According to this Asia Times article, the answer is emphatically yes. And the reason is because of the convergence of interests that will come together to oppose what the author contends are the Islamic Republic’s true goals.
Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional – that is, nuclear – weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.
An Iranian Reich with President Ahmedinejad playing the role of the Iranian Hitler ? It doesn’t sound so far fetched when you consider this:
Iran’s oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances, as I reported in Demographics and Iran’s imperial design (September 13, 2005). Just outside Iran’s present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.
And the result has been an almost universal conclusion, by the same foriegn leaders who so vehemently opposed the war in Iraq that Iran must be confronted and, if necessary, dealt with militarily. As the author points out, there are several reasons for this:
First, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have the most to lose from a nuclear-equipped Iran. No one can predict when the Saudi kingdom might become unstable, but whenever it does, Iran will stand ready to support its Shi’ite co-religionists, who make up a majority in the kingdom’s oil-producing east.
At some point the United States will reduce or eliminate its presence in Iraq, and the result, I believe, will be civil war. Under conditions of chaos Iran will have a pretext to expand its already substantial presence on the ground in Iraq, perhaps even to intervene militarily on behalf of its Shi’ite co-religionists.
And Iran’s ambitions may not just extend to the West and Southwest, but also to the North:
What now is Azerbaijan had been for centuries the northern provinces of the Persian Empire, and a nuclear-armed Iran could revive Persian claims on southern Azerbaijan. Iran continues to lay claim to a share of Caspian Sea energy resources under the Iranian-Soviet treaties of 1921 and 1940.
Can someone say Alsace Lorraine ?
Of course, the consequences are a potentially even more serious this time around:
Faced with encirclement and ruin, the Islamic Republic is fully capable of lashing out in a destructive and suicidal fashion, not only against Israel but against other antagonists. Whatever one may say about Chirac, he is not remotely stupid, and feels it prudent to warn Iran that pursuit of its imperial ambitions may lead to a French nuclear response. French intelligence evidently believes that Iran may express its frustrations through terrorist actions in the West.
Of course, there is one nation that is decidedly not joining in the international condemnation of Iran’s nuclear program, China:
By far the biggest loser in an Iranian confrontation with the West will be China, the fastest-growing among the world’s large economies, but also the least efficient in energy use. Higher oil prices will harm China’s economy more than any other, and Beijing’s reluctance to back Western efforts to encircle Iran are understandable in this context. It is unclear how China will proceed if the rest of the international community confronts Iran; in the great scheme of things it really does not matter.
Does this mean that there could even be a Chinese-Iranian alliance ? It seems unlikely that China would stand alone against the rest of the world at a time when it seeks to become a power in the world, but there are other ways that Beijing could dirsupt international intentions in the Middle East.
The author’s final paragraph is particularly grim:
Washington will initiate military action against Iran only with extreme reluctance, but it will do so nonetheless, except in the extremely unlikely event that Ahmedinejad were to stand down. Rather than a legacy of prosperity and democracy in the Middle East, the administration of US President George W Bush will exit with an economy weakened by higher oil prices and chaos on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere. But it really has no other options, except to let a nuclear-armed spoiler loose in the oil corridor. We have begun the third act of the tragedy that started on September 11, 2001, and I see no way to prevent it from proceeding.
An accurate picture of the future ? That is unclear. What is clear is that we are heading down the tracks of a major confrontation in the Persian Gulf, and this time it won’t be with a two-bit dictator with a third-rate army. How it will play out is something none of us can pretend to predict.
Technorati Tag: Iran, Middle East, nuclear proliferation, Foreign Policy
