Two recent Iranian developments help define the problems and opportunities the United States faces in the Middle East. One is the apparent collapse of European efforts to convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear weapons program in return for considerable economic aid as well as assistance in developing peaceful nuclear power. The other is the appearance of Iranianmade bombs among Iraqi insurgents. Both puzzled many observers. These developments should not have been surprising and the reasons for this may be illuminating.
The nuclear offer was rejected in the aftermath of what seems to have been a rigged Iranian election, the winner being the hard-line former mayor of Teheran. He announced that the bomb was a matter of sovereignty, not to be negotiated away for mere economic advantage, i.e., for prosperity.
From the point of view of the mullahs who run the country, the situation is now precarious. Several elections have shown that the population wants reform, which means that it wants the mullahs out of power. Because the population is quite young, fewer and fewer Iranians identify with the 1979 revolution against the Shah. To strengthen itself, the regime touts the foreign threat, most clearly represented by the U.S. force in neighboring Iraq. It also emphasizes its mission to spread Islam and to correct the one great crime against Islam, the existence of Israel. As a means of destroying Israel, and of deterring the hated West, the national bomb/missile program becomes not only a matter of national pride but also a means of maintaining the mullahs' power.
Since the mullahs present the Europeans as second-rate versions of the United States, they present defiance of the Europeans as an expression of Iranian independence, a way of buttressing their own power. Agreement with the Europeans would become a shameful surrender, rather than a solution for the area's instability.
The bombs in Iraq are also probably about the mullahs' power. Americans who first identified the bombs as Iranian-made were shocked. The Iranian government, it seemed, was working against the liberation of their co-religionists across the border, possibly even against placing them in power in Iraq. Iran is the only Shi'ite state in the world; most Muslims (who are Sunnis) regard the Shi'ites as either a separate cult or as heretics. Iraq has a Shi'ite majority, and one possible future for the country is a federal system in which the Shi'ia south would gain considerable autonomy (as would the Kurdish north). Quite naturally the minority Sunnis, concentrated in the middle of the country, are unenthusiastic, particularly since the oil regions are in Shi'ia and Kurdish territory.
So why would a Shi'ia government in Iran help Sunnis killing other Shi'ites? As in the Iranian bomb situation, the answer is that the government in Teheran is interested first in maintaining power and only much later in the health and survival of its citizens and co-religionists. Iraq may end up as a rival and, worse, a truly democratic Shi'ia state. Shi'ites in Iran would ask why they could not enjoy similar rights. A successful Iraqi democracy would demonstrate that democracy in Iran is a sham, because ultimately the unelected mullahs control the system (e.g., by vetoing candidates and annulling any laws they dislike).
Why should we care? Defense against nuclear weapons can take two forms, active and deterrence. Active defense (anti-missile missiles) may or may not work. It is certainly worth the effort, but it does not currently exist in any quantity. Deterrence depends upon fear. If a government really does not care about the fate of its citizens, for example because it believes that death by jihad is an excellent idea, then deterrence becomes impossible. The more the government is held responsible by its citizens, the better the chance that it will try to avoid nuclear warfare. It may be far too late to prevent the Iranians from building a bomb within five to ten years. They already have ballistic missiles that can reach Israel and Eastern Europe. It would be extremely unfortunate if the Iranians obtained a bomb while their rulers imagined that they had a historical mission to obliterate Israel. The Israelis would surely fire back, and most observers think they already have enough nuclear firepower to destroy Iran.
The U.S. Role in the Middle East
It is surely in the U.S. national interest to keep the entire Middle East from being irradiated and its population massacred. Most Europeans would probably agree. Note, incidentally, that Saddam Hussein used to promise much the same thing as the Iranians now threaten, as soon as he got his bomb. Although no evidence was found of an active Iraqi nuclear bomb program, it was clearly established that Saddam expected to restart his quite viable program as soon as UN sanctions were lifted.
That brings us back to Iraq. Perhaps it is worth remembering that the options in 2003 were either to attack or to accept the end of the sanctions within a year. Saddam was certain to advertise the end of sanctions as a major victory over the United States, with all the consequences that would have brought for U.S. prestige within the Middle East.
Some have argued that the United States was foolhardy to destabilize the Middle East by attacking Iraq. This statement carries a subtle implication that the Middle Eastern situation in 2003 was stable. Though not really to our liking, perhaps it was the best we were likely to get. In fact it was dynamic and running very much the wrong way from an American perspective.
The regime of sanctions and limits placed on Iraq was becoming more intolerable to much of the world by the day. What we now know of the oil-for-food scandal suggests that the UN would have ended the sanctions within a year at most. That would have freed Saddam to rearm. The Iranians were already working hard on a nuclear bomb, which they wanted for their own purposes, quite independently of whether the United States was engaged in Iraq (they were using the U.S. presence containing Saddam as evidence of U.S. regional aggression). The mullahs were already trying to stave off a rising demand for democracy. Ultimately we could have expected a replay of the Iran-Iraq War using nuclear weapons, quite possibly permanently denying the world the oil resources of the Middle East (not to mention creating an unprecedented human tragedy).
Another element of the previously "stable" Middle East would have been continuing fury over the existence of Israel, which many Muslims see as a Western intrusion into their world. This anger is likely to remain as a fact of life. It would color Muslim opinion of the United States whether or not we had attacked Iraq (and Saddam had managed to convince many that our embargo containing him was a kind of attack).
Above all, jihad is probably best seen as an inchoate expression of fury at the decline of the Muslim world relative to the West. The inventor of modern Muslim fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, wrote about the moral superiority of the Muslim in a world dominated by Western material superiority. The way to survive was to concentrate on the moral decline of the West, as reflected, for example, in the shamelessness of Western women. It would, of course, be even better simply to vaporize the evil West. The existence of Israel is infuriating because it is a permanent reminder of military defeat (i.e., material inferiority). Note that, like the Iranian mullahs, the jihadis are not particularly interested in material prosperity; they even see such prosperity as a diversion from their moral mission.
When Osama and others write about reverting to a golden age of pure Islam, they are saying that Muslims are superior because they are spiritually better, and that they must capitalize on that superiority. The United States did not create Osama and his movement; rather they reflect hundreds of years of anger and misfortune. The 9/1 1 attacks and much of what is now happening in Iraq can be traced to that long history, not to any particular acts on our part. Without our intervention in Iraq, it seems likely that Jihadi terrorists would have continued to attack Americans -in the United States, since there would not have been any reason to concentrate on Iraq. Was this sort of "stability" better than what we now face?
If the Iraqis manage to erect a viable and more or less democratic state, the Iranian mullahs will be in trouble. Ideally their own people will seize enough power to insure that whoever rules in Teheran really does have their interests in mind. In that case an Iranian bomb will fit into a regional pattern of deterrence. It could turn out that, instead of distracting us from the Iranian threat, the Iraqi operation will have been quite relevant to it. An Iranian bomb with deterrent thinking might actually reduce conflict, though not necessarily tension. Of course the mullahs may well decide that some sort of war will better buttress their powers. That would be something like the situation which some historians now believe gave rise to World War I: a German elite facing a rising demand for power from the elected Reichstag actively sought a major war. In the case of Iran, the demand for democracy long predated our occupation of Iraq. So did our interest in supporting it.