As Iran's scientists busily enrich uranium, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to project defiance against an America that is hopelessly entangled in Iraq and hemorrhaging international prestige. These would seem to be good times for Ahmadinejad and his fellow hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary government: America has crushed their great Iraqi Baathist rival, losing much of its international credibility and regional influence in the process while contributing to a rise in oil prices that only increases Iran's geostrategic leverage, rich as it is in crude. This would appear to be Iran's historical moment, its opportunity to be recognized as the Middle East's dominant regional power. And yet the hardliners' nuclear gambit is as much about weakness as it is about strength.
Like North Korea and other "rogue states," Iran's government is seeking a guarantee against getting regime-changed, a fear made particularly acute by the swift destruction of Saddam Hussein's murderous rule directly next door. A fissile insurance policy wouldn't seem as urgent if not for the fact that the Iranian regime is facing a crisis of legitimacy at home. Iranians are overwhelmingly young, eager for true democracy and utterly sick of living under Islamic rule. As Edward Luttwak - senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies points out in a recent issue of Prospect, Iran is also ethnically divided:
"Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards."
The regime is desperate for prestige to bolster its support. Developing nuclear weapons, scaring and defying the West and attempting to assert regional hegemony are not simply a matter of ideology but of survival.
Luttwak argues gruffly that Iran, and the entire Middle East for that matter, can safely be ignored. But this is not quite right. True, the chances of Iran developing ICBM's sophisticated or numerous enough to get past America's counterforce capabilities are slim, as are the chances that Iran would become a "suicide state," inviting its total destruction by equipping terrorists with a nuclear weapon (anyway, probably the only groups insane enough to carry out a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States would be Sunni jihadists such as al Qaeda, who consider Iran their sworn apostate enemy). But should Iran get the bomb and thereby succeed in becoming the region's dominant power, America and the West would face a hostile hegemon in a region critical to the world's energy supply. Alternatively, Iran's efforts may trigger an arms race, provoking Egypt and Saudi Arabia to develop their own nuclear weapons and making one of the world's most unstable regions a nuclear flash point that could result in the annihilation of millions, as well as the destruction of all those oil wells. Unless America suddenly and miraculously converts to a comprehensive alternative energy policy, none of this is strategically irrelevant.
And yet our greatest allies in addressing this quandary don't sit on the Security Council. After decades of fundamentalist oppression, the Iranian people have developed a broad and sophisticated democratic movement that calls for "reform" of their government. Their goal should be our goal. After all, the problem is not Iran with a bomb; the problem is this Iran with a bomb. Striking militarily, as Vice President Dick Cheney and his cronies seem so eager to do, might set back Iran's nuclear program temporarily but would bolster the current regime, giving it greater pretext to crack down on the country's democratic dissidents and redouble its efforts to go nuclear. As the saying goes, you can't bomb knowledge. Aerial raids on Iranian installations would only slow Iran's progress while doing even further harm to America's credibility and legitimacy. Attempting to undermine the mullahs militarily, by supporting armed rebel groups is also short-sighted. These groups have no broad-based support in Iran and a military overthrow of the Islamic Revolutionary government could well lead to chaos and violent struggles for power. We have already seen the disaster wrought by American-sponsored regime change. Better not to repeat the mistake.
Instead, America should isolate Iran's government while embracing its people. Diplomatic and economic pressure have weakened Ahmadinejad's hardliner position, prompting a vicious crackdown on dissent. Ahmadinejad will be able to maintain power only by fraud and intimidation. There is little America can do about this on the ground. As Laura Secor demonstrated in a recent issue of The New Republic, even America's announcement of cash support for Iranian democracy groups has endangered and undermined those very dissidents. But as Secor and others have argued, America can and should greatly expand the number of student visas available to Iranian scholars, journalists and activists so as to build mutual trust and give Iran's democracy movement the in-depth knowledge of western liberal democracy it so desperately seeks.
Unfortunately, in the current climate of suspicion and fear, America is doing the opposite. Visiting Iranian students have been handcuffed, shackled and thrown in jail. Hossein, an Iranian studying here, told me that he had to wait months to have his visa renewed and almost missed the start of the school year when he returned to Iran last summer to visit his family. He says he knows many other Iranian students who never go back to Iran, opting instead to wait for a green card for fear that they will be denied re-entry to the United States. Dr. Hassan Rezzaei, an Islamic law scholar and human rights advocate, came here after being awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship on Islamic Studies at the Library of Congress but told me he was denied re-entry by the State Department after visiting Iran for an academic conference and had to petition for over a year to have his visa reinstated. This is hardly the way to build solidarity or create progress. On Iran, Bush and Cheney seem to have placed their faith in missile strikes and fomenting revolution. But Iran's democracy movement seeks something quite different. "We've had quite enough of revolution," Hossein told me. "We want reform." We would do well to listen to him.