[extropy-chat] FW: Iran Behavior: Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report

Wed Jan 18 02:32:26 UTC 2006

 Consider:

  _____  

From: Strategic Forecasting, Inc. [mailto:noreply at stratfor.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 6:08 PM
To: HerbM at learnquick.com
Subject: Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report

 Strategic Forecasting
<http://www.stratfor.com/images/messages/logo_left.jpg?mopen=060117-GIR-GIR>

Stratfor.com <http://www.stratfor.com> Services
<http://www.stratfor.com/services/> Subscriptions
<http://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/> Reports
<http://www.stratfor.com/reports/> Partners
<http://www.stratfor.com/partners/> Press Room
<http://www.stratfor.com/press-room/> Contact Us
<http://www.stratfor.com/contact/> 
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
01.17.2006

<https://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/premium-guest-pass.php?ref=060117%20
-%20GIR%20-%20GIR&camp=Guest%20Passformat=HTML>  

Analyses <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/more.php>  Country
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/coprofiles.php?showCountry=1&count
ryId=1&cName=Afghanistan&regionId=1> Profiles - Archive Forecasts
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/forecast.php>  Geopolitical
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/geopoldairy.php> Diary Global
Market  <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/globalbrief.php> Brief -
Archive Hotspots
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/hotspots.php?showHotSpots=1> -
Archive Intelligence
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/intelguide.php> Guidance Net
Assessment <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/netassess.php>
Situation  <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/showsitreps.php>
Reports Special  <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/splreports.php>
Reports Strategic Markets
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/smarkets.php> - Archive Stratfor
Weekly <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/weekly.php>  Terrorism
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/terrorbrief.php> Brief Terrorism
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/terrorintelreport.php>
Intelligence Report Travel Security
<http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/travelalerts/> - Archive US - IRAQ
War  <http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/iraqcommap.php> Coverage 

Iran's Redefined Strategy

By George Friedman

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.

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.

There are four possibilities:

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane and wants to be
attacked because of a bad childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this is
part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons -- and a deterrent to
Israel -- before the Israelis attack.
4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli -- or for
that matter, American -- air strike.

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.

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.

The Three-Player Game

So what is happening? 

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.

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.

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.

This was not what the Iranians had hoped for. 

Reclaiming the Banner

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Nuclear Gambit

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:

1. Iran's policy of accommodation with the West was over.
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.
3. Iran was prepared to take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared
to take. Al Qaeda was a piker.

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.

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. 

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.

Intra-Islamic Diplomacy

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. 

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. 

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. 

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis at stratfor.com.

Get unrestricted access to Stratfor Premium with a FREE 7-day Trial today.

Have intelligence delivered straight to your inbox every day and get 24/7
access to the "Shadow CIA" with Stratfor Premium - yours FREE for an entire
week!

As the most comprehensive package of intelligence features available online,
Stratfor Premium brings you decision-oriented intelligence so that you can
find relevant answers to your toughest questions with: 

*	In-depth analysis on relevant political, economic, military, and
security developments 

*	Alerts drilling into the significance and direction of
course-altering events. 

*	Exclusive Special Reports and Forecasts, plus much more! 

Sign
<http://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/premium-guest-pass.php?ref=060117%20-
%20GIR%20-%20GIR&camp=Product%20Mailing&format=HTML> up for your Guest Pass
today! Be among the first to receive the advance warning that helps you stay
prepared, identify opportunities, and manage risk. 

For an entire week, get unrestricted access to the behind-the-scenes
intelligence that will add impact to your day-to-day decisions and your
long-term prospects. With new reduced subscription rates - now just $39.95 a
month - there's never been a better time to experience the Stratfor
advantage first-hand.

Stratfor is ready to keep you informed with intelligence at your fingertips
every day - try it now with FREE 7-day access. Click
<http://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/premium-guest-pass.php?ref=060117%20-
%20GIR%20-%20GIR&camp=Product%20Mailing&format=HTML> here to find out more
now!

Ready to Subscribe? Click
<http://www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/premium-guest-pass.php?ref=060117%20-
%20GIR%20-%20GIR&camp=Product%20Mailing&format=HTML> here to sign up now. 

Distribution and Reprints

This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to Strategic
Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com. For media requests, partnership
opportunities, or commercial distribution or republication, please contact
pr at stratfor.com.

Do you have a friend or acquaintance that would benefit from the consistent
actionable intelligence of the FREE STRATFOR Weekly Geopolitical
Intelligence Report? 

Send them to
www.stratfor.com/subscriptions/free-weekly-intelligence-reports.php to sign
up and begin receiving the Stratfor Weekly every Tuesday for FREE!

Newsletter Subscription

The STRATFOR Weekly is e-mailed to you on an opt-in basis with STRATFOR. If
you no longer wish to receive regular e-mails from STRATFOR, please send a
message to service at stratfor.com
<mailto:service at stratfor.com?subject='UNSUBSCRIBE - Free GIR'> with the
subject line: UNSUBSCRIBE - Free GIR. For more information on STRATFOR's
services, please visit www.stratfor.com or e-mail info at stratfor.com today!

C Copyright 2006 Strategic  <http://www.stratfor.com/> Forecasting Inc. All
rights reserved. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060117/f6119721/attachment.html>