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How To Handle Iran

Jaan Sepp - 4/7/2005

Iran may be among the most ripe anti-Western countries in the world to be turned around. It has been in internal turmoil for years already, as the rapidly growing youth is gaining strength and audacity, while effectively alienated from the theocracy's ide-ology by thorough frustration. According to many sources, Iran's large, relatively highly educated and potent population is far more pro-Western than the populations of many countries we tend to take as the West's allies, like Russia, India and certain Arab countries. Iran is an antithesis to Saudi Arabia. While Saudi Arabia is a country where a small relatively pro-Western elite is ruling over deeply conservative popula-tion, Iran's 70 million population, often strikingly liberal, is ruled by a small anti-Western regime.

Of course the West must take into consideration certain sensitivities. Like elsewhere in the region, also in Iran, the reformists and the best allies the West can get, are mo-tivated not only by personal liberties and democratic polity, but also by nationalism. They tend to turn to the greatness of Persia's past, seeing the theocracy responsible for the great country's present decay. Because of this, the West should be extremely care-ful and precise in its actions to not lose or compromise the uniquely powerful and ef-ficient ally that it could have in the Iranian nation. Iran, like another important country in the neighborhood, Pakistan, is a non-Arab Muslim state with imperial past (which in Pakistan's case is the Mughal India). Moreover, unlike Pakistan, Iran is a Shi'ite empire, which makes it feel constantly lonely in the Sunni and Arab dominated Mus-lim Umma. Shi'a Islam is traditionally more liberal than Sunni, and it is indeed the Iranian theocracy that has for a long time made this invisible.

A war against Iran, especially if hastily prepared and legitimized by claims of Iran's nuclear program, would probably result in much bigger problems for Western forces than experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather, the West could learn from the neighbor country how nationalist pride can work for the benefit of Western orienta-tion and democracy. In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf's bloodless coup d'état over the increasingly Islamist regime of the conservative Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was committed with large popular support. After that, Musharraf has in fact brought about a more democratic and open society in Pakistan than his democratically elected predecessors Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. The continuous propaganda slant portraying Musharraf as a dictator of the kind similar to the late military ruler Zia ul-Haq is counterproductive and risks to undermine one of the West's most impor-tant allies.

Another lesson should also be taken from Pakistan. Like in India and in Pakistan, also in Iran a large part of the pro-Western population sees the nuclear weapons program through nationalist pride rather than through the apocalyptic scenarios distributed in the West about an "Islamic bomb". India saw its nuclear weapon as a license for su-perpower status and parity with China. For Pakistan, nuclear weapon was seen largely as a life insurance against Indian aggression, but also as an immense national pride that seemed to lift a Third World country into regional eminence. Having been basi-cally abandoned by the West when the Soviet Union removed from Afghanistan, the nuke again made Pakistan a player that had to be listened to. And what is even more important: Pakistan's nuclear weapon did not prevent Musharraf from taking over and adopting a pro-Western policy. Rather, it contributed to that.

A hostile non-nuclear Iran, constantly seeking ways to strike the West into back and to undermine democracy in the Middle East, is probably more harmful than a nuclear Iran with a responsible, pro-Western government. Of course the problem is how to avoid the worst scenario: hostile nuclear Iran turning into a similar kind of zombie state that is found today in North Korea. North Korea was surely more dangerous for the US than Saddam's Iraq, but the point is North Korea was already beyond effective remedy, while Iraq, as it seems, could still be saved with bearable efforts.

Iran's society is more healthy than the one in Saddam's Iraq was. Iran has already many basic structures for effective democracy in place, although completely disem-powered. Therefore, Iran needs no full scale retaliation by military means, but rather a revolution that would remove the aging highest echelon of the theocracy, and bring about genuine, and strong, Iranian democracy. To achieve this, three elements are needed: United opposition movement; a strong and visible leader; and resolute West-ern moral, political and material backing for the opposition, without compromising it, or letting it down (like in Iraq after the Gulf War). The present regression in Iran's re-gime may really be the swan song of the theocracy, a lengthened Iranian version of Gennady Yanayev's putsch in Moscow, after the preparation of the ground by a weak Iranian Gorbachev, President Khatami.