Iranian dangers (18 February 2006)

Bush’s inability to see the consequences of confrontation with Iran could wreak havoc, argues Glen Rangwala.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (March 2006)

Just about the most uncontroversial thing that you could say about America’s war on Iraq is that the winner of the war has been Iran. Many of those within the Bush administration believed in a strategy of encircling Iran back in early 2003. With a heavy US military presence in Iraq to Iran’s west, in Pakistan and Afghanistan to its east, and in central Asia and the Gulf to its north and south respectively, Iranian regional power would collapse, its economy could be strangled and the regime would simply cave in, with a few US or Israeli military prods if necessary.

The reality could scarcely be more different. With the collapse of the Iraqi state, the historical bulwark to Iranian power, Iran has become the single greatest power in the Gulf area, the US military is suffering from a recruitment and morale crisis, and the US presence in the countries of the region has either been removed, as in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, or is looking increasingly precarious, as in Pakistan. In Iraq, the political climate facing US forces is increasingly set by movements and leaders whose long-term mentor is Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The US is unlikely to be able to undertake another large-scale use of force in the region for the indefinite future. The US may have sought to contain Iran; but instead, through a combination of diplomacy, power and luck, Iran has managed to contain the US.

It is this context that should be remembered as Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel join Washington’s chorus of reciting the Iranian threat, particularly over the restarting of its nuclear enrichment programme. Much of the talk from the Bush Administration, particularly the request on 15th February from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the US Congress to give $75m to Iranian opposition media and political groups (now called ‘pro-democracy’ groups), amounts to no more than bluff and banter. During an earlier era, the Clinton Administration too had generously funded Iranian groups claiming to promote democracy - the popular election of ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president followed.

The next step will be UN Security Council deliberations on Iran in March, at which the five nuclear powers who make up the permanent members will probably give a final warning to Iran to prove, on pain of economic sanctions, that it is not attempting to attain the nuclear status that they themselves already have. Among Iranians, there is a widespread sense of the hypocrisy of this stance: an opinion survey from early February showed that 85% s of the Iranians polled supported continuing the nuclear enrichment programme, with 74% backing it even if it meant being sanctioned by the Security Council.

The verbal conflict over Iran’s strategy in Iraq also continues to rumble on. For the past two years, the standard analysis offered by senior British officials involved in Iraqi affairs has been that Iran’s policy is to avoid with equal vigour both bringing chaos to Iraq and allowing the US and UK to claim that their project in Iraq has been a success. In practice, this has meant a subtle tactic of backing different Iraqi political groups, many of whom are now in government, and playing them off against each other so they end up competing with one another to be Iran’s chief ally.

The public claims made by the British and Americans, however, have ignored this tactic in favour of blunt threats. In October, a senior British official, later revealed to be the UK ambassador to Iraq, William Patey, claimed that Iran was supplying explosives to insurgents in Iraq to kill British troops with. Few experts at the time believed those claims, despite their repetition by Blair. By January, the Ministry of Defence was in full retreat, acknowledging that there was no proof of Iranian involvement and, less plausibly, that they had never really blamed Iran after all.

In a major speech in December, George Bush proclaimed that Iran was trying to undermine Iraq’s elections “because a free Iraq threatens the legitimacy of Iran's oppressive theocracy”. His argument was ridiculous: elections in Iraq have entrenched in power leaders from clerically-led parties, thus taking Iraq the closest it has ever been to a theocracy, and those leaders had been supported all along in their election campaigns by Iran. US forces in Iraq and especially their British counterparts in southern Iraq are increasingly falling under the indirect protection of the Iranian regime, with the knowledge that its forbearance in avoiding outright confrontation could be lifted at any moment.

But the Iranian government also has a strong sense, perhaps even an exaggerated one, of its own new level of power. President Ahmadinejad told USA Today in mid-February that he wasn’t concerned with UN economic sanctions because “those who want to impose limitations on us will lose more than us”. Iranian officials have also talked about withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the event of Security Council action, which would mean that they, like Pakistan and Israel, would be under no legal prohibition from developing nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad’s own elections and his much-publicised statements on Israel and the Holocaust all stem from Iranian confidence and a feeling of invulnerability amid the reversal of US fortunes in Iraq, and the resultant opportunity for Iran to establish its position as a rival centre of power in the Middle East. The danger is that Bush, spurred on by Blair’s moralism, will once again ignore the limitations on America’s imperial power and use military strikes in a vain attempt to coerce the Iranians into compliance. The escalation that would result from such a tactic would have grave repercussions on Iranians, Americans and Brits alike.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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