For most of this decade, as the price of hydrocarbons broke record after record and the big oil exporters watched their revenues soar, Iran seemed capable of riding out all the shocks that international politics, and George W Bush in particular, could throw at it. Bush included the country in his 2002 “axis of evil” speech; he invaded its neighbours to the east and west; and in 2006 the UN security council, pushed by the US and its European allies, imposed sanctions in response to Iran’s nuclear programme. Yet none of these actions dented the Iranians’ sense of immunity from misfortune. America’s travails in Iraq and Afghanistan ended whatever hopes Bush may have harboured of attacking Iran itself; the Americans were even forced to solicit Iranian co-operation in pacifying both. (Iran helped fitfully). As for sanctions, initially designed to curtail Iran’s purchase of nuclear equipment and its leading personalities’ ability to travel, these seemed a trifle next to the spiralling sums that the Iranians earned from the sale of their oil: $47bn in 2005, $58bn in 2006, $70bn in 2007. Tehran boomed while Baghdad and Kabul suffered, and a new middle class, shedding the old revolutionary austerities, discovered consumerism. Today, the casual visitor to Tehran may judge that little has changed. The skyline over the northern, affluent end of the city is jagged with steel skeletons, as high-rises go up in place of recently demolished villas. In the bazaar in the centre of Tehran, the hub of Iran’s mercantile economy, it is common to see a porter, dragging his cart through the lanes, wearing a bandage over his nose—testament to the Iranian obsession, by no means confined to the middle class, for aesthetic “improvement.” But all is not as it seems. Work on hundreds of building projects has stopped, others progress at a snail’s pace. Bazaar traders complain of a severe downturn. Even Iran’s legions of plastic surgeons are feeling the pinch. When the global financial crisis began last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad liked to argue that Iran’s economy would be sheltered by its internal orientation. For all its enthusiastic participation in international trade—Iran is the second biggest oil exporter in Opec and a major importer of foodstuffs, consumer goods and building materials—the country is not fully integrated into the global economic system. Outside the oil and gas industry, Iran attracts negligible foreign investment, and the economy runs on cash transactions, not the personal debt and speculative investment instruments that have brought such grief to the west. But now it is clear even to the government’s supporters that Iran faces acute economic pain. This is the consequence both of Ahmadinejad’s profligate attitude to the oil windfall and his failure to prepare for its inevitable end. When Ahmadinejad took over from the reformist cleric Muhammad Khatami, who had completed his maximum of two consecutive terms, the economy was sclerotic but functioning. Khatami had dipped liberally into a rainy day reserve made up of surplus oil revenues, called the oil stabilisation fund (OSF), but his government had also made modest efforts to wean the economy off its dependence on oil and encourage Iranians, impenitent property-speculators, to invest their riyals into manufacturing. Ahmadinejad attracted those Iranians who felt excluded from the Khatami boom or saw it as a drift to western nihilism. He was elected not only because of his piety and humble style of living, but also because of his promise to distribute Iran’s oil revenues among the people. Once elected, this is exactly what he did. Through the state-dominated banking system, he doled out huge sums in loans (worth billions in US dollars) to young people, newlyweds and small businessmen. As he toured the country, where he was received rapturously by the poor, he pledged billions more for infrastructure projects and job creation. The president drew on Iran’s soaring oil receipts to fund his largesse. According to central bank figures, the government has spent $130bn worth of oil revenues in the past three years. Khatami’s government, by contrast, spent $97bn from the same source over its entire, eight-year life. Repeatedly, senior economists and opposition politicians have warned of the baleful consequences of Ahmadinejad’s policies—with reason, it is now clear. Inflation, which ran at just over 10 per cent when he was elected, is nudging 30 per cent. Iranians’ purchasing power has been eroded, particularly when it comes to housing and food, where inflation exceeds the headline rate. (The president’s decision to reduce petrol subsidies, which most orthodox economists supported, has also had inflationary results.) A policy of encouraging loans to aspiring home-owners created a property bubble that burst in the autumn, leaving many defaulters in its wake. Non-performing loans have risen sharply since Ahmadinejad came to power and now account for some 20 per cent of banks’ exposure. For the first time in a decade, the middle classes are becoming less prosperous. Meat, fruit and vegetables have soared in price; Iranians struggle to afford their seasoned stews and saffron rice. Pistachios, formerly a staple snack in middle-class homes, are now a luxury. “Today it costs $100 to gather the extended family even for a modest meal,” grumbles a trader in the Tehran bazaar, “and for someone making $400 a month, a good wage, that’s a big sum. If you accept an invitation it’s customary to return the favour. So people aren’t accepting invitations any more.” Ahmadinejad has failed to diversify the economy—an objective so urgent, it was enshrined in a five-year plan for all governments irrespective of ideological orientation. On the contrary, argues Saeed Leylaz, a prominent government critic, Iran’s dependence on oil as a source of budgetary spending has increased more than sevenfold since he came to power. The recent collapse of the oil price, from a midsummer peak of almost $150 to about $35 a barrel in mid-January, is reminding Iranians of their vulnerability to ill winds from abroad. Ahmadinejad demurs: there is no reason why “an Iranian should catch a fever if someone sneezes in the west.” He claims that he can govern effectively even if the price falls to $5 a barrel. The International Monetary Fund is not so sure; in August the fund stated that Iran would face an “unsustainable” current account deficit if the oil price fell below $75. This, surely, is the rainy day for which the oil stabilisation fund was set up, to maintain government spending at a time of low oil revenues. Yet the OSF, having been repeatedly plundered by the government, is almost empty. Even if oil prices bottom out soon, it seems inevitable that 2009 will bring Iran sharply rising unemployment, persistent high inflation, and an increase in the kind of public disgruntlement that led bazaar traders to shut up shop in October in protest at plans to introduce VAT. (The government backtracked and the shutters came back up.) According to Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former Central Bank governor, “bitter days” are in store. For the rest of the world, the question is how economic pain will affect Iran’s ability to withstand growing international pressure to abandon its longstanding pursuit of self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel—a status that would allow Iran to make a nuclear bomb. Iranians’ sense of immunity is at last being threatened—and at the tail-end of Bush’s bellicose presidency, when one might have expected it to be strongest. Many recall the last time an oil price slump coincided with a period of strategic peril—during the long and bloody war that Iran fought in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein. Economic as much as military setbacks obliged Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of revolutionary Iran, to agree to a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, a decision that he likened to drinking a “poisoned chalice.” Now, Iran’s adversaries hope, the clerics may buckle again. This year is, of course, the 30th anniversary of the revolution that toppled the Shah and turned Iran into an Islamic Republic—a political hybrid, part-theocracy, part-democracy, that has proved remarkably resilient. Iran has developed a bifurcated system, where the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, may not be challenged, while many other members of the ruling elite, such as the president and members of parliament, are subject to regular electoral scrutiny under universal suffrage. On 12th June Ahmadinejad will stand for a second term, and his most formidable opponent may be Muhammad Khatami, the moderate reformist who stood down in 2005 and is now being entreated by his supporters to throw his turban into the ring. It may be a year of danger for Iran. Some analysts fear that Israel’s battering of Gaza, and its misleading depiction of Hamas as an Iranian proxy, presage an attack on Iran’s confirmed and suspected nuclear sites. At their installation at Natanz, in central Iran, the Iranians are busy producing low enriched uranium appropriate for generating electricity; by 2010, western experts believe, they may have amassed the expertise and technology to produce a different sort of uranium in sufficient quantities to make a bomb. The Iranians insist that they only want to make electricity, and a US intelligence finding published in 2007 suggested that Iran had abandoned nuclear weapons research four years earlier. This finding, which seems to have been framed in order to deny Bush a pretext for attacking Iran, has been effectively ignored by the administration and its European allies; they have maintained their efforts to demonstrate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, that Iran is working on nuclear weapons and warheads. The IAEA has no way of telling for sure, because Iran only lets inspectors into declared nuclear sites, and not those installations where, it is claimed, illicit military research takes place. Since 2002, when startling new intelligence came to light concerning the extent of the Iranian programme, Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been a matter of international concern. Flattered by the world’s attention, Iran has diligently cemented alliances with fellow Shias in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, and now regards itself, with reason, as a regional force. By gaining a nuclear capability, the Iranians would be able to leapfrog their middle eastern neighbours and glower at Israel, hitherto the region’s sole atomic power, from a position of parity. That would transform the middle east and increase Iran’s prestige among the millions of Muslims who chafe at their own governments’ cooperation with the US. The arrival of Barack Obama may represent less of a change than expected. He wants to expand diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, he opposed the invasion of Iraq, as Iran did, and he shares a given name—Hussein—with the most beloved of the Shia imams. But Obama may find it easier to continue with the policy of curt multilateral negotiations and economic pressure that he inherits. The US ambassador to the IAEA predicts little change in America’s approach to Iran’s nuclear programme. This suggests that while continuing to join the EU in intermittent negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to freeze uranium enrichment, the US will also do its best to ensure that Iran is further isolated economically. American soft power has dissuaded foreigners from dealing with Iranian banks, blocked international credit lines to Iranian companies and discouraged many non-American companies with a US presence from doing business with Iran. If Russia and China continue to block an escalation of sanctions in the UN security council, the US, the EU and other allies will act on their own. Restrictions on fuel sales to Iran, whose low refining capacity forces it to import petrol, have been mooted. Iran today, however, is not the Iran of late 2001. Then alarm at America’s wrath in the wake of 9/11 caused even hardline clerics to drop the chant “Death to America” from Friday prayers. Tehran fell over itself to help the US with intelligence during the assault on Afghanistan. Iran wanted to avoid provoking the US and, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, it put out feelers proposing a détente between the two countries. The Iranians’ main demand was that the US publicly disclaim any ambition to topple the Islamic Republic; according to US officials privy to the offer, Iran appeared willing to downgrade its association with armed groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, which oppose Israel’s existence. The Bush administration did not bother to respond. Now, with US foreign policy in disarray, Iran no longer fears an invasion, and hardly a day passes without Iran’s military leaders warning Israel of the humiliating defeat it will suffer if it dares attack. In any bilateral negotiations Iran would certainly demand that the US change its lenient attitude towards Israel’s atomic status and treatment of the Palestinians, and that it reduce its huge military presence in the Persian Gulf. Iran is no longer a supplicant; it insists that its enhanced new status be recognised. The mood music is not encouraging. Editorials in Tehran newspapers were quick to condemn Hillary Clinton’s appointment as secretary of state—a sign, they fear, that the Obama administration will toe a strongly pro-Israel line. And Iran has used the carnage in Gaza to intensify its verbal assaults on Israel, its western backers, and those Arab governments that have, in its view, callously stood back and observed the Palestinians’ agony. If Obama is serious about improving relations with Iran, he could begin by declaring his intention not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and then draw the country into wider talks on stabilising Iraq and Afghanistan—an overture that would appeal to Iran’s sense of regional self-worth. Most pressing of all, Obama must revive attempts to broker an accommodation between Israelis and Arabs. With a robust peace process and US withdrawal from Iraq in sight, the Iranians would have less to be angry about. Even before the Israeli attack on Gaza, speculation about an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations was rife; if Israel emerges from the fighting with its military pride enhanced, and its politicians fight the forthcoming parliamentary elections in an atmosphere of jingoistic pride, this speculation will grow. Iran could react to an attack by closing the Gulf of Hormuz or by stirring up their proxies in Iraq and Lebanon. Iran claims to have smashed a sophisticated Israeli spy ring; three men face the death penalty. All the while, the scientists at Natanz inch forward. Iran, in the words of an EU ambassador in Tehran, is entering a “danger zone.” Obama and his team may want to wait for the results of the presidential elections in June before exploring their negotiating options. Yet that would be a mistake, for no Iranian president, Ahmadinejad included, has controlled foreign and nuclear policy. In the Islamic Republic, which is built on anti-American sentiment, the delicate process of engaging the US without undermining the official ideology is a job for the largely unelected establishment—made up of Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Khamenei, a handful of top officials and other senior clerics and military leaders. This establishment will remain, whatever the poll results. That said, an election campaign may provide a turbulent backdrop to attempts to recalibrate relations. Already, the police and the Basij, a 5m-strong paramilitary force, have mounted huge shows of strength in the streets of Tehran—a deterrent to anyone tempted to disturb the country’s sullen calm. The conservative establishment, although disenchanted with Ahmadinejad, has cranked up a media campaign aimed at dissuading Khatami, who is popular despite the failure of his reform movement, from standing. (Khatami has a history of announcing his candidacy late in the day, and fellow reformists have put immense pressure on him to stand.) Conservatives recall Khatami’s presidency as the most sustained assault on their ideology and privileges since the republic’s inception; they don’t want it repeated. In 2005, it was Basijis, guided by people close to the supreme leader, whose votes swung the election Ahmadinejad’s way. Four years on, Khamenei’s praise for the government suggest that Ahmadinejad retains his backing. Bereft of support elsewhere in the establishment, the president needs Khamenei as much as he needs the poor Iranians who voted for him. Although heartily disliked by the metropolitan middle class, as much for his eccentric foreign policy as his economics,Ahmadinejad retains some popularity among these less privileged Iranians. They point out that no one has accused him of personal corruption, a rarity in Iranian politics, and that Iran stands taller in the world than in 2005. The president calculates that a final spurt of handouts to the poor will secure him re-election, but the economy may be in even worse straits in June. A full blown economic crisis, especially if it is exacerbated by intensified external pressure, or even an Israeli attack, would imperil Khamenei’s mission of steering Iran to atomic mastery. That, in turn, could persuade him to rethink his support for the president. Meanwhile, chastened by Iran’s rise, US foreign policy specialists have abandoned their maximalist approach. Former CIA agent Robert Baer has even argued that since Iran is no longer a blindly ideological state, it is now America’s natural ally in the middle east. Such thinking may not convince the cautious diplomats around Obama, but it indicates a maturing appreciation that Bush’s approach to Iran has worked no better than the rest of his middle east policy.
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of monographs on the geopolitics of countries that are currently critical in world affairs. Click here for a printable PDF of the monograph in its entirety.
To understand Iran, you must begin by understanding how large it is. Iran is the 17th largest country in world. It measures 1,684,000 square kilometers. That means that its territory is larger than the combined territories of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal — Western Europe. Iran is the 16th most populous country in the world, with about 70 million people. Its population is larger than the populations of either France or the United Kingdom. Under the current circumstances, it might be useful to benchmark Iran against Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq is 433,000 square kilometers, with about 25 million people, so Iran is roughly four times as large and three times as populous. Afghanistan is about 652,000 square kilometers, with a population of about 30 million. One way to look at it is that Iran is 68 percent larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 40 percent more population.More important are its topographical barriers. Iran is defined, above all, by its mountains, which form its frontiers, enfold its cities and describe its historical heartland. To understand Iran, you must understand not only how large it is but also how mountainous it is.
Iran’s most important mountains are the Zagros. They are a southern extension of the Caucasus, running about 900 miles from the northwestern border of Iran, which adjoins Turkey and Armenia, southeast toward Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. The first 150 miles of Iran’s western border is shared with Turkey. It is intensely mountainous on both sides. South of Turkey, the mountains on the western side of the border begin to diminish until they disappear altogether on the Iraqi side. From this point onward, south of the Kurdish regions, the land on the Iraqi side is increasingly flat, part of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. The Iranian side of the border is mountainous, beginning just a few miles east of the border. Iran has a mountainous border with Turkey, but mountains face a flat plain along the Iraq border. This is the historical frontier between Persia — the name of Iran until the early 20th century — and Mesopotamia (“land between two rivers”), as southern Iraq is called. The one region of the western border that does not adhere to this model is in the extreme south, in the swamps where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway. There the Zagros swing southeast, and the southern border between Iran and Iraq zigzags south to the Shatt al-Arab, which flows south 125 miles through flat terrain to the Persian Gulf. To the east is the Iranian province of Khuzestan, populated by ethnic Arabs, not Persians. Given the swampy nature of the ground, it can be easily defended and gives Iran a buffer against any force from the west seeking to move along the coastal plain of Iran on the Persian Gulf. Running east along the Caspian Sea are the Elburz Mountains, which serve as a mountain bridge between the Caucasus-Zagros range and Afghan mountains that eventually culminate in the Hindu Kush. The Elburz run along the southern coast of the Caspian to the Afghan border, buffering the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. Mountains of lesser elevations then swing down along the Afghan and Pakistani borders, almost to the Arabian Sea. Iran has about 800 miles of coastline, roughly half along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, the rest along the Gulf of Oman. Its most important port, Bandar Abbas, is located on the Strait of Hormuz. There are no equivalent ports along the Gulf of Oman, and the Strait of Hormuz is extremely vulnerable to interdiction. Therefore, Iran is not a major maritime or naval power. It is and always has been a land power. The center of Iran consists of two desert plateaus that are virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. These are the Dasht-e Kavir, which stretches from Qom in the northwest nearly to the Afghan border, and the Dasht-e Lut, which extends south to Balochistan. The Dasht-e Kavir consists of a layer of salt covering thick mud, and it is easy to break through the salt layer and drown in the mud. It is one of the most miserable places on earth.
Iran’s population is concentrated in its mountains, not in its lowlands, as with other countries. That’s because its lowlands, with the exception of the southwest and the southeast (regions populated by non-Persians), are uninhabitable. Iran is a nation of 70 million mountain dwellers. Even its biggest city, Tehran, is in the foothills of towering mountains. Its population is in a belt stretching through the Zagros and Elbroz mountains on a line running from the eastern shore of the Caspian to the Strait of Hormuz. There is a secondary concentration of people to the northeast, centered on Mashhad. The rest of the country is lightly inhabited and almost impassable because of the salt-mud flats.
If you look carefully at a map of Iran, you can see that the western part of the country — the Zagros Mountains — is actually a land bridge for southern Asia. It is the only path between the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea in the north. Iran is the route connecting the Indian subcontinent to the Mediterranean Sea. But because of its size and geography, Iran is not a country that can be easily traversed, much less conquered. The location of Iran’s oil fields is critical here, since oil remains its most important and most strategic export. Oil is to be found in three locations: The southwest is the major region, with lesser deposits along the Iraqi border in the north and one near Qom. The southwestern oil fields are an extension of the geological formation that created the oil fields in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Hence, the region east of the Shatt al-Arab is of critical importance to Iran. Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world and is the world’s fourth largest producer. Therefore, one would expect it to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It isn’t.
Iran has the 28th largest economy in the world but ranks only 71st in per capita gross domestic product (as expressed in purchasing power). It ranks with countries like Belarus or Panama. Part of the reason is inefficiencies in the Iranian oil industry, the result of government policies. But there is a deeper geographic problem. Iran has a huge population mostly located in rugged mountains. Mountainous regions are rarely prosperous. The cost of transportation makes the development of industry difficult. Sparsely populated mountain regions are generally poor. Heavily populated mountain regions, when they exist, are much poorer. Iran’s geography and large population make substantial improvements in its economic life difficult. Unlike underpopulated and less geographically challenged countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Iran cannot enjoy any shift in the underlying weakness of its economy brought on by higher oil prices and more production. The absence of inhabitable plains means that any industrial plant must develop in regions where the cost of infrastructure tends to undermine the benefits. Oil keeps Iran from sinking even deeper, but it alone cannot catapult Iran out of its condition.
The Broad Outline
Iran is a fortress. Surrounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the ocean, with a wasteland at its center, Iran is extremely difficult to conquer. This was achieved once by the Mongols, who entered the country from the northeast. The Ottomans penetrated the Zagros Mountains and went northeast as far as the Caspian but made no attempt to move into the Persian heartland. Iran is a mountainous country looking for inhabitable plains. There are none to the north, only more mountains and desert, or to the east, where Afghanistan’s infrastructure is no more inviting. To the south there is only ocean. What plains there are in the region lie to the west, in modern-day Iraq and historical Mesopotamia and Babylon. If Iran could dominate these plains, and combine them with its own population, they would be the foundation of Iranian power.
Indeed, these plains were the foundation of the Persian Empire. The Persians originated in the Zagros Mountains as a warrior people. They built an empire by conquering the plains in the Tigris and Euphrates basin. They did this slowly, over an extended period at a time when there were no demarcated borders and they faced little resistance to the west. While it was difficult for a lowland people to attack through mountains, it was easier for a mountain-based people to descend to the plains. This combination of population and fertile plains allowed the Persians to expand. Iran’s attacking north or northwest into the Caucasus is impossible in force. The Russians, Turks and Iranians all ground to a halt along the current line in the 19th century; the country is so rugged that movement could be measured in yards rather than miles. Iran could attack northeast into Turkmenistan, but the land there is flat and brutal desert. The Iranians could move east into Afghanistan, but this would involve more mountain fighting for land of equally questionable value. Attacking west, into the Tigris and Euphrates river basin, and then moving to the Mediterranean, would seem doable. This was the path the Persians took when they created their empire and pushed all the way to Greece and Egypt. In terms of expansion, the problem for Iran is its mountains. They are as effective a container as they are a defensive bulwark. Supporting an attacking force requires logistics, and pushing supplies through the Zagros in any great numbers is impossible. Unless the Persians can occupy and exploit Iraq, further expansion is impossible. In order to exploit Iraq, Iran needs a high degree of active cooperation from Iraqis. Otherwise, rather than converting Iraq’s wealth into political and military power, the Iranians would succeed only in being bogged down in pacifying the Iraqis. In order to move west, Iran would require the active cooperation of conquered nations. Any offensive will break down because of the challenges posed by the mountains in moving supplies. This is why the Persians created the type of empire they did. They allowed conquered nations a great deal of autonomy, respected their culture and made certain that these nations benefited from the Persian imperial system. Once they left the Zagros, the Persians could not afford to pacify an empire. They needed the wealth at minimal cost. And this has been the limit on Persian/Iranian power ever since. Recreating a relationship with the inhabitants of the Tigris and Euphrates basin — today’s Iraq — is enormously difficult. Indeed, throughout most of history, the domination of the plains by Iran has been impossible. Other imperial powers — Alexandrian Greece, Rome, the Byzantines, Ottomans, British and Americans — have either seized the plains themselves or used them as a neutral buffer against the Persians.
Underlying the external problems of Iran is a severe internal problem. Mountains allow nations to protect themselves. Completely eradicating a culture is difficult. Therefore, most mountain regions of the world contain large numbers of national and ethnic groups that retain their own characteristics. This is commonplace in all mountainous regions. These groups resist absorption and annihilation. Although a Muslim state with a population that is 55 to 60 percent ethnically Persian, Iran is divided into a large number of ethnic groups. It is also divided between the vastly dominant Shia and the minority Sunnis, who are clustered in three areas of the country — the northeast, the northwest and the southeast. Any foreign power interested in Iran will use these ethnoreligious groups to create allies in Iran to undermine the power of the central government. Thus, any Persian or Iranian government has as its first and primary strategic interest maintaining the internal integrity of the country against separatist groups. It is inevitable, therefore, for Iran to have a highly centralized government with an extremely strong security apparatus. For many countries, holding together its ethnic groups is important. For Iran it is essential because it has no room to retreat from its current lines and instability could undermine its entire security structure. Therefore, the Iranian central government will always face the problem of internal cohesion and will use its army and security forces for that purpose before any other.
Geopolitical Imperatives
For most countries, the first geographical imperative is to maintain internal cohesion. For Iran, it is to maintain secure borders, then secure the country internally. Without secure borders, Iran would be vulnerable to foreign powers that would continually try to manipulate its internal dynamics, destabilize its ruling regime and then exploit the resulting openings. Iran must first define the container and then control what it contains. Therefore, Iran’s geopolitical imperatives:
1. Control the Zagros and Elburz mountains. These constitute the Iranian heartland and the buffers against attacks from the west and north.
2. Control the mountains to the east of the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut, from Mashhad to Zahedan to the Makran coast, protecting Iran’s eastern frontiers with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Maintain a line as deep and as far north and west as possible in the Caucasus to limit Turkish and Russian threats. These are the secondary lines.
3. Secure a line on the Shatt al-Arab in order to protect the western coast of Iran on the Persian Gulf.
4. Control the divergent ethnic and religious elements in this box.
5. Protect the frontiers against potential threats, particularly major powers from outside the region.
Iran has achieved four of the five basic goals. It has created secure frontiers and is in control of the population inside the country. The greatest threat against Iran is the one it has faced since Alexander the Great — that posed by major powers outside the region. Historically, before deep-water navigation, Iran was the direct path to India for any Western power. In modern times, the Zagros remain the eastern anchor of Turkish power. Northern Iran blocks Russian expansion. And, of course, Iranian oil reserves make Iran attractive to contemporary great powers. There are two traditional paths into Iran. The northeastern region is vulnerable to Central Asian powers while the western approach is the most-often used (or attempted). A direct assault through the Zagros Mountains is not feasible, as Saddam Hussein discovered in 1980. However, manipulating the ethnic groups inside Iran is possible. The British, for example, based in Iraq, were able to manipulate internal political divisions in Iran, as did the Soviets, to the point that Iran virtually lost its national sovereignty during World War II. The greatest threat to Iran in recent centuries has been a foreign power dominating Iraq —Ottoman or British — and extending its power eastward not through main force but through subversion and political manipulation. The view of the contemporary Iranian government toward the United States is that, during the 1950s, it assumed Britain’s role of using its position in Iraq to manipulate Iranian politics and elevate the shah to power. The 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq was a terrific collision of two states, causing several million casualties on both sides. It also demonstrated two realities. The first is that a determined, well-funded, no-holds-barred assault from Mesopotamia against the Zagros Mountains will fail (albeit at an atrocious cost to the defender). The second is that, in the nation-state era, with fixed borders and standing armies, the logistical challenges posed by the Zagros make a major attack from Iran into Iraq equally impossible. There is a stalemate on that front. Nevertheless, from the Iranian point of view, the primary danger of Iraq is not direct attack but subversion. It is not only Iraq that worries them. Historically, Iranians also have been concerned about Russian manipulation and manipulation by the British and Russians through Afghanistan.
The Current Situation
For the Iranians, the current situation has posed a dangerous scenario similar to what they faced from the British early in the 20th century. The United States has occupied, or at least placed substantial forces, to the east and the west of Iran, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran is not concerned about these troops invading Iran. That is not a military possibility. Iran’s concern is that the United States will use these positions as platforms to foment ethnic dissent in Iran.Indeed, the United States has tried to do this in several regions. In the southeast, in Balochistan, the Americans have supported separatist movements. It has also done this among the Arabs of Khuzestan, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. And it has tried to manipulate the Kurds in northwestern Iran. (There is some evidence to suggest that the United States has used Azerbaijan as a launchpad to foment dissent among the Iranian Azeris in the northwestern part of the country.)
The Iranian counter to all this has several dimensions:
1. Maintain an extremely powerful and repressive security capability to counter these moves. In particular, focus on deflecting any intrusions in the Khuzestan region, which is not only the most physically vulnerable part of Iran but also where much of Iran’s oil reserves are located. This explains clashes such as the seizure of British sailors and constant reports of U.S. special operations teams in the region.
2. Manipulate ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq and Afghanistan to undermine the American positions there and divert American attention to defensive rather than offensive goals.
3. Maintain a military force capable of protecting the surrounding mountains so that major American forces cannot penetrate.
4. Move to create a nuclear force, very publicly, in order to deter attack in the long run and to give Iran a bargaining chip for negotiations in the short term.
The heart of Iranian strategy is as it has always been, to use the mountains as a fortress. So long as it is anchored in those mountains, it cannot be invaded. Alexander succeeded and the Ottomans had limited success (little more than breaching the Zagros), but even the Romans and British did not go so far as to try to use main force in the region. Invading and occupying Iran is not an option. For Iran, its ultimate problem is internal tensions. But even these are under control, primarily because of Iran’s security system. Ever since the founding of the Persian Empire, the one thing that Iranians have been superb at is creating systems that both benefit other ethnic groups and punish them if they stray. That same mindset functions in Iran today in the powerful Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). (The Iranian military is configured mainly as an infantry force, with the regular army and IRGC ground forces together totaling about 450,000 troops, larger than all other service branches combined.)-Iran is, therefore, a self-contained entity. It is relatively poor, but it has superbly defensible borders and a disciplined central government with an excellent intelligence and internal security apparatus. Iran uses these same strengths to destabilize the American position (or that of any extraregional power) around it. Indeed, Iran is sufficiently secure that the positions of surrounding countries are more precarious than that of Iran. Iran is superb at low-cost, low-risk power projection using its covert capabilities. It is even better at blocking those of others. So long as the mountains are in Iranian hands, and the internal situation is controlled, Iran is a stable state, but one able to pose only a limited external threat. The creation of an Iranian nuclear program serves two functions. First, if successful, it further deters external threats. Second, simply having the program enhances Iranian power. Since the consequences of a strike against these facilities are uncertain and raise the possibility of Iranian attempts at interdiction of oil from the Persian Gulf, the strategic risk to the attacker’s economy discourages attack. The diplomatic route of trading the program for regional safety and power becomes more attractive than an attack against a potential threat in a country with a potent potential counter.Iran is secure from conceivable invasion. It enhances this security by using two tactics. First, it creates uncertainty as to whether it has an offensive nuclear capability. Second, it projects a carefully honed image of ideological extremism that makes it appear unpredictable. It makes itself appear threatening and unstable. Paradoxically, this increases the caution used in dealing with it because the main option, an air attack, has historically been ineffective without a follow-on ground attack. If just nuclear facilities are attacked and the attack fails, Iranian reaction is unpredictable and potentially disproportionate. Iranian posturing enhances the uncertainty. The threat of an air attack is deterred by Iran’s threat of an attack against sea-lanes. Such attacks would not be effective, but even a low-probability disruption of the world’s oil supply is a risk not worth taking. As always, the Persians face a major power prowling at the edges of their mountains. The mountains will protect them from main force but not from the threat of destabilization. Therefore, the Persians bind their nation together through a combination of political accommodation and repression. The major power will eventually leave. Persia will remain so long as its mountains stand.
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