Iran's Redefined Strategy

By George Friedman

The Iranians have broken the International
Atomic Energy Agency seals on some of their nuclear facilities. They did
this very deliberately and publicly to make certain that everyone knew that
Tehran was proceeding with its nuclear program. Prior to this, and in
parallel, the Iranians began to -- among other things -- systematically bait
the Israelis, threatening to wipe them from the face of the earth.

The
question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They do not yet
have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have now hinted that (a)
they plan to build nuclear weapons and have implied, as clearly as possible
without saying it, that (b) they plan to use them against Israel. On the
surface, these statements appear to be begging for a pre-emptive strike by
Israel. There are many things one might hope for, but a surprise visit from
the Israeli air force is not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is
exactly what the Iranians seem to be doing, so we need to sort this
out.

There are four possibilities:

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
Iranian president, is insane and wants to be attacked because of a bad
childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver,
and this is part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear
weapons -- and a deterrent to Israel -- before the Israelis attack.
4.
The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli -- or for
that matter, American -- air strike.

Let's begin with the insanity
issue, just to get it out of the way. One of the ways to avoid thinking
seriously about foreign policy is to dismiss as a nutcase anyone who does
not behave as you yourself would. As such, he is unpredictable and, while
scary, cannot be controlled. You are therefore relieved of the burden of
doing anything about him. In foreign policy, it is sometimes useful to
appear to be insane, as it is in poker: The less predictable you are, the
more power you have -- and insanity is a great tool of unpredictability.
Some leaders cultivate an aura of insanity.

However, people who climb
to the leadership of nations containing many millions of people must be
highly disciplined, with insight into others and the ability to plan
carefully. Lunatics rarely have those characteristics. Certainly, there have
been sociopaths -- like Hitler -- but at the same time, he was a very able,
insightful, meticulous man. He might have been crazy, but dismissing him
because he was crazy -- as many did -- was a massive mistake. Moreover,
leaders do not rise alone. They are surrounded by other ambitious people. In
the case of Ahmadinejad, he is answerable to others above him (in this case,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), alongside him and below him. He did not get to
where he is by being nuts -- and even if we think what he says is insane, it
clearly doesn't strike the rest of his audience as insane. Thinking of him as
insane is neither helpful nor clarifying.

The Three-Player
Game

So what is happening?

First, the Iranians obviously
are responding to the Americans. Tehran's position in Iraq is not what the
Iranians had hoped it would be. U.S. maneuvers with the Sunnis in Iraq and
the behavior of Iraqi Shiite leaders clearly have created a situation in
which the outcome will not be the creation of an Iranian satellite state. At
best, Iraq will be influenced by Iran or neutral. At worst, it will drift
back into opposition to Iran -- which has been Iraq's traditional
geopolitical position. This is not satisfactory. Iran's Iraq policy has not
failed, but it is not the outcome Tehran dreamt of in 2003.

There is
a much larger issue. The United States has managed its position in Iraq --
to the extent that it has been managed -- by manipulating the Sunni-Shiite
fault line in the Muslim world. In the same way that Richard Nixon
manipulated the Sino-Soviet split, the fundamental fault line in the
Communist world, to keep the Soviets contained and off-balance late in the
Vietnam War, so the Bush administration has used the primordial fault line
in the Islamic world, the Sunni-Shiite split, to manipulate the situation in
Iraq.

Washington did this on a broader scale as well. Having enticed
Iran with new opportunities -- both for Iran as a nation and as the leading
Shiite power in a post-Saddam world -- the administration turned to Sunni
countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation with the
United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an ascended
Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington used
that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has
been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of
Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in
Afghanistan's Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United
States, however, attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It
became the swing player between Sunnis and Shia.

This was not what
the Iranians had hoped for.

Reclaiming the
Banner

There is yet another dimension to this. In 1979, when the
Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran, Iran was the center of
revolutionary Islamism. It both stood against the United States and
positioned itself as the standard-bearer for radical Islamist youth. It was
Iran, through its creation, Hezbollah, that pioneered suicide bombings. It
championed the principle of revolutionary Islamism against both
collaborationist states like Saudi Arabia and secular revolutionaries like
Yasser Arafat. It positioned Shi'ism as the protector of the faith and the
hope of the future.

In having to defend against Saddam Hussein's Iraq
in the 1980s, and the resulting containment battle, Iran became ensnared in a
range of necessary but compromising relationships. Recall, if you will, that
the Iran-Contra affair revealed not only that the United States used Israel
to send weapons to Iran, but also that Iran accepted weapons from Israel.
Iran did what it had to in order to survive, but the complexity of its
operations led to serious compromises. By the late 1990s, Iran had lost any
pretense of revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world. It had been flanked
by the Sunni Wahhabi movement, al Qaeda.

The Iranians always saw al
Qaeda as an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through
Shiite and Iranian eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al
Qaeda to usurp the position of primary challenger to the West. Under any
circumstances, it did not want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a
challenge. First, it had to reduce al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the
Sunnis had taken the banner from Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to
reclaim its place. Third, it had to do this without undermining its
geopolitical interests.

Tehran spent the time from 2003 through 2005
maximizing what it could from the Iraq situation. It also quietly
participated in the reduction of al Qaeda's network and global reach. In
doing so, it appeared to much of the Islamic world as clever and capable,
but not particularly principled. Tehran's clear willingness to collaborate
on some level with the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the war
on al Qaeda made it appear as collaborationist as it had accused the
Kuwaitis or Saudis of being in the past. By the end of 2005, Iran had
secured its western frontier as well as it could, had achieved what
influence it could in Baghdad, had seen al Qaeda weakened. It was time for
the next phase. It had to reclaim its position as the leader of the Islamic
revolutionary movement for itself and for Shi'ism.

Thus, the
selection of the new president was, in retrospect, carefully engineered.
After President Mohammed Khatami's term, all moderates were excluded from
the electoral process by decree, and the election came down to a struggle
between former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- an heir to
Khomeini's tradition, but also an heir to the tactical pragmatism of the
1980s and 1990s -- and Ahmadinejad, the clearest descendent of the Khomeini
revolution that there was in Iran, and someone who in many ways had avoided
the worst taints of compromise.

Ahmadinejad was set loose to reclaim
Iran's position in the Muslim world. Since Iran had collaborated with Israel
during the 1980s, and since Iranian money in Lebanon had mingled with Israeli
money, the first thing he had to do was to reassert Iran's anti-Zionist
credentials. He did that by threatening Israel's existence and denying the
Holocaust. Whether he believed what he was saying is immaterial. Ahmadinejad
used the Holocaust issue to do two things: First, he established himself as
intellectually both anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, taking the far flank among
Islamic leaders; and second, he signaled a massive breach with Khatami's
approach.

Khatami was focused on splitting the Western world by
dividing the Americans from the Europeans. In carrying out this policy, he
had to manipulate the Europeans. The Europeans were always open to the claim
that the Americans were being rigid and were delighted to serve the role of
sophisticated mediator. Khatami used the Europeans' vanity brilliantly,
sucking them into endless discussions and turning the Iran situation into a
problem the Europeans were having with the United States.

But Tehran
paid a price for this in the Muslim world. In drawing close to the
Europeans, the Iranians simply appeared to be up to their old game of
unprincipled realpolitik with people -- Europeans -- who were no better than
the Americans. The Europeans were simply Americans who were weaker.
Ahmadinejad could not carry out his strategy of flanking the Wahhabis and
still continue the minuet with Europe. So he ended Khatami's game with a
bang, with a massive diatribe on the Holocaust and by arguing that if there
had been one, the Europeans bore the blame. That froze Germany out of any
further dealings with Tehran, and even the French had to back off. Iran's
stock in the Islamic world started to rise.

The Nuclear
Gambit

The second phase was for Iran to very publicly resume --
or very publicly claim to be resuming -- development of a nuclear weapon.
This signaled three things:

1. Iran's policy of accommodation with
the West was over.
2. Iran intended to get a nuclear weapon in order to
become the only real challenge to Israel and, not incidentally, a regional
power that Sunni states would have to deal with.
3. Iran was prepared to
take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared to take. Al Qaeda was a
piker.

The fundamental fact is that Ahmadinejad knows that, except in
the case of extreme luck, Iran will not be able to get nuclear weapons.
First, building a nuclear device is not the same thing as building a nuclear
weapon. A nuclear weapon must be sufficiently small, robust and reliable to
deliver to a target. A nuclear device has to sit there and go boom. The key
technologies here are not the ones that build a device but the ones that
turn a device into a weapon -- and then there is the delivery system to
worry about: range, reliability, payload, accuracy. Iran has a way to
go.

A lot of countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The
United States is another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans
into this, and there are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb.
However, there are only two countries that can do something about it. The
Israelis don't want to get the grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid
action because they are the most vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon.
The United States doesn't want Israel to strike at Iran, as that would
massively complicate the U.S. situation in the region, but it doesn't want
to carry out the strike itself either.

This, by the way, is a good
place to pause and explain to readers who will write in wondering why the
United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear force but not an Iranian one.
The answer is simple. Israel will probably not blow up New York. That's why
the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes and does mind Iran having
them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not sharing time in preschool.
End of digression.

Intra-Islamic Diplomacy

If the
Iranians are seen as getting too close to a weapon, either the United States
or Israel will take them out, and there is an outside chance that the
facilities could not be taken out with a high degree of assurance unless
nukes are used. In the past, our view was that the Iranians would move
carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United States.
That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their
traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That
means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United
States. It would burnish Iran's credentials as the true martyr and fighter
of Islam.

Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be reaching out to the
Sunnis on a number of levels. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a radical
Shiite group in Iraq with ties to Iran, visited Saudi Arabia recently. There
are contacts between radical Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon as well. The Iranians
appear to be engaged in an attempt to create the kind of coalition in the
Muslim world that al Qaeda failed to create. From Tehran's point of view, if
they get a deliverable nuclear device, that's great -- but if they are
attacked by Israel or the United States, that's not a bad outcome either.


In short, the diplomacy that Iran practiced from the beginning of
the Iraq-Iran war until after the U.S. invasion of Iraq appears to be ended.
Iran is making a play for ownership of revolutionary Islamism on behalf of
itself and the Shia. Thus, Tehran will continue to make provocative moves,
while hoping to avoid counterstrikes. On the other hand, if there are
counterstrikes, the Iranians will probably be able to live with that as
we