Tehran Rising

Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine.com:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ilan Berman, Vice President for Policy of the Washington-based American Foreign Policy Council. An Adjunct Professor for International Law and Global Security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC., he serves as a member of the reconstituted Committee on the Present Danger, and as Editor of the Journal of International Security Affairs. He is the author of the new book Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States. READ MORE

FP: Mr. Berman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Berman: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Berman: Much of my day-to-day work at the American Foreign Policy Council involves tracking political and security trends in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Russian Federation. In the weeks and months after September 11th, I began noticing a troubling pattern. In country after country, new signs of Iranian activism - diplomatic, economic and even military - were emerging. The extent of these inroads over the past four years has been quite remarkable, and lead to an inescapable conclusion -- Tehran is rising, and rising rapidly.

FP: You argue that Iran poses the single greatest challenge to the U.S. Tell us how.

Berman: Quite simply, no other country today poses as great an obstacle to long-term U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East and beyond. Over the past two-and-a-half years, international attention has tended to focus almost exclusively on Iran's nuclear program, and for good reason. But as worrying as they are, the atomic ambitions of Iran's ayatollahs are only part of a larger strategy -- one that is designed to make the Islamic Republic the dominant geopolitical power in the Middle East.

Signs of this strategic offensive are everywhere. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, Iranian officials are busy creating alliances intended to dilute U.S. and European influence - and to create new outposts for their "Islamic Revolution." In the Persian Gulf, Tehran's massive, multi-year military expansion has begun to alter the regional balance of power, much to the detriment of the U.S.-led Coalition. Tehran has also deepened its support for a variety of terrorist groups, ranging from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to segments of the insurgency in Iraq.

In the process, Iran's leaders have sent a very clear message: their country has positioned itself as a spoiler for American policy in the greater Middle East.

FP: Expand a bit on the mullahs’ link with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and terrorists in Iraq.

Berman: Since the U.S. State Department began formally tracking terrorist trends two decades ago, one country - Iran - has consistently topped its list of state sponsors of terror. It is a mantle the Iranian regime has worn proudly for years, and not much has changed since September 11th. In fact, against the backdrop of the War on Terror, Iran has stepped up its support for its chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. It has assisted in the expansion of the group's activities abroad, and - with collusion from Syria - it has dramatically expanded Hezbollah's strategic capabilities through the provision of thousands of artillery rockets and short-range missiles.

As for al-Qaeda, Iran's links are much deeper than commonly understood. By now, the conventional wisdom that Shi'a Iran and Sunni al-Qaeda did not and do not collaborate should be definitively disproved. The tactical alliance between Tehran and the bin Laden network can be traced back to at least the early 1990s. And this partnership is not a thing of the past; over the past three years, Iran has had a major hand in providing safe haven to high-level al-Qaeda operatives - including Saad bin Laden, one of Osama bin Laden's oldest sons. It has also allowed al-Qaeda affiliates, like the radical Kurdish Ansar al-Islam and Jordanian-born master terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to operate freely on its territory, and provided them with political cover and logistical support in their war against U.S. and Coalition forces in Iraq.

FP: If Iran continues it nuclear advances, how will it affect the international balance of power?

Berman: It is clear that an atomic Iran would drastically alter the correlation of forces in the Middle East. Most directly, a number of regional states (such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt) are likely to seek nuclear arms themselves in an effort to counterbalance Iranian capabilities, touching off an arms race in the process. A more subtle shift should be expected as well; the Persian Gulf will become less and less hospitable to the United States as countries in the region attempt to create some sort of accommodation with their powerful newly-nuclear neighbor.

The greatest casualty of all, however, will be the Iranian people. Armed with nuclear weapons, Iran's ayatollahs will be able to repress their domestic opposition without fear of repercussions from the international community. The results? A new lease on life for the Islamic Republic, and a death knell for nascent Iranian democracy.

FP: What are the prospects for a successful democratic revolution in Iran?

Berman: Admittedly, revolutions are notoriously hard things to predict. Nevertheless, I think there are substantial reasons for optimism when it comes to Iran. The Islamic Republic today looks remarkably like the Soviet Union in the closing days of the Cold War. Unemployment is at 20 percent and climbing. Half of the population lives below the poverty line. Drug addiction and prostitution rates are skyrocketing, and per capita GDP is at 1977 levels. Most importantly, Iran is in the midst of a profound demographic transformation. Fully two-thirds of Iranians - almost 50 million people - are now under the age of thirty, which means that they have lived most (if not all) of their lives under the Islamic Revolution, and are acutely aware of its shortcomings. The resulting pro-American sentiment that is visible on the Iranian "street" makes these young Iranians a key constituency for the United States - that is, if we are indeed serious about "winning hearts and minds" in the Middle East.

FP: What policies do you recommend for the U.S. to adopt toward Iran immediately?

Berman: The fundamental problem confronting the United States is that the nuclear "clock" in Iran is ticking very fast, while the regime change "clock" is moving quite a bit slower.

Washington's first order of business therefore must be to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions. Here, a number of measures - ranging from stepped-up security coordination with Gulf states to regional deployments of missile defense to more aggressive counterproliferation - would help complicate Iran's path to the bomb, and neutralize its potential for WMD blackmail among its smaller, weaker neighbors.

Second, and even more important, the United States needs to use the resulting window of opportunity to empower, mobilize and bolster the Iranian opposition. This requires substantially expanding our public broadcasting into Iran, the way we did toward the Soviet bloc during the 1980s. It also means increasing outreach to opposition groups, both within Iran and abroad, and having a serious policy discussion in Washington about exactly which regime alternatives can and should have a seat at the policy-planning table.

FP: What are the chances that the diplomatic efforts of Europe or the UN will succeed in containing Iran's nuclear program?

Berman: Slim to none. I think it is useful to remember that the European track has been tried before; in the early- to mid-1990s, the EU attempted to moderate Iran's support for terrorism and pursuit of WMD through a series of diplomatic economic incentives. Predictably, that policy, known as "critical dialogue," was a complete failure. Yet European leaders seem determined to make the same mistakes over again.

As for the United Nations, the idea that the Security Council will take decisive action on the Iranian "nuclear file" constitutes more than a little bit of wishful thinking. After all, two of the permanent members of the Security Council - Russia and China - have had a major hand in enabling Tehran's atomic ambitions over the past two decades, and are certainly not eager for their nuclear dealings with Iran to become a matter of public record.

With the proper economic and diplomatic inducements, Russian President Vladimir Putin could perhaps be persuaded to see the light - particularly given the fact that Iran increasingly poses a threat to Russian citizens and to Russian interests in the Middle East. China is another story entirely, however. Over the past year, Beijing has codified at least two major energy deals with Tehran worth a combined $100 billion over the next quarter-century. In the process, Iran effectively has secured a Chinese veto if its nuclear program ever comes up for review at the Security Council.

FP: What do you make of the recent revision of U.S. intelligence estimates regarding when Iran will acquire a nuclear capability?

Berman: It is either very cynical, or very naive. The fact is, we don't know when an Iranian bomb will materialize. Many variables are at play here -- Iran has been active on the nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union for over a decade, and the CIA has admitted that it has been unable to definitively track Iran's clandestine procurement efforts there. Moreover, the nuclear cartel run by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, which supplied Iran with key nuclear know-how in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is not out of business, and could still be actively trading with the Iranian regime.

Significantly, though, the new CIA estimate is bound to carry a lot of political weight, because it effectively legitimizes Europe's nuclear diplomacy. After all, if an Iranian bomb is a decade away, there is plenty of time to negotiate.

In a way, though, all of this should be beside the point. When the American intelligence community thinks Iran will go nuclear is of little real consequence. The real timeline the United States needs to gear its strategy toward is when the most skittish member of its coalition thinks Iran will have the bomb. And that country, Israel, happens to think an atomic Iran could emerge substantially sooner than the CIA does.

FP: Mr. Berman, it was a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you for joining us.

Berman: My pleasure.