the always interesting Stratfor report:

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
well.

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.

By  Anonymous, at 1/18/2006 9:47 AM  

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