The Iranians are resuming uranium enrichment, the IAEA has agreed to refer Iran to the UN security council and talks aimed at resolving the problem keep breaking down. Another Iran crisis. The west usually gets Iran crises wrong. We got it wrong in 1953 when we—the US and Britain—removed a democratically elected prime minister, Muhammad Mosaddeq, rubbing out any chance of genuinely democratic politics in Iran for a generation. And we got it wrong a number of times when, after 1979, fear of revolutionary Iran expanding its influence in the region led us to indirectly help in the creation of two of our biggest foreign policy headaches of the last half century—Saddam Hussein in Iraq and al Qaeda during the civil war in Afghanistan.
In both these places we tried to constrain Iranian influence: eventually in both cases we had to accept it and work with it. In Afghanistan we had to invade and support the Iran-backed Northern Alliance to defeat the Taleban, and in Iraq now our position is only tenable as long as the Iran-backed Shias co-operate. Is there a message in this for the nuclear crisis? Might it not be better to accept the inevitable earlier rather than later? Many of our past errors in handling Iran were made for reasons that seemed compelling at the time. But we can see with hindsight that they were nonetheless errors, and in dealing with the current crisis, we should try to learn from them.
It is quite rational for the Iranians to want their own nuclear deterrent. Look at Iran’s neighbours—Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan to name but four; unstable to lesser or greater degrees, several of them containing groups who hate Shia Muslims as much as they hate the US. Iran is the only country in the world to have had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the last 30 years (by Saddam). On the other hand, Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and we should expect it to meet its treaty obligations. Israeli concern at the prospect of a nuclear Iran is understandable. From a distance, we can take President Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel and the Holocaust as empty rhetoric. Up close, the Israelis have to take them more seriously.
So where does this leave the west? Some commentators have suggested that Iran is in a pre-revolutionary situation, and that all that is necessary to tip things over the edge is a nudge from air strikes or economic sanctions, after which the Iranian people will rise up and depose the mullahs. But this is rather like proposing to shake up a kaleidoscope in the hope of getting a Titian. For one thing, a revolution is a great educator—for the people that live through it—about the dangers of revolutions. Iranians don’t want to go through 1979 again. One reason the liberal President Khatami, who held power from 1997-2005, failed to follow through on his promises for reform was that he had a well-founded dislike of political violence, and would not push his disputes with the hardline leadership too far. It is far from certain that another revolution in Iran would produce anything better than the current regime. Others have suggested that the west could encourage regional tensions within Iran and destroy the regime that way. And thereby create another Yugoslavia, or another Iraq? This is hardly a recipe for stability.
Moreover, both air strikes and sanctions are very blunt instruments. Because nuclear development activities are easily dispersed to a multitude of separate, secret, protected sites, air strikes could not halt a nuclear weapons programme. They would be a mere gesture, pointless unless we were prepared to subsequently escalate to a degree that would be politically impossible after Iraq. As for sanctions, from an Iranian perspective—meaning the people rather than their government—imposing sanctions would look like bullying. The Iranians have a deep cultural dislike of arrogance and bullying, which derives from the long history of Shiism as the faith of a persecuted minority within Islam. There are perhaps no people in the world less likely to be persuaded out of what they perceive to be a just cause—ordinary Iranians strongly believe they are entitled to peaceful nuclear power—by threats and coercion. And rather like Fidel Castro blaming Cuba’s economic decline on the US embargo, imposing sanctions on Iran could provide President Ahmadinejad with a nice alibi for failing to deliver on the big economic promises he made during last year’s election campaign for redistribution of wealth and improvement in living standards for the poor. For Ahmadinejad and the other Iranian leaders, the nuclear confrontation looks like heads you lose, tails we win.
But Iran is a complex place, and demands more care and subtlety than we have sometimes given it. It is true that western observers overestimated the liberal, reformist movement in Iran in the Khatami period, and thus were surprised by Ahmadinejad’s election victory last year. But we are in danger of getting Ahmadinejad wrong too. He is no Stalin, as Niall Ferguson suggested in the Sunday Telegraph last summer. Everyday government in Iran has been in confusion since his election. Ahmadinejad’s relationships with the other personalities in the Iranian leadership are troubled, and in his first six months in power, the Iranian parliament repeatedly rejected his nominations for oil minister and other cabinet members. This is not a situation Stalin would have tolerated for a moment.
Meanwhile, the electoral arithmetic suggests that Ahmadinejad’s support may be less strong than it seems. He owes part of his electoral success to a boycott of the elections by many reformist voters. Ahmadinejad won last year with the support of less than 40 per cent of eligible voters, even after suspected vote-rigging and stuffed ballots. Of the votes he won, by a clever campaign that appealed particularly to the poor and unemployed, many were given to him because he was not a mullah. The reformists have not performed well. But they still represent the basic attitudes of many Iranians, especially the young.
So it may be time for some imagination and risk-taking on the west’s part. The EU has failed to persuade the Iranians to do the right thing, so now is the time for the US to attempt it directly, and allow the Iranians to talk to the organ-grinder rather than the monkey. Given the level of anti-Iranian feeling in the US over many years, such a move would be politically risky, but if the continuing talks with North Korea can be justified, then so can a similar effort with Iran. The US should offer direct talks to resolve the problem, and the resumption of full US/Iran diplomatic relations, not as a bonbon for good behaviour, but in a mature way, recognising the true purpose of diplomacy: authoritative, direct communication in difficult circumstances. American diplomats should offer resolution of outstanding debt problems and other disputes, in order to show the Iranian people that they are doing everything possible to resolve the problem with the hardline regime.
Unlike other peoples in the middle east, ordinary Iranians tend to be pro-US and pro-Europe. Mosque attendance levels are low, reflecting widespread disillusionment with theocratic rule, especially among the young. This also sets many Iranians apart from young Muslims elsewhere, for whom Islamic fundamentalism can look like the only viable future. So a resumption of normal relations with the US could well prove popular with ordinary Iranians.
The US government could attempt to negotiate initially on the basis of allowing the Iranians an autonomous, peaceful nuclear programme, subject to UN monitoring at whatever level necessary to ensure nuclear weapons cannot be developed. The Iranians and Russians appear to have made some progress in this direction already. A serious attempt by the US at engagement and negotiation would have the effect of calling the Iranian government’s bluff, and give us a chance of detaching them from the support of the Iranian people. More widely, with seemingly ever-growing tension between the west and Islam, it could only do good for the US to be seen to be talking to a major Islamic country to resolve a problem, rather than threatening or bombing it.
Iran is central to a vital region of the world, and whatever happens in that region over the next 20 years, Iran is going to play a major role in it. Whatever we do about their nuclear programme now, it makes sense to avoid action that would ensure the enmity of the Iranian people over that period. And the chances of a friendly government eventually emerging there are much higher if we avoid attempting to bully them with little prospect of success now. Let’s not make any more mistakes.
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