- It's like old times in the Persian Gulf. As of this week,
a second aircraft carrier battle task force is being sent in -- not
long after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen highlighted
planning for "potential military courses of action" against
Iran; just as the Bush administration's catechism of charges against
the Iranians in Iraq reaches something like a fever pitch; at the
moment when rumors of, leaks about, and denials of Pentagon back-to-the-drawing-board
planning for new ways to attack Iran are zipping around ("Targets
would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to
the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which
directs operations in Iraq."); and only days before the U.S. military
in Iraq is supposed to conduct its latest media dog-and-pony show
on Iranian support for Iraqi Shi'ite militias (".including date
stamps on newly found weapons caches showing that recently made Iranian
weapons are flowing into Iraq at a steadily increasing rate.").
On the dispatching of that second aircraft carrier, Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates offered the following comment: "I don't
see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder."
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- And, when you really think about it, it is indeed a "reminder"
of sorts. After all, the name of that second carrier has a certain
resonance. It's the USS Abraham Lincoln, the very carrier on which,
on May 1st exactly five years ago, President George W. Bush landed
in that S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet, in what TV people
call "magic hour light", for his Top-Gun strut to a podium.
There, against a White House-produced banner emblazoned with the
phrase "Mission Accomplished," he declared that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended."
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- Now, more than five years after Baghdad fell, with Saddam
Hussein long executed, Osama bin Laden alive and kicking, and American
soldiers fighting and dying in the vast Shi'ite slum suburb of Sadr
City in Baghdad, the dangerous administration game of chicken with
Iran in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere once again intensifies. It's
a dangerous moment. When you ratchet up the charges and send in the
carriers, anything is possible.
-
- We regularly read about all of this, of course, but almost
never as seen through anything but American administration or journalistic
eyes (and sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart). The author
of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues, Pepe Escobar, a continent-hopping
super-journalist for the always fascinating Asia Times and now The
Real News as well, has done a striking job of covering the Iraq War,
the various oil wars and pipeline struggles of the Middle East and
Central Asia, and, these last years, has regularly visited Iran.
Today, in his first appearance at Tomdispatch, he offers something
rare indeed, an assessment of Iran "under the gun" -- without
the American filter in place. Tom
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- The Iranian Chessboard Five Ways to Think about Iran
under the Gun By Pepe Escobar
-
- More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the
New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes
against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has
proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same
techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the
period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.
-
- The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The
ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons
are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking
U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf -- Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda,
a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle
to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might
put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
-
- Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign:
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent
on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning
for "potential military courses of action" when it comes
to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus,
Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence"
in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations"
of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even
admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest
leadership [of Iran] is involved."
-
- But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out
of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant.
And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier
battle group into the Persian Gulf.
-
- But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges
and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from
Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and
to better decode the Iranian chessboard.
-
- 1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five
percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy
percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological
-- and revolutionary -- religion, fueled by a passionate mixture
of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may instill fear
in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a certain empathy
for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea towards the vacuous
material world.
-
- For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has, in
fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms -- a kind of Fourth World of its
own, always cursed by political exclusion and implacable economic
marginalization, always carrying an immensely dramatic view of history
with it.
-
- It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the
contradiction that the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling,
however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds of Iran's religious
leaders, the very concept of the nation-state is regarded with deep
suspicion, because it detracts from the umma, the global Muslim community.
The nation-state, as they see it, is but a way station on the road
to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond
the present stage of history, however, they also recognize the necessity
of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary --
and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs,
the concept of nation-state -- a heritage, in any case, of the West
-- will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to
the will of Prophet Muhammad.
-
- In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful
message. I briefly became a mashti -- a pilgrim visiting a privileged
Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad,
four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner
lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans occupying
every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a tremendous
emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple infidel.
-
- 2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city
of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded,
in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned,
their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to the original
purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism -- a religion invariably
critical of the established social and political order.
-
- Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply
live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens
to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish,
Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle
East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian
subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian
Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates
of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian
crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly
equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out
Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock
'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).
-
- Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North
Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range
of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like
diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that
what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional
power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity
of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated
counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely
surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central
Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its
Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with
ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing
drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults
on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.
-
- The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its
demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look
East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American
energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great
skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in
Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China,
India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To
the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil"
air link already exists -- a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight
via Iran Air.
-
- Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking.
When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's
ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President
Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything
he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."
-
- Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing
among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans -- all
placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial
ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player,
Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state
in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road -- the backbone of a new Asian
Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence
it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's
the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists,
or all of the above, are throwing such a collective -- and threatening
-- fit.
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- 3. What is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad
up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed
Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian
diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's
nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear
power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran -- unlike
the US -- has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter
millennium.
-
- Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a
mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad
believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite
messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since
the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and
the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions
and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological
machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new
Holocaust.
-
- Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally
irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants
to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated
ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech
at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really
said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime
occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was
actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah
Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime
so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable
one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.
-
- In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq
War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession,
or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa -- a religious injunction
-- under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the
Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis
what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes
and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.
-
- Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's
his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the
Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam
Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle"
Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents
have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in
Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite
division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the
hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the
army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime
and their faction of it.
-
- Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's
visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme
Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the
explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment
on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development
in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.
-
- Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani,
a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself
let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But
Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public.
Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence,
he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend,
Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.
-
- 4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before
the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the
ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that
Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist
rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing
to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign
motto was: "We can.")
-
- But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled
all key levers of power -- the Supreme National Security Council,
the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations
that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the
parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a
terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media --
they assumed they would also control the self-described "street
cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.
-
- For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18
years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control
of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary,
the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.
-
- Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda.
He purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded
diplomats; encouraged the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture
and Islamic Guidance to crackdown on all forms of "nefarious"
Western influences, from entertainment industry products to colorful
made-in-India scarves for women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary
friends from the Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as
faithful as administratively incompetent -- especially in terms of economic
policy. Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme
Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly
unpopular ruling elite.
-
- Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence
has not translated into street barricades and it probably will not;
nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would an attack on
Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single
political faction supports the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.
-
- There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may
be wildly unpopular -- because of so much enforced austerity in an
energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility -- but
for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote provinces,
life is still bearable. In the large urban centers -- Tehran, Isfahan,
Shiraz, and Tabriz -- most would be in favor of a move toward a more
market-oriented economy combined with a progressive liberalization
of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other way). No
velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.
-
- At least four main factions are at play in the intricate
Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics -- and two
others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though thoroughly
marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.
-
- The extreme right, very religiously conservative but
economically socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned
with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of
this faction.
-
- The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of
provincial religious figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic
than the extreme right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But
there is a crucial internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads
-- the Islamic foundations, active in all economic sectors -- badly
want a reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure
of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains
is working against the national interest.
-
- Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as
$600 billion in Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian
Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the brightest continue to flee
the country. But the Islamic foundations also know that this state
of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's power.
-
- The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps,
a key component of government with vast economic interests, transits
between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what
they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni
Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program.
In fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran
must enter the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the
"American Satan," but to irreversibly change the balance of power
in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
-
- The current reformists/progressives of the left were
originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later,
after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some
sort of religious democracy, their new icon became former President
Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here, after
all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and
the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher
Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility
of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring"
didn't last long -- and is now long gone.
-
- The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of
moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term President, current
chairman of the Expediency Council and a key member of the Council
of Experts -- 86 clerics, no women, the Holy Grail of the system,
and the only institution in the Islamic Republic capable of removing
the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported by the intelligentsia
and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The Shark," Rafsanjani
is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains privileged ties to key Washington
players and has proven to be the ultimate survivor -- moving like a skilled
juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as power in the country shifted.
-
- Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of
the Supreme Leader. As the regime's de facto number two, his quest
is not only to "save" the Islamic Revolution, but also
to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile the country with
the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest
is already brewing among the young in Iran's major cities, who dream
of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.
-
- If the Bush administration had any real desire to let
its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente
cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.
-
- 5. Heading down the New Silk Road
-
- Reformist friends in Tehran keep telling me the country
is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba
-- and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip"
or any of the other color-coded Western-style movements that Washington
might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.
-
- Under such conditions, what if there were an American
air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his
own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the
retaliation would be doubly powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere
in the world.
-
- From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq
to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse,
do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests
-- and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere.
Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone.
-
- The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to
doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted
by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide
at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven
by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.
-
- Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and,
to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security Grid
is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry
in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence
of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This year Iran
finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for
the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the
"peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S. allies
are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their
economic, political, cultural, and -- crucially -- geostrategic connections
with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an
attack against Asia.
-
- What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than
ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington (not to
mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb.
Perhaps the Mahdi himself -- in his occult wisdom -- is betting on
a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.
-
- Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent
for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign
correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris,
Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized
in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to
Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: a
snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, both published by Nimble Books in
2007.
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- Copyright 2008 Pepe Escobar
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