The Big Winner in the "War Against Terror" Is Iran
    By Olivier Roy
    Le Figaro

    Wednesday 20 September 2006

    Five years after the launch of the war against terrorism, terrorism is doing just fine, for the good reason that the "war" has missed its objective: President Bush has successively challenged Iraq and Iran; he announces the opening of a broad front that extends from Lebanon to Afghanistan, the principal axis of which today would be Iran. He quite simply forgets that the one who brought the war, Osama bin Laden, is still alive and active ... in Pakistan, but never mentioned by the president. Bin Laden is enjoying the benefit of a new territorial sanctuary there, thanks to an agreement signed by the Pakistani government and local Taliban partisans. Moreover, recent attempts at attacks in London have shown that the Pakistani connection tends to be central today in the terrorist equation. And yet, the finger now points at Iran. Ever since the invasion of Iraq, then, the Americans have developed the art of seeking bin Laden there where he is not. Difficult, then to justify the extension of the field of the strugle against terrorism unless bin Laden is made a marginal element in the framework of a new strategic vision entirely centered on the Iranian threat.

    What therefore would be the nature of this Iranian threat? It doesn't have much to do with terrorism, but involves the nuclear question. An Iranian nuclear program poses two problems: the general problem of proliferation and the specific problem of the place a possible bomb would take in Islamic Iran's strategy. The simple fact that Iran became nuclear, whatever its regime, would incite at least two countries to launch themselves into the arms race: Turkey and Saudi Arabia, followed by Egypt. The effect of proliferation is mechanical. But the fact that Iran at this moment is led by a militant Islamic regime obviously adds to the worry, in particular, within Israel. It is therefore appropriate to put these two facts into perspective: Iran as a regional power and Iran as an ideological religious state, for the regime plays on both registers.

    We find first of all one constant, one anterior to the Islamic revolution and that will survive it: Iran's self-assertion as a regional power, essentially turned toward the Gulf and that wishes to pose as the "big godfather" in the region. The countries targeted in this respect are all the Arab regimes and above all the petro-monarchies. The Shah of Iran grabbed the Emirate islands of Tumb and Musa in 1981; he intervened in Oman and Pakistani Baluchistan, all the while supporting the Kurds against Saddam Hussein and initiating talks with the Imam Moussa Sadr, the architect of Lebanese Shiite political renewal. Iraq, with which Teheran had a territorial dispute, was the main adversary. For the Shah, the strategy of bypassing the Arab states took the form of an alliance with Israel. It's the Shah who launched Iran's nuclear program with European support (the Eurodif program).

    The Islamic revolution changed Iran's objectives less than it did its methods for achieving them. The bypass of the Arab regimes is no longer achieved through alliance with Israel, but, on the contrary, through an appeal launched at the Muslim "Umma" to reunite around the Islamic revolution against the leadership in place in the Arab world. Iran has presented itself then as the leader in the Rejection Front. Under Khomeini, the rivalry with Iraq was expressed in revolutionary terms ("the path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala": i.e., before launching a battle against Israel, Saddam must first be overthrown). Everything was centered on the war with Iraq; on other fronts, Iran remained cautious (in spite of a violent speech against the little Satan, the USSR, Islamic Iran was careful not to provoke the Soviets; in Afghanistan, it supported the Shiites only, and even then, only those who agreed to acknowledge the leadership of the Iranian Guide.)

    But that appeal for the overthrow of Arab regimes failed: traditional Sunni Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood) as well as the Palestinians lined up behind Iraq during its war with Iran (1980-1988). The Saudis and the Pakistanis stirred up a very anti-Shiite Sunni radicalization from which the al-Qaeda movement would emerge. Only one part of the non-Iranian Shiites joined the revolution (the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). Suddenly, Arab nationalism and Sunni Salafism - in conflict up until then - began a process of convergence that one would rediscover during all the two decades that followed.

    Twenty years after the revolution, wanting to fuse Islamism and anti-Imperialism, revolutionary Iran found itself de facto shut up inside a Shiite axis that was more of a prison than a trampoline. The Khatami period was also a consequence of this foreign policy failure: internal liberalization went along with a timid opening toward the United States.

    It's the war against terrorism conducted by President Bush starting in 2001 that was to allow Iran to recover its dream of making a breakthrough in the Arab world and taking regional leadership. Iran is, in effect, the big winner of the war against terrorism. It's been rid of its two opponents, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, without firing a shot. Washington cannot hope to stabilize Iraq without the neutrality of Tehran, which, in any case, sees its local allies arrive in power in Baghdad. Finally, the last war in Lebanon has made Shiite Hezbollah, at least provisionally, the hero of the Arab street. The Shiite arc and the rejection front coincide in spite of the antagonisms between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. All the country needs to do to now to create a complete sanctuary for itself is to leave the nuclear military option open.

    Westerners are faced with a difficult choice: real sanctions against Iran presume a confrontation in fact, while they are bogged down in three conflicts (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon) in which the Iranians enjoy local relays and when the West's own allies (the Gulf countries, Iraqi Kurds, Armenia and Afghanistan) would be the first to bypass the sanctions, without even mentioning false allies like Russia, China, even Japan.

    What can Ahmadinejad do? After having regionalized the conflict and raised the stakes by his violently anti-Israeli declarations, the regime suddenly adopts a more flexible line, suggested by Khatami - who is no dissident - during his last visit to the United States: in exchange for soothing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Lebanon, Iran could de facto continue enrichment - in short UN 1701 for 1559, the Gulf in exchange for the Near East. For the West, it's obviously exchanging the reversible for the irreversible. It is not very likely that a durable agreement could be arrived at with Iran in the present climate. The only way left then, is to disconnect all the different conflicts from one another, to talk with Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria - that is, precisely to cease talking about a global war against terror. That expression only poorly conceals a mixture of arrogance and impotence that has played into the hands of Iran as well as bin Laden. We must return to a political analysis of the conflicts in th Middle East and stop with the ideology.

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    Olivier Roy is an expert on Islam, and the Director of Research at the CNRS (French National Center for Social research). His latest book to be published is La La cit face l'Islam ("Secularism Faced With Islam"), published by Stock.

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