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Jewish World Review Jan. 27, 2005 / 17 Shevat, 5765 Decision-day in Iran: Is it for or against United States? By George Friedman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The election in Iraq, however well or badly it will go, moves the spotlight to Teheran. It is now Iran's move and it is possibly the single most important choice that Iran will make since its Islamic revolution.
Iran has a single, overwhelming national security interest: protecting itself from encroachments by foreign powers. After World War II, the primary threat came from the Soviet Union. Another threat, both ancient and continual, came from Iraq. Under both the shah and the ayatollahs, Iraq constituted what became the major national security threat.
The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s had a devastating effect on Iran. There is hardly an Iranian family who did not suffer a loss in that war. Iraq came out ahead in the war militarily, but had it simply defeated Iran, the result would have been catastrophic. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Iraq has been Iran's nightmare.
This is why the Iranians did not seriously object to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Iranians did everything they could to encourage and entangle the Americans in the war — including providing intelligence that triggered American responses. There was nothing more important for Iran than to see Saddam Hussein's regime collapse.
For Iran, the best outcome of the war would be a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The second best outcome would be chaos in Iraq. Both provide Iran with what it needs: a relatively secure frontier and an opportunity to shape events to the West.
It had been Iran's hope that the U.S. invasion would create a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The United States certainly dangled this possibility in front of the Iranians. Ahmed Chalabi, the original fair-haired boy of the Pentagon, had a dual role to play. He was the conduit the Iranians used to pump intelligence into Washington that justified and required the invasion. He was also the channel used by the United States to convince the Iranians to keep the lid on the Iraqi Shiites. Chalabi told Iran that the U.S. would give them what they want if the Shiites remained quiet. Chalabi, like a figure in a Cold War espionage novel, was used and used up by both sides.
The Iranians will get a Shiite government in Baghdad after the election. It is not clear at all that it will be a puppet state. The Iraqi and Iranian Shiites have diverging interests and somewhat different views of the kind of regime they want. Nevertheless, whatever the tensions, any Shiite regime is better than a Sunni regime, as far as the Iranians are concerned.
But even for this, there will be a price. The new government will continue to control Shiite regions and have the cooperation of the Kurds. They will not control Sunni regions, where the insurgency is in place. There will not be a real Iraqi state unless the Sunni insurgency is defeated. The Shiites, with the Americans, can potentially defeat the Sunnis, but Iranian cooperation is necessary. At the very least, the Iranians will have to avoid destabilizing the Shiite government by manipulating the Iraqi Shiites to get more pro-Iranian officials in place. They will also have to share tactical intelligence on the Sunni insurgency with the Americans.
Alternatively, they can go with their second best choice: chaos in Iraq. Under that scenario, the Shiites in Iraq are pressured not to fight the Sunnis and the Iraqi regime becomes the government of Shiite Iraq and nothing more. At that point, Iraq, in effect, becomes divided into three states — Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd.
This is a tempting proposition. The problem the Iranians have is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If Iraq collapses and the Iranians dominate southern Iraq, then the road is open militarily to Kuwait and Saudi oil fields. The Iranians might not want to take advantage of this, but the Arabs cannot hope for the best as a foreign policy.
The Saudis cannot afford chaos in Iraq and a wide-open road from Iran. They will increase their dependence on the United States and will be forced to do whatever they can to reduce the rebellion in the Sunni region.
A united Iraq under a Shiite-dominated coalition government will secure Iran's western frontiers, but will deny it the opportunity to dominate the region. A divided Iraq will give it secure borders, an opportunity for domination and serious responses from Arab states. It will drive the Arabs into the American arms. Things could get dicey fast for the Iranians.
The U.S. is letting Iran know — via the convenient conduit of Sy Hersh and the New Yorker — that it is ready to push back hard. The Iranians are signaling back that they are a nuclear power — which is not true yet.
The Iranians have a fundamental strategic decision to make. They can work with the United States and secure their interests. Or they can undermine the United States and go for the big prize: domination of the Persian Gulf. The first is low risk, the second incredibly high risk.
How lucky are the Iranians feeling?
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George Friedman is chairman of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., dubbed by Barron's as "The Shadow CIA," it's one of the world's leading global intelligence firms, providing clients with geopolitical analysis and industry and country forecasts to mitigate risk and identify opportunities. Stratfor's clients include Fortune 500 companies and major governments.
© 2005 TMS
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