Last November the Iranian people were privileged to watch perhaps the year’s most bizarre presidential home video, in which the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described how a divine glow of light had played around him as he delivered his first address to the United Nations. ‘I felt it,’ the President recalled. ‘All of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27 to 28 minutes, all the world leaders did not blink.... It’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking. They were astonished, as if a hand had held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.’
The real reason for the glazed looks of the assembled world leaders that day at the UN was almost certainly rather simpler. It was, as one official put it, that they simply couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Mr Ahmadinejad spoke in messianic terms of Iran’s struggle against Western ‘state terrorism’, its ‘logic of the dark ages’, and called on the Divinity to ‘hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that pure and perfect human being’.
Even within Iran itself, Mr Ahmadinejad’s words were seen by some as sacrilegious. But last week, as it resumed its nuclear research programme, the Islamic Republic took a clear step towards having its very own capability to produce a divine glow, a sudden change in the atmosphere, and a hastened departure for us all to the Promised Land. The EU3 — Britain, France and Germany — have ended, as pointless, the talks which aimed to broker a deal. A UN Security Council reference looms. (Iran, of course, claims that its work is for peaceful power-generation — but since it has the world’s fourth largest oil reserves, that feels like a new form of what we might call Holocaust denial.)
Nobody should underestimate the grave danger of an Iranian bomb. Deterrence would no doubt operate between a nuclear Iran and a nuclear Israel, just as it did in Cold War Europe, but nuclear proliferation of any kind is desperately serious. Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric recalls the early days of the Iranian revolution, when international meddling most definitely was on the agenda. And an Iranian Bomb could, as the Saudi foreign minister warned last week, start a nuclear ‘arms race’ in the Middle East, the most unstable region in the world. Given the fragility of the House of Saud, with its parallels in some ways to pre-revolutionary Iran, a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia is a truly horrifying prospect.
Yet the most worrying aspect of all in Iran’s march towards a nuclear weapon is that there is, in fact, almost nothing we can do about it. Thanks in part to our own calamitous Middle East policies, Tehran can make life more difficult for us than we can for it. Iran ships 2.4 million barrels of oil per day, making it the fourth largest oil exporter. With an oil price now over $65 a barrel, not far from its all-time high, the withdrawal or reduction of Iranian oil would have swift and serious effects on the economies of the West.
Any drive towards sanctions could merely end up further damaging the credibility of the UN, since the dependence of Asian countries, particularly China, on Iranian oil makes it unlikely that any kind of really biting sanctions would ever survive Beijing’s Security Council veto. Even if they did, there would be plenty willing to break them, plenty of customers for Iranian oil.
Military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would again be likely to cause more problems than it solved. They are well dispersed, and often effectively sheltered. Airstrikes would have to be widespread, sustained and very destructive, and even then could not guarantee that the programme had been stopped. Iran would become what Iraq was in the 1990s, a fully-fledged outlaw state, periodically bombed by the Allies, but with no real assurance that WMD were not still present.
Britain’s and America’s occupation of Iraq — or West Iran, as it increasingly deserves to be known — has proved to Tehran that America cannot invade, and has handed the Iranians a new lever. Tony Blair would not long survive a big increase in British casualties in Basra. If the West starts getting troublesome, Tehran could make Shia Iraq far bloodier than it is now, and send many more squaddies home in boxes.
So if Iran really wants the Bomb, it’s hard to see how we can stop it. Perhaps the new weapon should be named the Dubya, in grateful tribute to the man whose policies have helped to make it all possible. Our only hope — and it is a serious one — is that perhaps the Iranians don’t want the Bomb at all — or perhaps, at least, they want something else even more. It may be that most of what has dominated the Iran story for the past six months — the EU3 talks, threats of the Security Council, even Mr Ahmadinejad — are not the central issues. As they have now made clear, the Iranians aren’t too scared by, or indeed interested in, the UN or the EU3.
What they may, however, be really interested in is the Americans, who have so far been content to take a back seat and leave matters to such titans as Jack Straw. The US has imposed tight sanctions on Iran, including a technology and oil embargo, for the last 27 years. That, unlike anything the UN could ever agree on, has been quite harmful, holding back Iranian development and growth. Then there is the US military threat, which Iran can never totally ignore. There are some analysts in Tehran who think that the nuclear sabre-rattling is Iran’s way of getting Washington’s attention.
Could there be some kind of grand bargain, in which America promises not to attack Iran, restores complete trade and travel links, and reopens full diplomatic relations, in return for binding guarantees that Tehran will stop attempting to enrich uranium? There are many problems — not least Iran’s consistent bad faith, breaches of promise and of earlier undertakings, and the likely hostility of the neocons around Bush.
And then there is Mr Ahmadinejad, with his glowing lights of God, his call for Israel to be wiped out, his conference to ‘re-assess’ the Nazi genocide. Yet for all the President’s eye-catching initiatives, it is generally accepted that real power over the nuclear issue does not rest with him but with the Supreme Guardian, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad did not make the decision to resume work on the nuclear project, and it would not be his finger on the button.
Ahmadinejad’s power over Iraq’s complicated political landscape is incomplete in other ways, too. Parliament rejected three of his choices for the key post of oil minister; he has the usual politician’s delivery problems; and popular discontent with him is rising. Ahmadinejad’s posturing about Israel and the West may be mainly populist rhetoric to win him greater authority with his public. If that is so, it is surely imperative that the West avoids playing into his hands by taking him at face value.
The shadow of Iraq hangs heavy over our response to the rather more dangerous threat of Iran. But the parallels may be deceptive. Over Iraq, the United States should have followed the path of multilateralism. In Iran, however, we would all benefit if Washington now took the diplomatic lead.
Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic editor of The Spectator and a feature writer for the London Evening Standard.