Stratfor on Iran

Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report – January 17,
2006


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@stratfor.com.

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