Preparing for the Showdown
The unfolding drama in Iran had consequences not only domestically, but for the entire region. Throughout the decade, the Islamic Republic had served as the dynamo that galvanized opposition against the region’s Western-backed security regimes. The irony was that since al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Iran and the United States had largely shared the same enemies. By overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and elevating Shiites in Iraq, Washington helped extend Iran’s regional influence east and west. America’s remodelling of the region, based on forcible regional regime change and transition from despotism to democracy, further gave voice to the region’s (mainly Islamist) dispossessed, whom Iran saw as its natural allies. As late as June 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addressed students at the American University in Cairo with the words:
For 60 years my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people…[including] freedom from the midnight knock of the secret police.
A series of regional changes prompted a reassessment of this mission of democratization which appeared to dovetail with Iranian interests. In January 2006, following Ahmadinejad’s election, Iran relaunched its nuclear enrichment programme, refocusing Western policymakers on the threat Iran posed to their hegemony. By the end of 2009, Iran was operating sufficient centrifuges to produce a nuclear bomb, had tested the solid-fuel Sajjil missile which, it boasted, could deliver a warhead within a 1,300-kilometre radius, and had launched a satellite into orbit. Its capabilities helped project Iran’s influence across the region. Secondly, a series of sequential Islamist electoral successes highlighted the fragility of regimes Washington counted amongst its traditional allies, and the possible expansion of an anti-Western camp in an area of strategic and economic primacy. Finally, shaken by their failures in Iraq, America’s neo-conservative camp fell from grace. In December 2006, the Bush administration accepted the report of a Congressional panel – the Iraq Study Group, comprised of the leading diplomatic doyens of American realpolitik – which recommended changing tack to ‘a US policy that emphasizes political and economic reforms instead of advocating regime change’. Washington abandoned its carping against friendly Arab security regimes, increased its provision of military support, and stoked regional fears of Iran’s nuclear and hegemonic ambitions in the Arab heartland.
The volte-face was intended to save the region from metastasizing into proxy civil wars and extinguish the sectarian flames. Instead it did the reverse. By reverting to what they knew best – supporting unpopular regimes and deeming tyranny a lesser evil than political Islam, US leaders fuelled a new cycle of confrontation that pitted Sunni Arab security regimes and Israel against transnational forces egged on by Iran. The mounting tension could be felt across the region. The two rival camps scouted for local pawns to use as leverage, turning the region into a chessboard in which the smallest encounter was a test of the balance of forces.
In Iraq, Iran found leverage in the plethora of armed Shia groups who had surfaced since the invasion, and who in the event of an Israeli or US attack on Iran it hoped to activate in order to bog down US forces. It thus exercised an effective veto over whether American troops made an orderly withdrawal or hurried defeat. It also entered into a formal strategic ‘alliance’ with Syria in 2006, persuading Damascus to cross a threshold it had hitherto studiously avoided. In Lebanon, Hizbollah gave Iran a bridge to the Mediterranean, leverage against America’s 14 March allies, and some deterrence against an Israeli strike in Iran. And in Gaza, Hamas offered Iran a similar base to project its interests against not only Israel, but also Mubarak’s Egypt.
The rising levels of acrimony testified to the growing polarization. A senior member of Khamenei’s office revived Iranian claims to Bahrain as Iran’s fourteenth province, and Khamenei’s military advisor warned that Iran had the means to ‘burn the region, its military bases, even the oil wells of the Gulf Cooperation Council [the association of Arabian peninsula states] should Iran come under American military attack’. Egypt and Israel tightened their security cooperation, particularly over Gaza. In early 2009, Cairo announced the capture of arms smugglers on its territory allegedly linked to Iran and Hizbollah, and Israel reportedly bombed a convoy trafficking Iranian arms to Gaza as far south as Sudan. Egypt also publicly allowed Israeli submarines to pass through the Suez Canal, suggesting that they were bound for waters off the coast of Iran.
Much of the bile was sectarian. Sunni media outlets fanned alarmist reports of a Shia proselytization programme sweeping Arab capitals, particularly Damascus. Iraqi refugees, Iranian funding for schools, Shia religious college stipends, and a surfeit of Persian translation agencies all served as purported covers. Morocco formally accused Iran of spreading Shiism in the Maghreb, and severed ties. The region’s faultlines, hitherto defined by the Arab–Israeli conflict, were increasingly morphing into an Arab–Persian (or Sunni–Shia) divide.
Much as in the Soviet–US Cold War, small fires born of local grievances acquired geo-political strategic import. Flare-ups in Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza became magnets for outside interests, magnifying their intensity.
After four years of relative obscurity, Yemen’s offensive against the Houthis in its northern outback showed increasing signs of morphing into a proxy war. Houthi leaders accused Saudi Arabia and US drones of aiding Yemen in its suppression of Zaydi revivalists. Yemen and Saudi Arabia both charged Iran with using the Houthis as a cat’s paw to establish a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. In November 2009, Saudi Arabia formally engaged in its first cross-border military intervention since the Gulf War in 1991, using Apache helicopters to repulse what it claimed was Houthi penetration of its border. In a further attempt to prevent a Shia spillover, Riyadh allocated $5 billion to construct a fence the length of its border with Yemen, reportedly imposed a naval blockade around Yemen to prevent Iranian arms shipments, and cleared Shia Ismaili villages on the Saudi side of the border. Presenting the conflict as a showdown between two standard-bearers of the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki denounced Saudi interference as ‘deplorable’ and a fellow general accused Riyadh of practising ‘state terrorism’. Ayatollah Sistani, too, issued a statement condemning ‘the repressive persecution of the Zaydi sect’ and in Bahrain Shia protestors clashed with Sunni security forces outside the parliament building, as Shia parliamentarians inside opposed a motion supporting the Saudi offensive.
Lebanon aroused even greater emotions, as both camps poured in political and material capital. Ever since the 1970s, Lebanon had served as the ring within which the region’s powerbrokers wrestled to prove their prowess.
Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel elevated Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, from a sectarian Lebanese leader to a regional hero. Remarkably, Yusuf Qaradawi, spiritual mentor of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, reversed his earlier anti-Shia rulings and declared it incumbent on all Muslims to support Hizbollah. Even bin Laden’s mentor and right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called for a pact with ‘Lebanon’s disinherited’, and praised their resistance in the face of official Arab ‘treachery’. A newspaper in Cairo hailed Nasrallah a neo-Nasser, the ultimate Egyptian accolade. Harnessing the political capital he had gained, Nasrallah gave a post-war speech addressing the region, not only the Lebanese, in his appeal for people to cast aside their confessional differences and choose between the disenfranchised masses and the perfidious elite; between the followers of muqawwama (resistance) and musawwama (compromise).
In the aftermath of the war, the 14 March’s patrons tried to recoup their losses. Saudi Arabia rushed funds to repair the war damage, in a race with Iran for delivery. The UN sent a European-led force of peacekeepers into South Lebanon, which though more powerful than its UNIFIL predecessor lacked a mandate to disarm Hizbollah. As Iran replenished H
izbollah’s depleted arsenal, Washington committed $410 million in post-war military aid for Lebanon’s armed forces. The funds, said a visiting senior US commander, would create ‘the army that sooner or later will have to stand up to the armed branch of Hizbollah’.
With outside forces bolstering rival security factions, Lebanese politicians feared a descent into civil war. Fearful of the army’s rank-and-file Shia, the US diverted funds to such Sunni institutions as the Information Section intelligence agency. But they proved scant match for Hizbollah. When in May 2008, Hizbollah took over West Beirut, Sunni politicians could do little but wail from the sidelines. ‘Are the streets of Beirut the terrain for the resistance? Is Israel here in Beirut?’ asked prime minister Fuad Siniora, as the country’s armed forces stood aside. Hizbollah again proved it was Lebanon’s prevailing power.
Perhaps Iran’s most striking success was crossing confessional boundaries to assume patronage of the ascendant Palestinian force, the Sunni Islamist movement, Hamas. Although the ties dated back years, from Hamas’s perspective the alignment occurred as much by default as by design. After Western and neighbouring powers had rebuffed Hamas’s attempts to engage, and stripped it of funding, it had scant alternative. As Western powers extended political backing and military training and arms to its rival, Fatah, under General Keith Dayton, the United States Security Coordinator in Jerusalem, Hamas sought similar support from Iran.
With Palestine’s economy almost entirely dependent on outside sources, the local demand for intra-Palestinian reconciliation was weaker than the external forces wrenching Hamas and Fatah apart. Following the bifurcation of Gaza and the West Bank in June 2007, each camp bolstered their respective proxies with further inflows of military aid to consolidate their hold in their respective enclaves. Washington committed $370 million over four years to train West Bank security forces, which in return it expected to coordinate with Israel and target Islamists.
As in the Lebanon war, Israel’s 2008–2009 war in Gaza was intended to repulse Iranian influence, and restore the territory from which Israel had withdrawn to a pro-Western sphere of influence. Initially it seemed a repeat of the Lebanon fiasco. Hamas fired its Iranian-supplied arsenal of medium-range rockets, reaching to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and accrued political capital by surviving almost as long as Hizbollah without waving a white flag. At an emergency Arab League summit in Qatar, attended by the leaders of its Islamist and regional allies, Hamas successfully portrayed Israel as a bully state, draining its offensive of international legitimacy.
But as the dust settled, the reality appeared less convincing. With only a handful of Israelis killed by Hamas fire throughout the month-long assault, Israel’s bombardment revealed the limitations of the deterrence capabilities of Iran’s supposed satellites. With much of the Gaza government’s infrastructure ravaged, and Iran’s supply lines directly targeted, Israel’s operation offered a foretaste – or ‘pre-introduction’ in the words of an Israeli diplomat – of how a future region-wide confrontation might look. Although Hamas survived in Gaza, it henceforth did so as a largely pliant force operating within Egypt’s and Israel’s orbit. Fearful of an Islamist emirate on its northern border, Egypt intensified its own siege on Gaza. In the midst of the war, pro-Western Arab states boycotted an Arab League gathering attended by Hamas in Doha and mustered a rival summit of their own. More blatantly still, six European leaders travelled together to Jerusalem to dine with Olmert and applaud his victory. Whereas in July 2006, Hizbollah had responded to an Israeli assault on Gaza by launching its own cross-border raid, this time it kept quiet. ‘The Iranian camp,’ scoffed an Israeli general, ‘fights for Palestine to the last Palestinian.’
The Gaza war highlighted how overblown the fear of Iranian hegemony had become. Given its mute response to the assault on Gaza, the idea of a pending attack on or subversion of Gulf Arab states seemed far-fetched. Iran was rather exposed for what it was: a middle-level power ridden with internal woes. To see its hand behind every regional fire was to inflate its capabilities, if not misread its intentions. The balance sheet revealed an Iranian regime in turmoil, its leaders too busy with internal travails to find energy to devote to the tribulations of their external allies. Hizbollah shed support in elections and, confined to its straitjacket in Gaza, Hamas begun to court new allies beyond Iran’s orbit. The prospect for Western-backed leaders, by contrast, looked rosier: after six years of chaos, Iraq gained a semblance of stability; the two wars against non-state actors that bookended Olmert’s rule delivered Israel’s longest period of quiet on its northern border and restored calm to its south. And in a further sign of the shifting balance of power in September 2007, Israel destroyed Syria’s nuclear facility, a joint North Korean, Iranian and Syrian venture begun in 2001, with barely a whimper of protest from Damascus.
Most pivotal of all to the regional balance was Iran’s nuclear programme. Western-led efforts to clip the country of its aspirations to cast the region under its nuclear umbrella accelerated in 2010, but not fast enough to arrest development. In October 2009, the permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany resumed talks with Iran. They proposed a deal whereby Iran would send the uranium required to power its nuclear reactor for enrichment and conversion into fuel-rods in Russia and France. Had Iran accepted, it would have forfeited the means to produce the highly enriched uranium required for a warhead, since once converted into rods, the uranium could not be further enriched. Beleaguered domestically, Iran initially expressed interest, no doubt noting the precedent of Libya, where Western powers readily acquiesced to Qaddafy’s suppression of internal dissent in exchange for jettisoning his nuclear programme. As negotiations continued into 2010, signs of Iranian foot-dragging or defiance were met with US denunciations of Iran’s ‘military dictatorship’; progress, in talks, by contrast, rendered Western powers surprisingly mute.
With Iran’s influence seemingly past its high-water mark, another regional powerbroker made increasing headway. The decision of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP), to shift his energies towards the Middle East rekindled the country’s Islamist legacy and loosened its moorings to the staunch western secularism of its founder Kemal Ataturk, and his domestic heirs, the generals. Turkey found an alternative field of influence to Europe, which appeared increasingly sceptical of Turkey’s accession to the EU despite the submission of its candidacy in October 2005. The policy won Turkey favour with Arab states anxious for allies to stave off Tehran’s regional influence – crucially in Iraq. And it offered lucrative commercial benefits.
Turkey’s reorientation might have proved less significant had it not been for the dwindling of other traditional regional heavyweights such as Egypt, Iran and Iraq, as well as the waning of US influence following the Iraq imbroglio. As it was, thanks to these factors Turkey recouped an influence not felt since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. By the end of the first decade of the millennium, Ankara had transformed its geopolitical standing in the region. Turkey’s exports to the region swelled sevenfold in as many years, reaching $31 billion by 2008, and Turkish companies secured contracts to build airports in Cairo, Libya, Tunisia, Qatar and the UAE, and a crude-oil refinery in Iran. Sidelining his secular-leaning foreign officials, Erdogan projected Turkey’s soft power with a vastly expanded Islamic relief network, particularly in Gaza. He further assuaged a series of historic regional grievances, reopening the border with Armenia (closed since 1993), and congratulating ‘his friend’ Ahmadinejad on his 2009 election victory. In 2005 Syria ended its longstanding territorial claim to Hatay, a province the French mandate granted to Turkey in 1939, and in return Turkey eased Syria’s diplomatic isolation, lifting visa restrictions on Syrian nationals, connecting the two countries’ gas and electricity networks and laying the foundations for a common market.
More remarkably still, Erdogan made strides to defuse Turkey’s 25-year-long domestic war against the Kurdish separatist movement, t
he PKK, which had cost 40,000 lives. In the summer of 2009, much to his generals’ ire, Erdogan offered an estimated 4,000 PKK fighters an amnesty. More broadly, he granted Turkey’s own Kurdish population, estimated to number 12 million, limited political and cultural rights in a country which until the late 1980s had called Kurds ‘mountain Turks’. He lifted the ban on the use of languages other than Turkish in public and, speaking a few words of Kurdish, in September 2009 he launched a Kurdish-language satellite channel. He sanctioned the teaching of Kurdish in schools, and allowed some towns to again assume their Kurdish names, thereby jettisoning the Turkification plan of the 1940s which had assigned 12,000 localities Turkish names.
The policy was not without setbacks. It stoked Turkish nationalist sentiments inside Turkey, and prompted some to warn of a military backlash. Warnings that Erdogan was opening a Pandora’s box proved dangerously plausible after the PKK resumed a bombing campaign against civilians in Istanbul in 2008 and enthusiastic crowds extended a hero’s welcome to the beneficiaries of the amnesty, who returned in rebel uniforms. In the 2009 local elections, the main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, fared well, particularly in the predominantly Kurdish south-east, prompting the authorities to ban it for ‘damaging the independence of the state and the indivisible integrity of its territory and nation’. At the same time, the reforms eased relations with neighbouring states and the EU, which had long pressed Turkey to improve minority rights, and paved the way for Turkish participation in the exploration of oil in Iraqi Kurdistan.
A History of the Middle East Page 55