Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal
We tell the Iranians that the military option is "on the table." But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran's rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best.
Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam. This is all part of a larger pattern. As Tehran has wreaked havoc on regional order and peace over the last three decades, the world has indulged it…. Over the course of its three decades in power, this revolutionary regime has made its way in the world with relative ease. No "White Army" gathered to restore the lost dominion of the Pahlavis; the privileged classes and the beneficiaries of the old order made their way to Los Angeles and Paris, and infidel armies never showed up. Even in the face of great violation – the holding of American hostages for more than 400 days – the indulgence of outside powers held.
Compare the path of the Iranian revolutionaries with the obstacles faced by earlier revolutions, and their luck is easy to see. Three years into their tumult, the tribunes of the French Revolution of 1789 were at war with the powers of Europe. The wars of the French Revolution would last for well over two decades. The Bolsheviks, too, had to fight their way into the world of states. The civil war between the White and Red Armies pulled the Allies into the struggle. A war raged in Russia and in Siberia. It was only in 1921 that Britain granted the Soviet regime de facto recognition.
In its first decade, the Iranian revolution was a beneficiary of the Cold War. From the vantage point of the U.S., the Iranians had the most precious of assets – a long border with the Soviet Union. Americans were reluctant to push the new clerical regime into the Soviet orbit. The crisis that nearly shattered the Reagan presidency, the covert sale of arms to Iran authorized by Ronald Reagan himself, stemmed from this reading of Iran as the "underbelly of the Soviet Union."
In retrospect, the U.S. exaggerated the weakness of the Iranian theocrats in the face of the communist menace within Iran, and on the Soviet border. Nearby was the great struggle for Afghanistan, the last fight of the Cold War, and this too was a boon to the Iranian clerics.
Many thought that the Iranian moderates would turn up in the fullness of time. In his inaugural speech, George H.W. Bush offered an olive branch to Iran's rulers: "Goodwill begets goodwill," he said. A decade later, in the typical Clintonian spirit of contrition and penance, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave Iran's rulers an outright apology for America's role in the coup that overthrew the nationalist leader Mohammad Mussadiq in 1953. The coup "was clearly a setback for Iran's political development," she said, part of a flawed American diplomacy that aided the Shah's government as it "brutally repressed political dissent."
But the clerics have had no interest in any bargain with the U.S. Khomeini and his successors have never trusted their society's ability to withstand the temptations of normal traffic with America. Furthermore, oil wealth granted Iran's rulers an exemption from the strictures of economic efficiency. They would pay the price of economic sanctions and deny their country the benefits of access to the American market, because their hold on political power trumped all other concerns.
At any rate, the market was forgiving. The European Union, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and China in later years, would supply Iran with all the technology and imports it needed. Oil revenues enabled the regime to defy the power of outsiders.
Tehran has never needed to remake itself into a warrior state. The skills of the bazaar and the ways of terror have seen it through…. They have harassed Arab rulers while posing as status quo players at peace with the order of the region….
The leaders who oversee the American project in Iraq now see Iran as the principal threat to our success there. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a diplomat with a thorough knowledge of the region, has spoken of an Iranian attempt to "Lebanonize" Iraq – to subvert the country through the use of proxies. In Iraq, the Iranians have been able to dial up the violence and dial it down, to make promises of cooperation to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki while supplying Shiite extremists with weapons and logistical support….
The hope entertained a year or so ago, that Iran would refrain from playing with fire in Iraq, has shown to be wishful thinking. Iran's nuclear ambitions are of a wholly different magnitude. But before we tackle that Persian menace, the Iranian theocrats will have to be shown that there is a price for their transgressions.
(Fouad Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Foreigner's Gift (Free Press, 2006)
____________________________________
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1931520/John-Bolton-US-should-bomb-Iranian-camps.html?service=print
John Bolton: US should bomb Iranian camps
By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Last updated: 3:35 PM BST 06/05/2008
John Bolton, America's ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American's overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be "far higher" if Washington took no action.
"This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we're not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do," he said. "Then the ball would be in Iran's court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops."
Mr Bolton, an influential former member of President George W Bush's inner circle, dismissed as "dead wrong" reported British intelligence conclusions that the US military had overstated the support that Iran was providing to Iraqi fighters.
A US military spokesman revealed last week that the elite Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards had drafted in personnel from Lebanon's Hizbollah to train fighters from Iraq's Shia militias.
Colonel Donald Bacon, a spokesman for the coalition in Baghdad, said captured fighters had told interrogators that thousands of Iraqi fighters were undergoing training in the Islamic Republic.
The main camp is located near the town of Jalil Azad, near Tehran, according to coalition officials.
The capture of Qais Khazali, a major figure in the Shia insurgency alongside Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hizbollah guerilla, last year yielded a treasure trove of information on Hizbollah's activities in Iraq.
"Ali Mussa Daqduq confirmed Lebanese Hizbollah were providing training to Iraqi Special Group members in Iran and that his role was to assess the quality of training and make recommendations on how the training could be improved," said Col Bacon. "In this role, he travelled to Iraq on four occasions and was captured on his fourth trip."
Five Britons kidnapped in Iraq are believed to have been put under the control of Quds Force agents after failed attempts to barter the men for Khazali and Daqduq's freedom.
The importance of the Quds Force to stability in Iraq was demonstrated last week when a five-member Iraqi delegation was sent to Tehran to meet with its commander, General Ghassem Soleimani. The delegation was despatched by the Iraqi government to plead for an end to Iranian meddling in its enfeebled neighbour.
No comments:
Post a Comment