Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  We know that Ayatollah Khomeini cancelled the Shah’s nuclear-weapons program after the revolution in 1979 because it was “un-Islamic.” We know that Tehran started the program up again in the mid-eighties during the Iran-Iraq War, when it became clear that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons, and that it stopped again after international inspectors declared Iraq nuclear-free in 1994. We think that it was restarted once more in 1999 or 2000, and now we are told that it stopped again in 2003. What was that about?

  Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and then had a military coup, which must have worried the Iranians a lot. Then, after 9/11, the United States began claiming that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons again, which must have frightened them even more. So Tehran started working on nuclear weapons yet again—and then stopped in 2003, after Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the U.S. and Pakistan turned out to be relatively stable after all.

  That was also the year when it became known that Iran was working towards a full nuclear fuel cycle for its civil nuclear power program. That’s quite legal, but as it also gives the possessor the potential ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade, Iran came under international pressure to stop—so it suspended the enrichment program for three years and stopped the weapons program.

  It all makes sense, and you don’t need a single spy to figure it out. In fact, given the motives of most spies, you’re probably better off without them entirely.

  A properly trained and disciplined military will go along with an unnecessary war because they do not presume to second-guess the judgment of their political superiors, but they will often resist an unwinnable war. It’s they who would have to die in it, after all. So when it came to Iran, the U.S. intelligence services had a powerful although silent ally in the Pentagon.

  Despite the huge disparity in military power between the United States and Iran the latter would win any military confrontation in the Gulf. Overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. could not come up with the huge number of extra troops that would be needed to invade and occupy a mountainous country of seventy-five million people. It could bomb Iran to its heart’s content, hitting nuclear, military and port facilities, but then it would run out of options.

  Iran’s options, on the other hand, are very broad. It could just stop exporting oil. Pulling only Iran’s 3.5 million barrels per day off the market, in its present state, would send oil prices into the stratosphere. Or it could get tough and close down all oil-tanker traffic that comes within range of its missiles—which would mean little or no oil being exported from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. That would mean global oil rationing and industrial shutdowns.

  “Our coast-to-sea missile systems can now reach the length and breadth of the Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” boasted Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, in mid-2007, “and no warships can pass in the Gulf without being in range of our coast-to-sea missiles.” The latest generation of Iranian sea-skimming missiles have mobile, easily concealed launchers, and the missiles would come in fast and low from anywhere along almost two thousand kilometres of Iran’s Gulf coast.

  Iran could close the whole of the Gulf and its approaches to oil-tanker traffic: sink the first half-dozen tankers, and insurance rates for voyages to the Gulf would become prohibitive, even if you could find owners willing to risk their tankers. It’s very unlikely that U.S. air strikes could find and destroy all the missile launchers, so Iran wins.

  After a few months the other great powers would find some way for the United States to back away from the confrontation and let the oil start flowing again, but the U.S. would suffer a greater humiliation than it did in Vietnam, while Iran would emerge as the undisputed arbiter of the region. This is the war that the Pentagon did not want to fight, and it was quite right. By mid-2008, the likelihood of a U.S. attack on Iran was sinking fast.

  July 11, 2008

  SIX-TO-ONE AGAINST

  The Iranians have clearly concluded that all the American and Israeli threats to attack them are mere bluff. This explains the bravado of Iran’s little propaganda show on July 9, when it test-launched a number of ballistic missiles, including one that has the ability to carry a nuclear weapon and the range to strike Israel. This elicited the usual veiled threats of an attack on Iran from both Washington and Jerusalem, but the Iranians don’t believe them anymore.

  The main purpose of the tests was to strengthen the position of hardliners in domestic Iranian politics. They want to keep the confrontation with the United States and its allies alive, because they fear that other elements in the regime might bargain away Iran’s right to enrich nuclear fuel for civilian use.

  If neither the United States or Israel intends to attack Iran, this is a cost-free strategy: you win the domestic political struggle and nothing bad happens to you internationally. If you miscalculate, however, you get a war out of it. What are the odds that the Iranians are miscalculating?

  Many institutions try to analyze this question, and some of them will charge you quite a lot for an answer. However, all of them are essentially guessing what goes on in the minds of the U.S. president and/or the Israeli prime minister, both of whom are men in a hurry. Bush leaves office in January, and Ehud Olmert may be gone by September as the result of a corruption scandal.

  Prime Minister Olmert’s coalition government might collapse if he chose to attack Iran alone, and the Israeli military are clearly divided on the feasibility of such an attack. Besides, Israel could not do such a thing without Washington’s approval—Israeli aircraft would have to fly through Iraqi airspace, which is under U.S. control—so it all comes back to what Bush decides.

  He probably doesn’t know himself yet, and his main concern must be that senior soldiers and spies in Washington would go public to oppose such an adventure. In circumstances like these, I generally consult the International Institute for Discussing Current Affairs Over Dinner, whose advice can be had for the price of a good meal.

  Membership is limited to myself, my wife and my many talented children. Like me, they are experts in everything, and one of our most effective analytical tools is an exercise called Setting the Odds. A quorum of the Institute’s membership is currently on holiday in southern Morocco, and we deployed this technique at dinner last night.

  I offered my colleagues two-to-one odds that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Iran this year, and they laughed in my face. Their response was the same at odds of four-to-one. At six-to-one, one showed a mild interest, but still declined the offer. From which I deduce that for all the huffing and puffing in Washington and Jerusalem, an actual attack on Iran this year is extremely unlikely.

  You may object that this technique lacks scientific rigour. I would reply that so does everybody else’s, and at least you get a nice meal out of this one. Moreover, we have a good track record, mainly because we assume that, while individual leaders may lose the plot, large institutions like governments and armed forces are generally more rational in their choices.

  There are occasions when whole countries are so traumatized by some shock that truly bizarre decisions become possible—the United States after 9/11 was like that for a while—but this is not one of those times. The U.S. military has been war-gaming possible attacks on Iran since the 1990s, and it has never managed to find a scenario that resulted in a credible U.S. victory.

  Some people in the White House have convinced themselves that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow their government as soon as the first American bombs fall, but the professional soldiers in the Pentagon don’t believe in fairy tales. Six-to-one says that there will be no U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran this year.

  Then, finally, in 2009, the spotlight switched back to Iran’s domestic politics. Ahmadinejad rigged the presidential elections with the full support of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the outraged crowds came out on the streets. At first I expected a replay of the 1978-79 experience, but I was wrong.
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  July 21, 2009

  REVOLUTION WITHOUT MARTYRDOM?

  Young Iranians were back out on the streets in Tehran on Monday night, after almost a month’s hiatus. They were there again on Tuesday, despite the fact that there were many arrests. Their numbers will probably grow in the next week, for we are now nearing forty days since the regime’s Basij thugs brutally crushed the first round of demonstrations.

  In Iran’s Shia Muslim culture, forty days of mourning for the dead are usually followed by public demonstrations of grief. During the revolution against the Shah in 1978–79, that was when the crowds came out on the streets again, to be mown down once more by the Shah’s army. The cycle continued until the army, sick of killing unarmed fellow-countrymen, began to refuse the Shah’s orders.

  At least twenty young demonstrators, and possibly many more, were killed by the current regime’s paramilitary forces in late June. Will that old cycle of protest, killing, mourning and more protest repeat itself and lead to the overthrow of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the president whose disputed re-election he so firmly defends, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Probably not, but they could still lose.

  There will be no rerun of 1978 because today’s young Iranians are strikingly different from their parents’ generation thirty years ago. Those crowds had little to lose except their lives, and they were driven by a fatalistic courage that accepted death almost without demur. If you are fifteen or twenty-five or even thirty-five in Tehran today, you have lots to lose, and you do not want to die.

  Like some general expecting the next war to be just like the last, I didn’t understand this difference at first. But then the terrifying video clip of twenty-six-year-old Neda Agah-Soltan, shot down by a Basij sniper and dying in the street on June 21, got several million views inside Iran in twenty-four hours. After that, you could practically hear millions of young Iranians saying: “That could be me.” They didn’t want it to be, and the streets emptied.

  So, don’t expect escalating street protests to make Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad retreat. However, it’s possible that cautious, limited, recurrent protests could be part of a more complex strategy that ultimately accomplishes the same goal, for the ruling elite itself is deeply split. That has not happened before.

  The three “reformers” who now lead the opposition to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are the three people who made most of the day-to-day decisions in the country from the time of the revolution until only four years ago. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who ran against Ahmadinejad in this year’s presidential election (and may really have won it), was the prime minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989; Ali Akbar Rafsanjani was president from 1989 to 1997; and Mohammad Khatami was president from 1997 to 2005.

  Mousavi has always faced unrelenting hostility from the ultra-conservative Ali Khamenei. As president in 1981, Khamenei refused to accept Mousavi as prime minister (even though he had been legitimately chosen by parliament) until the Old Man himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, intervened and insisted that Mousavi be allowed to take office.

  The strong suspicion that this time the election itself was rigged by Khamenei’s supporters to exclude Mousavi from office has only made him more defiant. His website dismisses the regime’s claim that the protests were inspired by Iran’s foreign enemies with contempt: “Isn’t it an insult to 40 million voters … linking detainees to foreign countries? Let people freely express their protests and ideas.”

  Rafsanjani, in a sermon at Tehran University last Friday, aligned himself firmly with Mousavi, demanding an end to the media clampdown and the release of people arrested during the protests. He also referred indirectly to the fact that he actually chairs the committee that elects the Supreme Leader, and can dismiss him.

  Khatami went further on Monday, calling for a referendum on the alleged outcome of the election. “People must be asked whether they are happy with the situation that has taken shape,” he said. “I state openly that reliance upon the people’s vote and the staging of a legal referendum is the only way for the system to emerge from the current crisis.” It was after that that the protestors reappeared on the streets.

  They will not sweep the regime away, and if its henchmen start killing them again they will prudently withdraw from the streets for a while—but only to devise safer ways of making their resentment felt. Meanwhile, a parallel campaign will be waged within the ranks of the Islamic clergy, mixing fine theological points with crass appeals to self-interest. This will not be an epic tale of heroism and martyrdom, but a complicated and mostly obscure contest for the future of the Islamic Republic.

  The hard-liners’ hope, understandably enough, was that, after a while, the outrage at Ahmadinejad’s implausible re-election to the presidency would subside into a sullen acceptance of the inevitable. That has not happened. Iran is in for a lengthy struggle, with an unpredictable outcome.

  12.

  AFRICA

  Most African countries are actually poorer now than they were when they got their independence in the 1960s or 1970s. Back then, countries like China and Malaysia were the basket cases; now they bustle and glisten, while flying over most African countries at night is like flying over the sea. There are no lights. And Africans are not just poor. They are besieged by tyranny, corruption and violence. Few people would choose to be born in Africa; nobody would choose to be born there and be female.

  But things can change. Until the recent recession, Africa’s average economic growth rate over the previous eight years was 5 percent. Keep that up, and the gross domestic product will quadruple in less than thirty years. All they have to do is get the politics right.

  January 2, 2008

  KENYA: HOPE AND BETRAYAL

  More than two years ago, when Kenya’s current opposition leader, Raila Odinga, quit President Mwai Kibaki’s government, I wrote the following: “The trick will be to get Kibaki out without triggering a wave of violence that would do the country grave and permanent damage … Bad times are coming to Kenya.”

  The bad times have arrived, but the violence that has swept Kenya since the stolen election on December 27 is not just African “tribalism.” Members of the Kikuyu tribe have been the main target of popular wrath and non-Kikuyu protesters have been the principal victims of the security forces, but this confrontation is about trust betrayed, hopes dashed and patience strained to the breaking point.

  Nobody wants a civil war in Kenya, but it’s easy to see why Raila Odinga rejects calls from abroad to accept the figures for the national vote that were announced last Sunday. If Odinga enters a “government of national unity” under Kibaki, as the African Union and the United States want, then he’s back in the untenable situation that he was in until 2005, and Kibaki will run Kenya for another five years.

  If Odinga leaves it to Kenya’s courts to settle, the result will be the same: there have been no decisions yet on disputed results that went to the courts after the 2002 election. So when the opposition leader was asked by the BBC if he would urge his supporters to calm down, he replied: “I refuse to be asked to give the Kenyan people an anaesthetic so that they can be raped.”

  Despite the ugly scenes of recent days, Kenya is not an ethnic tinder-box where people automatically back their own tribe and hate everyone else. For example, it is clear that more than half the people who voted Mwai Kibaki into the presidency in the 2002 election were not of his own Kikuyu tribe, because the Kikuyu, although they are the biggest tribe, only account for 22 percent of the population.

  Kibaki’s appeal was the promise of honest government after twenty-four years of oppressive rule, rigged elections and massive corruption under the former president, Daniel arap Moi. If he had been just another thug in a suit, most Kenyans would have put up with Kibaki’s subsequent behaviour in the same old cynical way, but his victory was seen as the dawn of a new Kenya where the bad old ways no longer reigned. It is his abuse of their high hopes that makes the current situation so emotional.

  By 2005, Kibaki’
s dependence on an inner circle of fellow Kikuyu politicians was almost total and the corruption was almost as bad as it had been under Moi. The British ambassador, Sir Edward Clay, accused Kibaki’s ministers of arrogance and greed, which led them to “eat like gluttons” and “vomit on the shoes” of foreign donors and the Kenyan people. The biggest foreign donors, the United States, Britain and Germany, suspended their aid to the country in protest against the corruption.

  Most of the leading reformers quit Kibaki’s government in 2005, and in the weeks before last month’s election, their main political vehicle, the Orange Democratic Movement, had a clear lead in the polls. That lead was confirmed in the parliamentary vote on December 27, 2007, which saw half of Kibaki’s cabinet ministers lose their seats and gave the opposition a clear majority in parliament. But the presidential vote was another matter.

  Raila Odinga won an easy majority in six of Kenya’s eight provinces, but in Central, the Kikuyu heartland, the results were withheld until long after the vote had been announced for more remote regions. Observers were banned from the counting stations in Central and from the central tallying room in Nairobi—and on December 30, Samuel Kivuitu, the chairman of the electoral commission, declared that Kibaki had won the national vote by just 232,000 votes in a nation of thirty-four million.

  It stank to high heaven. Ridiculously high turnouts were claimed for polling stations in Central—larger than the total of eligible voters, in some cases—and 97.3 percent of the votes there allegedly went to Kibaki. It was an operation designed to return Kibaki to office while preserving a facade of democratic credibility, but no foreign government except the United States congratulated Kibaki on his “victory,” not even African ones, and local people were not fooled.