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<H1>Iran's Redefined Strategy</H1><!--BODY COPY--><B>By George
Friedman</B><BR><BR>The Iranians have broken the International Atomic Energy
Agency seals on some of their nuclear facilities. They did this very
deliberately and publicly to make certain that everyone knew that Tehran was
proceeding with its nuclear program. Prior to this, and in parallel, the
Iranians began to -- among other things -- systematically bait the Israelis,
threatening to wipe them from the face of the earth.<BR><BR>The question, of
course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They do not yet have nuclear
weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have now hinted that (a) they plan to
build nuclear weapons and have implied, as clearly as possible without saying
it, that (b) they plan to use them against Israel. On the surface, these
statements appear to be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are
many things one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force
is not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the Iranians seem
to be doing, so we need to sort this out.<BR><BR>There are four
possibilities:<BR><BR>1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane
and wants to be attacked because of a bad childhood.<BR>2. The Iranians are
engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this is part of it.<BR>3. The
Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons -- and a deterrent to Israel --
before the Israelis attack.<BR>4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would
welcome an Israeli -- or for that matter, American -- air strike.<BR><BR>Let's
begin with the insanity issue, just to get it out of the way. One of the ways to
avoid thinking seriously about foreign policy is to dismiss as a nutcase anyone
who does not behave as you yourself would. As such, he is unpredictable and,
while scary, cannot be controlled. You are therefore relieved of the burden of
doing anything about him. In foreign policy, it is sometimes useful to appear to
be insane, as it is in poker: The less predictable you are, the more power you
have -- and insanity is a great tool of unpredictability. Some leaders cultivate
an aura of insanity.<BR><BR>However, people who climb to the leadership of
nations containing many millions of people must be highly disciplined, with
insight into others and the ability to plan carefully. Lunatics rarely have
those characteristics. Certainly, there have been sociopaths -- like Hitler --
but at the same time, he was a very able, insightful, meticulous man. He might
have been crazy, but dismissing him because he was crazy -- as many did -- was a
massive mistake. Moreover, leaders do not rise alone. They are surrounded by
other ambitious people. In the case of Ahmadinejad, he is answerable to others
above him (in this case, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), alongside him and below him.
He did not get to where he is by being nuts -- and even if we think what he says
is insane, it clearly doesn't strike the rest of his audience as insane.
Thinking of him as insane is neither helpful nor clarifying.<BR><BR><B>The
Three-Player Game</B><BR><BR>So what is happening? <BR><BR>First, the Iranians
obviously are responding to the Americans. Tehran's position in Iraq is not what
the Iranians had hoped it would be. U.S. maneuvers with the Sunnis in Iraq and
the behavior of Iraqi Shiite leaders clearly have created a situation in which
the outcome will not be the creation of an Iranian satellite state. At best,
Iraq will be influenced by Iran or neutral. At worst, it will drift back into
opposition to Iran -- which has been Iraq's traditional geopolitical position.
This is not satisfactory. Iran's Iraq policy has not failed, but it is not the
outcome Tehran dreamt of in 2003.<BR><BR>There is a much larger issue. The
United States has managed its position in Iraq -- to the extent that it has been
managed -- by manipulating the Sunni-Shiite fault line in the Muslim world. In
the same way that Richard Nixon manipulated the Sino-Soviet split, the
fundamental fault line in the Communist world, to keep the Soviets contained and
off-balance late in the Vietnam War, so the Bush administration has used the
primordial fault line in the Islamic world, the Sunni-Shiite split, to
manipulate the situation in Iraq.<BR><BR>Washington did this on a broader scale
as well. Having enticed Iran with new opportunities -- both for Iran as a nation
and as the leading Shiite power in a post-Saddam world -- the administration
turned to Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation
with the United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an
ascended Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington
used that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has
been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of
Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in Afghanistan's
Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United States, however,
attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It became the swing player
between Sunnis and Shia.<BR><BR>This was not what the Iranians had hoped for.
<BR><BR><B>Reclaiming the Banner</B><BR><BR>There is yet another dimension to
this. In 1979, when the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran,
Iran was the center of revolutionary Islamism. It both stood against the United
States and positioned itself as the standard-bearer for radical Islamist youth.
It was Iran, through its creation, Hezbollah, that pioneered suicide bombings.
It championed the principle of revolutionary Islamism against both
collaborationist states like Saudi Arabia and secular revolutionaries like
Yasser Arafat. It positioned Shi'ism as the protector of the faith and the hope
of the future.<BR><BR>In having to defend against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the
1980s, and the resulting containment battle, Iran became ensnared in a range of
necessary but compromising relationships. Recall, if you will, that the
Iran-Contra affair revealed not only that the United States used Israel to send
weapons to Iran, but also that Iran accepted weapons from Israel. Iran did what
it had to in order to survive, but the complexity of its operations led to
serious compromises. By the late 1990s, Iran had lost any pretense of
revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world. It had been flanked by the Sunni
Wahhabi movement, al Qaeda.<BR><BR>The Iranians always saw al Qaeda as an
outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through Shiite and Iranian
eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al Qaeda to usurp the
position of primary challenger to the West. Under any circumstances, it did not
want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a challenge. First, it had to reduce
al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the Sunnis had taken the banner from
Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to reclaim its place. Third, it had to
do this without undermining its geopolitical interests.<BR><BR>Tehran spent the
time from 2003 through 2005 maximizing what it could from the Iraq situation. It
also quietly participated in the reduction of al Qaeda's network and global
reach. In doing so, it appeared to much of the Islamic world as clever and
capable, but not particularly principled. Tehran's clear willingness to
collaborate on some level with the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in
the war on al Qaeda made it appear as collaborationist as it had accused the
Kuwaitis or Saudis of being in the past. By the end of 2005, Iran had secured
its western frontier as well as it could, had achieved what influence it could
in Baghdad, had seen al Qaeda weakened. It was time for the next phase. It had
to reclaim its position as the leader of the Islamic revolutionary movement for
itself and for Shi'ism.<BR><BR>Thus, the selection of the new president was, in
retrospect, carefully engineered. After President Mohammed Khatami's term, all
moderates were excluded from the electoral process by decree, and the election
came down to a struggle between former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani --
an heir to Khomeini's tradition, but also an heir to the tactical pragmatism of
the 1980s and 1990s -- and Ahmadinejad, the clearest descendent of the Khomeini
revolution that there was in Iran, and someone who in many ways had avoided the
worst taints of compromise.<BR><BR>Ahmadinejad was set loose to reclaim Iran's
position in the Muslim world. Since Iran had collaborated with Israel during the
1980s, and since Iranian money in Lebanon had mingled with Israeli money, the
first thing he had to do was to reassert Iran's anti-Zionist credentials. He did
that by threatening Israel's existence and denying the Holocaust. Whether he
believed what he was saying is immaterial. Ahmadinejad used the Holocaust issue
to do two things: First, he established himself as intellectually both
anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, taking the far flank among Islamic leaders; and
second, he signaled a massive breach with Khatami's approach.<BR><BR>Khatami was
focused on splitting the Western world by dividing the Americans from the
Europeans. In carrying out this policy, he had to manipulate the Europeans. The
Europeans were always open to the claim that the Americans were being rigid and
were delighted to serve the role of sophisticated mediator. Khatami used the
Europeans' vanity brilliantly, sucking them into endless discussions and turning
the Iran situation into a problem the Europeans were having with the United
States.<BR><BR>But Tehran paid a price for this in the Muslim world. In drawing
close to the Europeans, the Iranians simply appeared to be up to their old game
of unprincipled realpolitik with people -- Europeans -- who were no better than
the Americans. The Europeans were simply Americans who were weaker. Ahmadinejad
could not carry out his strategy of flanking the Wahhabis and still continue the
minuet with Europe. So he ended Khatami's game with a bang, with a massive
diatribe on the Holocaust and by arguing that if there had been one, the
Europeans bore the blame. That froze Germany out of any further dealings with
Tehran, and even the French had to back off. Iran's stock in the Islamic world
started to rise.<BR><BR><B>The Nuclear Gambit</B><BR><BR>The second phase was
for Iran to very publicly resume -- or very publicly claim to be resuming --
development of a nuclear weapon. This signaled three things:<BR><BR>1. Iran's
policy of accommodation with the West was over.<BR>2. Iran intended to get a
nuclear weapon in order to become the only real challenge to Israel and, not
incidentally, a regional power that Sunni states would have to deal with.<BR>3.
Iran was prepared to take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared to take.
Al Qaeda was a piker.<BR><BR>The fundamental fact is that Ahmadinejad knows
that, except in the case of extreme luck, Iran will not be able to get nuclear
weapons. First, building a nuclear device is not the same thing as building a
nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon must be sufficiently small, robust and reliable
to deliver to a target. A nuclear device has to sit there and go boom. The key
technologies here are not the ones that build a device but the ones that turn a
device into a weapon -- and then there is the delivery system to worry about:
range, reliability, payload, accuracy. Iran has a way to go.<BR><BR>A lot of
countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The United States is
another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans into this, and there
are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb. However, there are only two
countries that can do something about it. The Israelis don't want to get the
grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid action because they are the most
vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon. The United States doesn't want
Israel to strike at Iran, as that would massively complicate the U.S. situation
in the region, but it doesn't want to carry out the strike itself either.
<BR><BR>This, by the way, is a good place to pause and explain to readers who
will write in wondering why the United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear
force but not an Iranian one. The answer is simple. Israel will probably not
blow up New York. That's why the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes
and does mind Iran having them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not
sharing time in preschool. End of digression.<BR><BR><B>Intra-Islamic
Diplomacy</B><BR><BR>If the Iranians are seen as getting too close to a weapon,
either the United States or Israel will take them out, and there is an outside
chance that the facilities could not be taken out with a high degree of
assurance unless nukes are used. In the past, our view was that the Iranians
would move carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United
States. That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their
traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That
means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United
States. It would burnish Iran's credentials as the true martyr and fighter of
Islam. <BR><BR>Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be reaching out to the Sunnis
on a number of levels. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a radical Shiite group in
Iraq with ties to Iran, visited Saudi Arabia recently. There are contacts
between radical Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon as well. The Iranians appear to be
engaged in an attempt to create the kind of coalition in the Muslim world that
al Qaeda failed to create. From Tehran's point of view, if they get a
deliverable nuclear device, that's great -- but if they are attacked by Israel
or the United States, that's not a bad outcome either. <BR><BR>In short, the
diplomacy that Iran practiced from the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war until
after the U.S. invasion of Iraq appears to be ended. Iran is making a play for
ownership of revolutionary Islamism on behalf of itself and the Shia. Thus,
Tehran will continue to make provocative moves, while hoping to avoid
counterstrikes. On the other hand, if there are counterstrikes, the Iranians
will probably be able to live with that as well.
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