A Geo-Strategic Brief

"Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century -- al Qaeda and Iran." President Bush, April 10th, 2008

In the run-up to the Iraq war, U.S. officials repeatedly included 'Iraq' and 'al-Qaeda' in the same sentence. Polls show that 62% of Americans were led to believe there was a connection between the two, and by extension linked Saddam to 9/11. All of which later proved completely false, but conveniently gave President Bush an additional four years in office. Unlike the ludicrous conflation of Persian Shi'a Iran and al-Qaeda, at least linking Saddam and al-Qaeda had a modicum of plausibility. Saddam and the minority that ruled Iraq were Sunni Arabs, the same as al-Qaeda who are a violent gang of extreme Sunni-Salafi Arabs. Iran, a nation state with a 2500 year history is not only ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically distinct from the non-state, 20 year old, extremist al-Qaeda,  in fact al-Qaeda despise the "Shi'a Persian heretics" even more than they hate the moderate Arab governments for being insufficiently Salafi. The garden variety American infidels come a distant third in al-Qaeda's league of Les Misérables.

One look at the map should give anyone pause.  Bahrain, the island nation in the Persian Gulf and the home base of US Navy’s fifth fleet is too small to see on a map this size. Conversely, Iran’s coastline is only too visible. It is difficult to imagine how a client (Iran) can refuse a request from its protector (Russia) for naval basing rights. There is no shortage of Iranian coastline to base as many fleets as the Russian Navy deems necessary to achieve total command of the area.  Checkmate will no longer suffice as a metaphor now that 20% of world oil supply goes through those “warm waters”. We may never know how history will record losing an overwhelmingly pro-western Iran to Russia without so much as a shot being fired, because the event may well end history – a point that President Bush conceded during his remarks about WW III immediately after Vladimir Putin’s landmark visit to Tehran.

There are three camps with two distinct strategies, plus an amalgam of strategies for dealing with the enigma that is Iran. Free of self-deluding euphemisms, a frank description of the hawks', the doves' and the US government's strategies are as follows:

The hawks demand Iran's unconditional surrender. They argue for economic strangulation, and diplomatic humiliation of Iran. A subset of  this group would add to the mix the threat of bombing Iran back to the stone age. A sub-subset advocates using the military option yesterday. The hawks' central contention is that we are at war already. Whether this contention is born out of the the world view of 'clashing civilizations', 'war on terror', 'war on Islamic extremism' or a relatively mundane real-political need to confront and retard the emergence of a regional power,  the hawks believe the war started decades ago and they just want to wake  us up to the raging battles all around  us.  The relentless disparagement of Iran in the media serves this group's stratagem by preparing the public opinion for the eventual collision. A collision which itself  is made inevitable partly by the tactic of disparaging Iran. Incredibly, the media's studied animosity is directed at a country in the Middle East that has held 28 elections in the last 30 years, where women hold high office, where Islam's junction with modernity  and burgeoning young population is causing  consternation within religious orthodoxy and religious/political reform is being debated vigorously. In short, one could not manufacture a better candidate to be a keystone U.S. ally  than Iran, given that county's demographic,  economic and political/cultural/religious weight in the region.

The doves advise dialogue without pre-conditions to align Iranian and Western self-interests, arguing that all other issues will dissolve in the shadow of  larger US-Iran's shared regional goals. This group does not buy into the notion that "the only thing worse than war with Iran is Iran with a bomb". They can think of something worse still. E.g.  the consequent blow-back from yet another war of choice could be a global insurgency against Western interests.  "Iran with the bomb", they believe can be tolerated through traditional use-it-and-be-vaporized deterrence doctrine. Or they hope that a threat-free and carrot-rich atmosphere will be more conducive to persuading Iran to horse-trade away its bomb-making capacity. There is a problem, however. The only reason  Iran would be willing to engage in dialogue would be to receive U.S.  endorsement of its 'regional power' status. Unless the doves are willing to publicly renounce previously stated red lines regarding  nuclear technology and past designations of  'terrorist sponsor', Iran would  not gain from  any dialogue. Unconditional dialogue cannot be seen as a moral high ground for the US to the extent that it will relegate human rights, workers rights and  political repression to the back burner.

The third camp is the US government whose official position is to  espouse a combination of both  hawkish and dovish strategies. Playing hardball while advertising peace has the appearance of a nuanced solution designed to be more effective than either pure hard-power or pure soft-power approaches. Unfortunately,  from Iran's perspective, this mixture of hard and soft, surely is not seen as "smart" -- it  is a combination that dulls the sharp edge of coercion, and simultaneously taints any US offer of compromise as insincere. The fact that this strategy gets the support of most is not because it is the most effective approach, but rather it is because it offends the fewest domestic constituents. Leaving the military option on the table keeps the prospects of war alive and, for now, that appeases the hawks. Going through the motions of multilateral endeavors at the UN with like-minded European powers leaves a faint hope for avoiding collision through dilution of resolve which pacifies the doves.  In practice, this does not amount to a solution to the problem at hand, rather it is a means of keeping the hawks and the doves at bay. Foreign policy that caters to opinion polls is no more likely to advance the national interest than foreign policy formulated according to a rigid ideology or foreign policy crafted around convictions of individual politicians  riding an ephemeral wave of popularity.

With the hindsight of the Bush-Saddam war fiasco, and the Chamberlain-Hitler peace blunder, it is important that particularly those strategies that seem facile should be appraised especially rigorously against a set of goals, and potential unintended consequences.

Such an appraisal would be a vapid exercise if Iran remains an enigma to the appraiser. Unfortunately, not only is Iran a mystery to most ordinary people, judging from recent presidential debates and the way presidential candidates lump Iran, Al-Qaida, Hezbulah, Hamas, etc. into a single entity dims any hope of a more clear-eyed future discourse. If the media will not take Mr. Giuliani to task on his conflating Persians vs Arabs, Sunnis vs Shiites, state vs non-state, 1400 year old established theology vs 20 year old fringe extremist phenomena,  then only sheer luck is going to prevent a looming  amateurish misadventure. Neither democracy, nor foreign-policy elites can save us from a  war-bird's view that 'they all look the same', as luxuriantly ignorant as that view may be.