Politics
The nuclear fat is in the fire
Published 14 February 2005
Iran - Iran is not some ill-sorted colonial confection like Iraq with 80 years on the clock. This proud, ancient nation would resist US invasion at all levels
The dispute over the Iranian government's nuclear programme is only the latest quarrel in a half-century of animosity between Iran and the United States. What makes this dispute immeasurably more dangerous than the CIA's Operation Ajax in 1953, or the anti-American riots of 1963, or the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, or the shooting down of IranAir Flight 655 in 1988, is the new world order in which it is being fought.
In a post-colonial and post-cold war world, neither Russia nor Britain, the old historical powers in the region, nor even the institutions of international diplomacy, have much power to persuade, threaten or restrain. Each country, Iran and the US, has a deep-seated resentment of the other, which is hard to express in traditional diplomacy, or to contain. The taste they share for Manichaean rhetoric - "Great Satan!", "axis of evil!" - makes the quarrel an agony to witness.
At the heart of the threat to peace is the Iranian hankering for security. Though never colonised by the European powers, Iran was for much of the 19th and 20th centuries a battleground of Russian and British rivalry. The naive Iranian faith in the US as its champion against these old-world bullies evaporated in 1953, when the CIA helped overturn the nationalist government of Muhammed Mossadeq to protect British interests and restore the young shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In Iran, Mossadeq is regarded with veneration, not least because he wasn't a clergyman. The shah went on to forge close relationships with both Democrat and Republican US presidents, dictate terms to the Ba'athist regime in Iraq and, for a while, make Iran both rich and influential.
Yet the shah, no less than his successors, dreamed of nuclear weapons and the power and authority that go with them. It was he who, in 1974, ordered two nuclear reactors to be built in Bushehr, a sweltering old port on the Gulf coast. In those days, before the nuclear accidents of Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the case for peaceful nuclear investment sounded less ludicrous than in the mouth of Iran's present nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani.
The revolution of 1979 was a failure in its capital aims of establishing a Shia paradise on earth and providing much material improvement in the lives of ordinary Iranians. Where it succeeded, beginning with the hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, was to turn the United States from an ally into an implacable foe.
The constitution of the new Islamic Republic of Iran was a hybrid, part clerical dictatorship and part parliamentary dem-ocracy of early 20th-century character. With the death of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, and his replacement by Ayatollah Khameini, any pretence of national unity vanished. The result, politically and in the economy, has been 25 years of stagnation, in which the reformers cannot reform and the anti-democratic right cannot stage a coup d'etat.
The right has its hands on all the levers of power, violence and wealth in Iran, including parliament, the armed services, the Revolutionary Guards and the militia or home guard (known as the the Basij), state enterprises such as the Bonyad-e-Mostazafan va Janbazan (the Foundation for Dispossessed and Disabled Veterans) and the bazaar. In the past decade, the reformers have had the backing of the masses.
The Iranian economy consists of a valuable oil industry badly in need of capital, torpid nationalised industries short of equipment and spares, an agricultural sector in difficulties and the bazaar. Prosperous industries, such as the carpet trade, have been ruined by bad management, possibly for all time.
Official figures put unemployment at 15 per cent of the workforce, but in reality about one person in four in Iran works anything remotely like a full day. Many, perhaps most, young men want to leave the country.
Eighteen months after the revolution, Saddam Hussein invaded southern Iran, and there followed a bloody war of attrition lasting nearly eight years. Since the end of that war in 1988, the hardliners in the clergy and armed forces have indulged their taste for theatrical foreign-policy gestures - such as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 - and meddling in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has responded with a policy of economic and diplomatic sanctions.
In 1997, a new era seemed to beckon when a quietly spoken cleric named Hojatoleslam Mohammad Khatami won the presidency of the republic on a platform of economic and political reform. In 2001, he was re-elected for a second and final term, again with about 20 million votes.
Khatami was successful in mending fences with some Arab states and the European Union. Yet the reform movement, known as the Second Khordad (after the Persian calendar date on which Khatami was first elected), was constantly frustrated by hardliners in the judiciary, the intelligence ministry and the armed forces. Last February, the reformists lost their majority in parliament when the clerical leadership barred as many as 2,500 candidates from taking part in elections.
On 6 December, Khatami addressed students at Tehran University. In a speech of painful candour, he confessed that, in the end, he dared not take on the forces of reaction, and the elections had to go ahead without the banned candidates. "My aim had never been to change the system" of clerical rule, he said. To a chorus of boos and catcalls, he further said: "This is the first time in the recent history of this nation that you have been able to stand before a representative of government and shout what you like." While, as President George W Bush said in his State of the Union address, the Iranian government "represses its people", modern Iran is also a place of considerable liberty (for men, at least) and intellectual life is vibrant. It is most assuredly not Ba'athist Iraq.
Khatami is now a lame duck until presidential elections on 17 June. Amid a mild economic revival, thanks to the strong price of crude oil, the Iranian right has reverted with delight to its policy of rhetoric and gesture. Many Iranians, especially those who remember Iraqi missile attacks on Tehran, would like the country to possess nuclear weapons, but as an Iranian friend put it, "just not in the hands of the akhonds [mullahs]".
That is just another way of saying that there are people in power in Iran who believe that only a nuclear weapon can protect clerical rule and entrench the turbaned class for another generation.
From Bushehr, the shah's German contractors departed after the revolution. After a great deal of searching, the Iranians in 1995 eventually contracted Russia's ministry of atomic energy (MinAtom) to take over the site, which had been badly damaged in at least six Iraqi attacks during the war. After the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars that might have gone into the oil industry, a 1,000-megawatt reactor is near completion, says the successor agency to MinAtom. It is generally accepted in Iran that the plant could not start up without US approval, and even that would not guarantee protection from Israeli attack.
Instead, nuclear research has been dispersed through sites all over a vast country. As one European diplomat put it, the Iranians have seen, in Iraq, that destroying your nuclear research does not prevent the US attacking you.
They have seen in North Korea that you can negotiate while developing nuclear technology.
Iran is not an ill-sorted colonial confection with just 80 years on the clock, like Iraq, but an ancient nation that has existed within the same borders since antiquity, and kept its language and culture intact through all the vicissitudes of a violent and chaotic history. Back in 1980, some Iranian monarchist exiles said that the population would not resist the Iraqis and they were proved decisively wrong. If the US were to attack Iran, it would surely have to expect resistance at every level and degree of Iranian society.
Air strikes on dispersed nuclear facilities would be unlikely to stop work. Moreover, the US army is vulnerable to Iranian intrigue and infiltration in the hostile environment of Iraq.
An alternative approach is to recognise that the nuclear fat is in the fire, and that this is as much the fault of the nuclear as the non-nuclear powers. The truth is that the technology for a small nuclear weapon is not very demanding. Nor can it be unlearned. All that can be done is to try to bring Iran into the inspection regime of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 1968 (which, after all, it has signed). The only positive note is that, 25 years on, nobody in Iran has the slightest illusion that the revolution can be exported, with or without nuclear weapons.
The great danger is that neither country has shown much interest in diplomacy, or much by way of diplomatic competence. The Bush administration continues to treat the Iranian government as if it came from outer space. The US achieved its goal in disarming Iraq of its unconventional weapons and then, for good measure, invaded the country. To do so in Iran would be a catastrophe far greater than anything that has passed in Iraq.
James Buchan has been visiting Iran since the early 1970s
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