Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.
Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80-million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid.
All the following statements about Iran are true. There are powerful Iranians who want to build a nuclear bomb. There are powerful ones who do not. There are people in Iran who would like Israel to disappear. There are people who would not. There are people- who would like Islamist rule. There are people who would not. There are people- who long for an idiot Western politician to declare war on them. There are people appalled at the prospect. The question for Western strategists is which of these people they want to help.
I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear US, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has ”no right” to nuclear defence?
None the less, this month’s reopening of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant and two others, though purportedly for peaceful uses, was a clear act of defiance by Iran’s new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Inspectors from the United Nations’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) remain unsure whether it implies a secret weapons programme, but the evidence for this is far stronger than, for instance, against Hussein. To have infuriated the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei takes some doing. As Hussein found, deviousness in nuclear matters is bound to arouse suspicion. Either way, the reopening yielded a strong diplomatic coalition of Europe, the US, Russia and China in pleading with Ahmadinejad to desist.
On January 16, Washington’s knee-jerk belligerence put this coalition under immediate strain. In two weeks, the IAEA must decide whether to report Iran to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. There seems little point in doing this if China and Russia vetoes it or if there is not plan B if such pressure fails to halt enrichment.
I cannot see how all this confrontation will stop Iran doing whatever it likes with its nuclear enrichment. The bombing of carefully dispersed and buried sites might delay deployment. But given the inaccuracy of US bombers, the death and destruction caused to Iran’s cities would be a gift to anti-Western extremists and have every world terrorist reporting for duty. Nor would the ”coward’s war” of economic sanctions be any more effective.
By all accounts, Ahmadinejad is not secure. He is subject to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His foe, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, retains some power. Tehran is not a Saddamist dictatorship or a Taliban autocracy. It is a shambolic oligarchy with bureaucrats and technocrats jostling for power with clerics. Despite a quarter century of effort, the latter have not created a truly fundamentalist Islamic state. Iran is a classic candidate for the politics of subtle engagement.
This means strengthening every argument in the hands of those Iranians who do not want nuclear weapons, who crave a secular state and good relations with the West. No such argument embraces name-calling, sabre-rattling, sanctions or bombs.
Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding- to be ”hugged close”, it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy. — Â