The now-joined struggle
for Iranian hearts and minds is where the universal battle of
ideas -- democracy vs. tyranny -- meets the dictates of Middle
Eastern geography. Whereas Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and other
Arab states are puzzle pieces carved out of featureless
desert, with no venerable traditions of statehood, the roots
of a great Persian power occupying the Iranian plateau date to
the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid empires. With nearly 70
million people occupying the tableland between the oil-rich
Caspian Sea and the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Iran is the Muslim
world’s universal joint.
Iranian power, both soft
and hard, is felt from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Indeed,
Iran’s influence in southern Lebanon and Gaza is part of a
historical tradition of empire and Shiite rule. By puncturing
the legitimacy of the clerical authority, the demonstrations
in Tehran and other cities have the capacity to herald a new
era in Middle Eastern and Central Asian politics.
Iran’s governing
institutions, however illiberal their current intent, are
structurally sounder than most in the Arab world. When the
shah was toppled, anarchy did not ensue: Within weeks, a
Shiite bureaucratic apparatus filled the void. That
sophisticated network reflected not just religion but also
Iranian high culture.
The Iran of the
ayatollahs was never a one-dimensional tyranny such as Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq; it is a complex system with an elected
parliament and chief executive. Likewise, Iran’s democracy
movement is strikingly Western in its organizational
discipline and its urbane use of technology. In terms of
development, Iran is much closer to Turkey than to Syria or
Iraq. While the latter two live with the possibility of
implosion, Iran has an internal coherence that allows it to
bear down hard on its neighbors. In the future, a democratic
Iran could be, in a benevolent sense, as influential in
Baghdad as the murder squads of a theocratic Iran have been in
a malignant sense.
Iran is so central to
the fate of the Middle East that even a partial shift in
regime behavior -an added degree of nuance in its approach to
Iraq, Lebanon, Israel or the United States-could dramatically
affect the region. Just as a radical Iranian leader can
energize the "Arab street," an Iranian reformer can energize
the emerging but curiously opaque Arab bourgeoisie. This is
why the depiction of presidential candidate Mir Hossein
Mousavi as but another radical, albeit with a kinder, gentler
exterior than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, completely misses
the point.
As in the former Soviet
Union, change in Iran can come only from the inside; only an
insider, be it a Mousavi or a Mikhail Gorbachev, has the
necessary bona fides to allow daylight into the system,
exposing its flaws. Only a staunch supporter of the Islamic
Republic such as Mousavi would have been trusted to campaign
at all, even as he is now leading a democratic movement that
has already undermined the Brezhnevite clerical regime. It is
unfinished business of the Cold War that we have been
witnessing the past few days. The Iranian struggle for
democracy is now as central to our foreign policy as that for
democracy in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
It is crucial that we
reflect on an original goal of regime change in Iraq. Anyone
who supported the war must have known that toppling Saddam
Hussein, a Sunni Arab -- whether it resulted in stable
democracy, benign dictatorship or sheer chaos -- would
strengthen the Shiite hand in the region. This was not seen as
necessarily bad. The Sept. 11 terrorists had emanated from the
rebellious sub-states of the sclerotic Sunni dictatorships of
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose arrogance and aversion to reform
had to be allayed by readjusting the regional balance of power
in favor of Shiite Iran. It was hoped that Iran would undergo
its own upheaval were Iraq to change. Had the occupation of
Iraq been carried out in a more competent manner, this
scenario might have unfolded faster and more transparently.
Nevertheless, it is happening. And not only is Iran in the
throes of democratic upheaval, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have
both been quietly reforming apace.
In recent years, an
anti-Iranian alliance of sorts has emerged of Israel and those
tired Sunni Arab dictatorships. Throughout Iranian history,
dating to Cyrus the Great, Jews and Persians have often had an
alliance against the mass of Arabs and other peoples that
border Iran to the west and south. In brief visits to Iran, I
have sensed a greater aversion to Saudi Arabia, for instance,
than to Israel. A virulent hatred of Jews may turn out to have
been an attribute of the clerical regime, which won’t outlive
it, at least not to the same extent. The late Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi did, in fact, maintain an implicit alliance with
Israel, and future Iranian leaders must look at the world from
the same geographical position as he did, without the baggage
of Third World radicalism with which the mullahs had been
indoctrinated early in the Khomeini period.
But a future
behind-the-scenes battle between Sunni Arabs and Shiite
Iranians for a silent strategic contract with Israel can be
effected only if the United States exerts strong pressure on
Israel to cede West Bank territory. Never has there been a
better time to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement, even if it requires the collapse of today’s
Israeli coalition in the process.
The Middle East has
entered a period of deep flux, to be further amplified by
elections in Iraq later this year and the seating of a
pro-Western government in Lebanon. Because of its central
geographic and demographic position astride the energy-rich
Middle East -- not to mention the attractive force of Persian
culture seeping far into Central Asia -- Iran, ironically, has
a better chance to dominate the region under dynamic
democratic rule than it has ever had under its benighted
clerisy. And that could be very good for the United States.
Robert D. Kaplan is a
senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a
national correspondent for The Atlantic.
