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COMMENTARY
October 18, 2003
World Series
The discussion about Iran this week has turned on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Abadi. She was met on her return to Iran by thousands of zealous well-wishers to whom she is a symbol of democracy and freedom. The Western media with their usual obtuseness speculate about whether this will give a boost to the reforming faction in Iranian politics. Yet they continue to assume that Mohammad Khatami the twice-elected if essentially powerless president is the key "reformer". He is instead the charming stooge of the fanatic ayatollahs against whom he shadow-boxes. He keeps his position at their pleasure and provides the pretty face past which Europe and the U.S. State Department parade aid trade and well-wishing missions. It is no longer easy to find anyone in Iran itself who takes him as other than a stooge. And one will understand why after listening to what President Khatami had to say about Ms Abadi's empty Nobel prize. He called the bestowal of it "politically-motivated" an attempt to "embarrass all Muslims and the people of Iran". Which is just what the "hard-line" ayatollahs would have said had they condescended to offer an opinion. The true reformers of Iran long since took to the streets and have been so far as I can see defeated there. The high point of the popular rebellion with its demands for free elections and the separation of mosque and state came in early July. The ayatollahs proved themselves to be in control of the situation seeing off the campus and other street actions with a casual brutality which got them serious attention nowhere in the West. My own assessment from what Iranian sources I have directly and indirectly is that the net effect of the Nobel Prize to Ms Ebadi is nil. The only thing that could make an immediate difference in Iran's domestic situation would be direct confrontation with the United States. Which is why so many Iranians -- including the late Ayatollah Khomenei's own grandson now speaking from safety in Shia Iraq -- are begging for this. They are likely to be disappointed. Faced with the near-certainty that Iran will soon become the first Middle Eastern power other than Israel with nuclear weapons -- the perfect cover for increased Hizbollah operations throughout the region and the world -- the Bush administration is behaving like France. Pressure for increased inspections of Iranian nuclear sites is being directed almost entirely through the United Nations. And the ayatollahs are being allowed to play a Saddam-like game in which as Thursday they opened a few more centres to inspection by the IAEA in order to take the wind out of an Oct. 31 deadline to open all. Let me spell out what I hinted in the last paragraph. The immediate danger from a nuclear-armed Iran is not that they will pump a missile into Tel Aviv as Ayatollah Rafsanjani has boasted in the past. They are not so crazy. The threat itself is sufficient to win concessions from any enemy; whereas acting on the threat would only bring Armageddon. A deployed nuclear arsenal instead provides its owner with the freedom to do anything else he wants with near impunity. And that "anything else" is likely to consist of using Hizbollah and other Iranian-controlled terrorist assets to rekindle the Islamic Revolution which Khomenei began far beyond Iran's borders. Iran is not the only threat. One of the more unnerving now emerging is the possibility Pakistan might station some of its own nuclear arsenal on Saudi Arabian territory ostensibly as a counter to the Iranian weapons that Pakistan helped develop (funnelling nuclear and missile technology to Iran from China and North Korea). The Saudis have adamantly denied that they have their own nuclear weapons programme and there is no convincing reason to think they do; but they could get around their signature on non-proliferation agreements by leaving Pakistanis in control of the arsenal on the analogy of the U.S. deployment of weapons in non-proliferating Germany. The only difference being that the Saudis have largely paid for Pakistan's nuclear development. If this all sounds rather incestuous or triangular it is probably because it is. What all parties share -- Iran Saudi Arabia Pakistan -- is the commitment to an "Islamic bomb" which all believe perhaps rightly can provide the great equalizer between a weak Islamic world and a strong West. The parties disagree about the form of the Islamic ideology they represent; but hardly disagree about the need to empower Islam in some form; or to preserve their own regimes against the threat of secularizing and democratizing forces. It is what puts each of them into a special relationship with international terrorism -- though much different in kind from country to country. Iran is at the cutting edge however. In the absence of deeply-penetrating human agents we cannot trust Western intelligence to guess when or even how Iran may suddenly declare what the North Koreans have recently declared -- that they have got beyond the point at which any plausible quick strike could knock out their nuclear capabilities. We can only know that when that point is reached we have a whole new ball game; a true World Series. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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