way of China and India, a universe unto itself, whose future will overwhelmingly be determined by internal politics and social conditions. Yet if one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating Iran’s fate, it would be Iraq. Iraq, history and geography tell us, is entwined in Iranian politics to the degree of no other foreign country. The Shiite shrines of Imam Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law) in Najaf and the one of Imam Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) in Karbala, both in central-southern Iraq, have engendered Shiite theological communities that challenge that of Qom in Iran. Were Iraqi democracy to ensure even a modicum of stability, the freer intellectual atmosphere of the Iraqi holy cities could have an impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a democratic Iraq will serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers might in the future take advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply embroiled in Iraqi politics, the very propinquity of the two nations with a long and common border might work to undermine the more repressive of the two systems. Iranian politics will become gnarled by interaction with a pluralistic, ethnically Arab Shiite society. And as the Iranian economic crisis continues to unfold, ordinary Iranians could well up in anger over hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by their government to buy influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. This is to say nothing of how Iranians will become increasingly hated inside Iraq as the equivalent of “Ugly Americans.” Iran would like to simply leverage Iraqi Shiite parties against the Sunni ones. But that is not altogether possible, since that would narrow the radical Islamic universalism it seeks to represent in the pan-Sunni world to a sectarianism with no appeal beyond the community of Shiites. Thus, Iran may be stuck trying to help form shaky Sunni-Shiite coalitions in Iraq and to keep
them perennially functioning, even as Iraqis develop greater hatred for the intrusion into their domestic affairs. Without justifying the way that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was planned and executed, or rationalizing the trillions of dollars spent and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war, in the fullness of time it might very well be that the fall of Saddam Hussein began a process that will result in the liberation of two countries; not one. Just as geography has facilitated Iran’s subtle colonization of Iraqi politics, geography could also be a factor in abetting Iraq’s influence upon Iran.