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How Will Iran Behave After the Turmoil?

2 years ago
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David Wood
David Wood
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Will the surviving hard-line, conservative regime in Iran, battered and defiant, now lash out at the West in a new spasm of nationalist whip-up-the-masses fervor?
Or will a chastised Iranian leadership now seek to shore up its street cred with the protesters by slightly relaxing policies that have led it to sacrifice access to the West in order to pursue nuclear weapons and support terrorists?
Thirty years after a revolution swept Islamist clerics into power in Iran, unprecedented political upheaval has seriously weakened the supreme authority of senior clerics and their handpicked political leadership. At home and abroad, their credibility has been deeply eroded.
Yet they are still in power, and how they will react, at this crossroads, is unknown.
Should Iran choose angry confrontation, it can make plenty of trouble, U.S. intelligence analysts say – from shutting down Persian Gulf oil exports to accelerating its work on nuclear warheads – and it's not clear the Obama White House can do much about it.
First signs aren't encouraging.
In central Tehran this week, while government police and the Basiji paramilitary brutally tamped down street protests, pro-government demonstrators, under the approving eye of government security forces, burned U.S., British and Israeli flags, then massed at the former U.S. embassy to celebrate the 1979 seizure of 52 American hostages who were held for 444 days.
Iran expelled two British diplomats after accusing them of spying, and in Moscow, the Kremlin said it agreed with Iran's religious strongman, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that the election was won in a landslide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even before the current election crisis threw its legitimacy in doubt, the Ahmadinejad regime was the principal driving force behind the "flashpoints for intensified conflict'' across the Middle East, according to Dennis Blair, U.S. director of national intelligence.
Those flashpoints, where the Iranian regime could ratchet up the heat, include Israel's confrontation with Hamas and Hezbollah, which Iran has supplied with sophisticated weapons, including rockets, surface-to-air missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles. The Iranian regime could retaliate for U.S. "meddling" in its post-election turmoil simply by pressuring Hamas to reject any negotiations with Israel, a key U.S. goal.
Similarly, Iran could use its influence among Shiite groups in Iraq to raise the level of violence, just as American troops are scheduled to withdraw from Iraq's cities by next Tuesday.
It could cause greater difficulties in the Persian Gulf, which produces 40 percent of the world's globally traded oil, a resource carried by tankers which squeeze through a two-mile-wide channel at the Strait of Hormuz to reach the outside world.
The United States maintains a sizable presence in the Persian Gulf region, including the amphibious assault carrier USS Bataan, with a reinforced Marine battalion and two accompanying warships, and the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, currently conducting flight operations in the northern Arabian Sea.
In his most recent report on Persian Gulf security, analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, looked hard at Iranian capabilities and concluded that an Iranian strike could heavily damage oil tankers and even the U.S. fleet.
"Iran could launch a coordinated attack involving explosives-laden remote-controlled boats, swarming speedboats, semi-submersible torpedo boats, kamikaze unmanned aerial vehicles, midget and attack submarines, and shore-based anti-ship missile and artillery fire,'' Cordesman reported.
Senior U.S. naval commanders in the region concede that such an Iranian strike might temporarily close the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran would pay dearly.
Iran's nuclear development program poses the most serious problem for the United States. The Ahmadinejad regime has continued to thumb its nose at United Nations' efforts to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence officials say Iran continues to develop its uranium enrichment capability to make nuclear weapons material, and continues to develop long-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Blair, the most senior U.S. intelligence official, said this spring that Iran could resume work on building a nuclear warhead and accelerate its other efforts "if a decision were made to do so."
Whether that will happen is unclear.
"We have a fundamental change in the Iranian regime,'' said Joseph Cirincione, a prominent expert on nuclear proliferation and president of the Ploughshares Fund, which supports nonproliferation efforts.
Cirincione said the regime "will emerge weaker, not stronger,'' and is likely to be "focused on internal dynamics for a long time to come, no matter who emerges in the leadership.''
But Iran's nuclear program is widely popular across the country, said Jacqueline Shire, senior analyst on Iran's nuclear program at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank.
"I think it's too early to say right now'' how Iran's political turmoil will affect its nuclear program, she said. "My instinct tells me ... this is a point of major national pride that reflects scientific achievement. I think the nuclear program would be fairly low on the list of things that would be sacrificed or changed.''
Amid such uncertainty, analysts suggest taking some practical precautions – such as beefing up missile defenses in the Persian Gulf, working more closely with Gulf Arab states on defenses, and re-examining the economic sanctions in place against Iran to ensure they offer real incentives for change.
But don't bet on it.
"There are no quick and easy answers to the present regime in Iran, if it survives," Cordesman wrote this week.
Filed Under: Iran
Tagged: Ali Khamenei, AliKhamenei, iran, iran election, iran nuclear program, IranElection, IranNuclearProgram, mahmoud ahmadinejad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad., MahmoudAhmadinejad, MahmoudAhmadinejad.
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