http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1688938,00.html
Simon Jenkins - Wednesday January 18, 2006 - The Guardian
Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick
an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard
in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment
programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it - macho phrases
about "all options open" - suggests an international community so crazed
with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.
Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to
be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer
in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital,
Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient
and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid.
All the following statements about Iran are true. There are powerful Iranians who
want to build a nuclear bomb. There are powerful ones who do not. There are people
in Iran who would like Israel to disappear. There are people who would not.
There are people who would like Islamist rule. There are people who would not.
There are people who long for some idiot western politician to declare war on them.
There are people appalled at the prospect.
The only question for western strategists is which of these people they want to help.
Of all the treaties passed in my lifetime the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT)
always seemed the most implausible. It was an insiders' club that any outsider could defy
with a modicum of guile. So it has proved. America, sitting armed to the teeth across
Korea's demilitarised zone, has let North Korea become a nuclear power despite a 1994
promise that it would not. America supported Israel in going nuclear. Britain and America
did not balk at India doing so, nor Pakistan when it not only built a bomb but deceitfully
disseminated its technology in defiance of sanctions. Three flagrant dissenters from the NPT
are thus regarded by America as friends.
I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy
separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between
nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear
Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America,
which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country
has "no right" to nuclear defence?
None the less this month's reopening of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant and two others,
though purportedly for peaceful uses, was a clear act of defiance by Iran's new president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
remain unsure whether it implies a secret weapons programme but the evidence for this is far
stronger than, for instance, against Saddam Hussein. To have infuriated the IAEA's Mohamed
ElBaradei takes some doing. As Saddam found, deviousness in nuclear matters is bound to
arouse suspicion. Either way, the reopening yielded a strong diplomatic coalition of Europe, America,
Russia and China in pleading with Ahmadinejad to desist.
On Monday, Washington's kneejerk belligerence put this coalition under immediate strain.
In two weeks the IAEA must decide whether to report Iran to the UN security council for possible sanctions.
There seems little point in doing this if China and Russia vetoes it or if there is no plan B
for what to do if such pressure fails to halt enrichment, which seems certain. A clear sign
of western floundering are speeches and editorials concluding that Iran "should not take
international concern lightly", the west should "be on its guard" and everyone "should think carefully".
It means nobody has a clue.
I cannot see how all this confrontation will stop Iran doing whatever it likes with its nuclear enrichment,
which is reportedly years away from producing weapons-grade material. The bombing of carefully
dispersed and buried sites might delay deployment. But given the inaccuracy of American bombers,
the death and destruction caused to Iran's cities would be a gift to anti-western extremists and have
every world terrorist reporting for duty.
Nor would the "coward's war" of economic sanctions be any more effective.
Refusing to play against Iranian footballers (hated by the clerics), boycotting artists,
ostracising academics, embargoing commerce, freezing foreign bank accounts - so-called smart sanctions
- are as counterproductive as could be imagined. Such feelgood gestures drive the enemies of
an embattled regime into silence, poverty or exile. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in these pages
after a recent visit, western aggression "would drain overnight its still large reservoir of anti-regime,
mildly pro-western sentiment".
By all accounts Ahmadinejad is not secure. He is subject to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
His foe, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, retains some power. Tehran is not a Saddamist dictatorship or a
Taliban autocracy. It is a shambolic oligarchy with bureaucrats and technocrats jostling for power with
clerics.
Despite a quarter century of effort, the latter have not created a truly fundamentalist islamic state.
Iran is a classic candidate for the politics of subtle engagement.
This means strengthening every argument in the hands of those Iranians who do not want nuclear weapons
or Israel eliminated, who crave a secular state and good relations with the west.
No such argument embraces name-calling, sabre-rattling, sanctions or bombs.
At this very moment, US officials in Baghdad are on their knees begging Iran-backed Shia politicians
and militias to help them get out of Iraq. From Basra to the suburbs of Baghdad, Iranian influence
is dominant. Iranian posters adorned last month's elections. Whatever Bush and Blair thought they
were doing by invading Iraq, they must have known the chief beneficiary from toppling the Sunni
ascendancy would be Shia Iran. They cannot now deny the logic of their own policy. Democracy
itself is putting half Iraq in thrall to its powerful neighbour.
Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding to be "hugged close"
it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying
a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy.
Jan Rasmussen