From The Australian, by Greg Sheridan. foreign editor August 23, 2007:
... Make no mistake, the world is building to a crisis in Iran.
The technical detail is endlessly fascinating and the manoeuvres by all the players gothic in their complexity. But the basic story is simple enough. Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. It has two programs for this: a highly enriched uranium program and a heavy-water reactor that will produce plutonium.
...Iran is the leader of the Shia version of fundamentalist and extremist Islam. It sponsors terrorism promiscuously. Its most important terrorist client is Hezbollah, a Shia group that de facto rules southern Lebanon. It is also the most important foreign sponsor of Hamas, a Sunni terrorist organisation that rules the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad, which has been responsible for much Palestinian terrorism, is effectively a branch of the Iranian intelligence services.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Iran also sponsors Shia and Sunni elements of the insurgency in Iraq.
There is no doubt the US has given the deepest possible consideration to taking military action against Iran's nuclear plants. When I interviewed US Vice-President Dick Cheney earlier this year, he endorsed Republican senator John McCain's formulation that the only thing worse than a military confrontation with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran.
Yet some analysts consider the idea that Bush may strike Iran to be wildly unrealistic. Let's be quite clear. I am certainly not advocating a strike against Iran but we should all know that we are heading for an epoch-marking crisis. The US has deployed extensive naval resources into the Persian Gulf in a bid to coerce Iran into some co-operation and to reassure Iran's neighbours, especially the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, that the US will look after their security. At the same time it has strengthened its military bases in the Gulf states and provided moderate Arab governments with extensive military equipment. Washington is also considering declaring Iran's revolutionary guard a terrorist organisation.
The best-informed analysts in the world believe the Bush administration will try very hard to make UN-mandated sanctions against Iran as powerful as possible to deter Iran from pursuing nukes. However, these analysts also believe this will be unsuccessful and that, whatever the outside world does by way of sanctions and pressure, nationalism will trump economics and Iran will eventually get the weapons.
The Europeans have been their usual pathetic selves in all this but a sanctions regime of sorts is in place and it should get tougher. And Iran is vulnerable to sanctions, even though it has huge reserves of oil and gas. The revolution of the ayatollahs is worse at running a modern economy than even the old command economies of the defunct Soviet bloc were.
But it won't matter because Iran's leadership is motivated by a type of religious conviction that cannot be trumped by economics. Young people in Iran are reportedly alienated from their leadership, but they still want nukes. Virtually every section of the Iranian population, whether motivated by religion, nationalism, power considerations or whatever else, wants nukes. Indeed, one part of Ahmadinejad's problems with the religious leaders stems from their feeling that they could get nukes more quickly and with less trouble if he would just shut up.
On the positive side, the US is implicitly offering Iran full diplomatic relations, trade benefits and any other reasonable benefit it could want if it gives up the nuclear chase. But Iran is a classic demonstration of the limits of realist theory in foreign relations. It is genuinely motivated by ideology, not by a normal calculus of national interest. Washington has been offering Iran some version of this deal - diplomatic and trade normality in exchange for nuclear non-proliferation and regional stability - virtually since the ayatollahs came to power in 1979. It was once Madeleine Albright's chief goal in life when she was Bill Clinton's secretary of state.
The deeply flawed James Baker-Lee Hamilton report on Iraq contains some sentence along the lines of saying that Iran shares the US's interest in a stable Iraq. Which Iran are the two esteemed American statesmen talking about? It is an Iran of their imagination, it is certainly not the real, existing Iran.
Iran's leaders are delighted with today's geo-strategic situation. They would rather not have sanctions but they have shown full mastery of the techniques of suppressing their population and are not seriously inconvenienced by its troubles. Otherwise, for them life is fine. The Americans are in a world of pain in Iraq. Iran's ally Hezbollah is slowly trying to take control of the Lebanese Government, in alliance with a pro al-Qa'ida Syrian front group, Fatah al-Islam. One of their techniques is novel: to assassinate the existing Lebanese parliamentary majority one by one.
Meanwhile Iran's other proxy, Hamas, goes from strength to strength. The Iranians are leading the Shia reassertion in the Middle East at the same time as they are polarising the broader Arab population around the idea of resistance to the West. Thus, as things stand, Iran has no incentive to make a bargain, except the fear of a US military strike.
The world's best analysts believe that whatever Washington decides, Israel will act to meet an existential threat. And it views a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat. There is some thinking within the Australian Labor Party to the effect that Israel would have a right to pre-emptive action under international law because it legitimately faces a grave threat from a nuclear Iran.
An Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be less effective in delaying Iran's nuclear weapons than a US strike. The Israelis believe Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009. The International Atomic Energy Agency thinks it's three to eight years but is constantly revising this estimate down. Once Iran possesses nuclear weapons, its danger as a sponsor of Hezbollah rises exponentially. It can also paralyse Israel and render life there almost unbearable by moving periodically to nuclear alert, forcing Israel to do the same and effectively chasing out foreign investment and tourists and shutting down industry.
A strike on Iran would be an awesomely dangerous and fraught action to take. Allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons may be equally as dangerous. There are no good options.
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