WHY TEHRAN WANTS THE BOMB
BERMAN, ILAN
14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 also be a member of the BY ILAN BERMAN The démarche was emblematic of the tional community since the fall of 2002, when nuclear program. Since then,...
...dissent and consolidate power without The Iranian leadership therefore has grown to embrace the international prestige that flows from their nuclear program...
...Back in 1979, Khomeini had wooed Iranians disillusioned with the rule of the Shah with the vision of prosperous, independent theocracy...
...swept to power in Tehran in 1979, the Islamic Republic THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR WHY TEHRAN WANTS THE BOMB he established has been at war with the world...
...The closer Iran gets to the “bomb,” the greater its ability to quash domestic dissent and consolidate power without a decisive international response...
...A LL OF THIS IS NO DOUBT disheartening to many in Washington...
...A stagnant, sclerotic economy...
...with nuclear For the Iranian leadership, the lessons “nuclear club...
...Signs of this slackening of ideological bonds are everywhere...
...Ilan Bermanis vice president for policy of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C...
...So were the subsequent difficulties experienced by the U.S.-led Coalition in uncovering Saddam’s vaunted weapons of mass destruction...
...A nuclear capability, however, has the potential to change all of that...
...Officials like Yah-reformation...
...by the end of its reign, the sprawling Safavid Empire (1502-1736) had stretched from what is modern-day Georgia and Syria in the west into today’s Afghanistan and Uzbekistan in the east...
...But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Iran’s regional ambitions remained unfulfilled...
...And in Iran’s north and east, growing ya Rahim Safavi, the commander of Iran’s powerful signs of political activism (and separatist tendencies) clerical army, the Pasdaran, now speak openly about their country becoming a “regional The closer Iran gets to the “bomb,” the superpower...
...In the process, Iran has emerged as the single greatest beneficiary of the changes now underway in the region...
...Over the past five years, the U.S.-led Coalition has, in rapid succession, eliminated Iran’s most immediate ideological adversary, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and removed the Islamic Republic’s most formidable military foe, Iraq...
...The ideology underpinning the current regime in Tehran is inherently expansionist in nature, and antagonistic to its neighbors...
...This sort of behavior naturally breeds hostility, so it is not surprising that Iran’s leaders have long been fearful of the possibility of foreign aggression— and desperate to find ways to forestall it...
...Unemployment is rampant, with some 30 percent of Iran’s working-age population estimated to be jobless...
...Hundreds of student and union protests take place around the country every month...
...And why clear effort...
...Ever since Iran’s “reformist” former president, Mohammad Khatami, strode onto the political scene in 1997, a chorus of U.S...
...Then there are the demographics...
...Today they see an atomic capability as a key element of regime stability, and as a vehicle for regional dominance...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17...
...Without them, adversaries of the United States might find that their days were numbered...
...And Iran’s ayatollahs appear to have decided that they need to follow in the footsteps of North Korea, lest they end up like Iraq...
...are visible among the country’s sizable ethnic Azeri and Arab minorities...
...Ever since his government’s unexpected announcement of a nascent nuclear capability in the fall of 2002, North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il, has managed to stymie American policy in Asia, and to tilt the geopolitical playing field in his favor...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 ILAN BERMAN Not surprisingly, this reversal of fortune has re-regime’s brand of radical Islam, and to call for religious vived Iran’s geopolitical ambitions...
...N LATE FEBRUARY, just days after the expiration of yet another United Nations deadline, and with the UN Security Council gearing up to deliberate new punitive measures, Iran’s firebrand president issued a defiant public statement...
...Today, following nearly four years of dipappears to have done...
...Today, Iran’s political thinkers still very much view their country as the “center of the universe”—a seminal regional power around which the politics of the greater Middle East should revolve...
...With much of the current Iranian leadership now in its late sixties or early seventies, and with many known to be ill, it is fair to say that Iran’s ayatollahs are poised to pass from the political scene...
...T HE SECOND CAUSE for Iran’s nuclear quest is regional in nature...
...France during the 1960s and 1970s, embraces the need for a “victorious and triumphant Islamic Revolution” in Iran and beyond...
...Yet, as the foregoing discussion suggests, Tehran’s nuclear plans are not up for discussion...
...This state of affairs, moreover, persists despite the fact that Iran—home to approximately 10 percent of the world’s oil and the planet’s second-largest reserves of natural gas—is a bona fide energy superpower...
...After all, ever since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini JUNE 2007 15 I Iran’s ayatollahs have learned that to survive in the Axis of Evil, one must nuclear club...
...lomatic deadlock, the Bush Administration appears The founding ideology of the Iranian state, for-to have acquiesced to a deal overwhelmingly favormulated by Khomeini while he was in exile in Iraq and able to the DPRK, one that explicitly recognizes the Stalinist state’s membership in the world’s weapons, it is possible to preempt have been unmistakable...
...Twenty-eight years after the Islamic Revolution, that imperative is still very much official state policy, manifested through Iran’s deep support for a bevy of foreign terrorist groups, its troublemaking in Iraq, and its persistent efforts to export its radical principles throughout the region...
...policy experts has advocated the need for engagement with the Islamic Republic...
...and a steady policy of “containment” on the part of the United States all conspired to keep Iran a poor and marginal player in Middle Eastern politics...
...After would Iran, one of the world’s top energy producers, invest so heavily in nuclear technology when more practical measures (such as the construction of additional refineries, upgrades to its aging, Cold War-era energy infrastructure, and more efficient industry practices) would more directly address its burgeoning energy needs...
...For the Iranian leadership, the lessons have been unmistakable: With nuclear weapons, it is possible to preempt “preemption” by the part of “preemption” on the part of the United the United States, much the way North Korea States, much the way North Korea appears to have done...
...Meanwhile, energy prices, driven by regional political instability, have skyrocketed, providing Iran—one of the world’s top energy exporters— with tens of billions in excess petrodollars...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 also be a member of the BY ILAN BERMAN The démarche was emblematic of the tional community since the fall of 2002, when nuclear program...
...In his January 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush identified Iran—along with Iraq and North Korea—as part of an “Axis of Evil” that was “arming to threaten the peace of the world...
...The Iranian nuclear program “is without brakes and a rear gear,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told religious leaders in Tehran in comments carried nationwide by state radio...
...Nearly a decade later, and despite repeated diplomatic failures, this idea does not seem to have lost any of its luster...
...Much the same way China faced no lasting international censure for its brutal, bloody suppression of student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Iran’s ayatollahs believe that once they attain nuclear status their reprehensible domestic practices effectively will become off-limits to the world community...
...Just a few years later, the Persian leader Nader Shah went even farther east, pushing into northern India and returning with large quantities of plundered treasure, including Indian emperor Shah Jahan’s fabled “peacock throne...
...But they also are acutely aware greater its ability to quash domestic that in today’s world, preserving a dominant regional role requires 21st-century technology...
...Unsurprisingly, Iran’s ayatollahs concluded that Saddam Hussein was toppled because he lacked the means by which to resolutely confront the United States...
...The answer to these questions can be found in the strategic logic underpinning Iran’s nuThe first reason for Iran’s interest in a nuclear capability stems from the classical idea of “deterrence”: the notion that a robust strategic arsenal can help discourage external aggression...
...The likely results of Iranian nuclearization, therefore, will be a new lease on life for the Islamic Republic, and a death knell for Iran’s nascent pro-democracy forces...
...The Iranian population, by contrast, is young, vibrant, and restive...
...Fully two-thirds of Iran’s roughly 70 million people are aged 35 or younger, and this constituency overwhelmingly has become disenchanted with a theocracy that has failed to deliver for them on both a political and an economic level...
...We dismantled the rear gear and brakes of the train and threw them away some time ago...
...After more than a quarter-century, the country’s ruling clerical class is graying...
...Iran’s beleaguered reformist press, under fire from the Ahmadinejad government, nonetheless continues to churn out scathing editorials and exposés of clerical corruption...
...American policymakers, as well as their counterparts in Europe, would do well to plan accordingly...
...More than two and a half decades later, this promise has evaporated, replaced by corruption and economic malaise...
...Iran today is in the throes of profound societal transformation...
...and editor of the newly released Taking on Tehran: Strategies for Confronting the Islamic Republic (Rowman & Littlefield-AFPC...
...all, why would the Islamic Republic—for years a virtual global pariah—risk the very tangible economic and political gains it has charted in recent years...
...On the contrary, amid fresh signs of Iranian troublemaking in places such as Iraq and Lebanon, “détente” with the Islamic Republic is once again being touted as a quick fix for our nagging Iran problem...
...The past five years, moreover, have only served to reinforce the prudence of this effort...
...Since then, it has become abundantly clear that the Iranian regime is that the Islamic Republic is embarked upon a deavor to develop a nuclear arsenal—and that spite of international pressure...
...Observers similarly say that the rate of inflation, officially pegged at just over 10 percent, is in fact considerably higher—and rising...
...P ERHAPS THE MOST COMPELLING LOGIC underpinning Iran’s nuclear program, however, has to do with Iran’s internal circumstances...
...Understandably, Iran’s leaders chafed at their second-rate status...
...The resulting focus on a nuclear capability, revived by Iran’s ayatollahs during the mid-1980s in the midst of their grinding eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is now over two decades old...
...Their country boasts a long imperial history...
...Today, the ruling regime in Tehran is stagnant and under siege...
...At great personal risk, a number of senior clerics have come forward to denounce the current a decisive international response...
...Less than a year and a half later, the rapid dismemberment of Saddam Hussein’s regime was watched closely from Tehran...
...The North Korean regime, by contrast, has survived—and thrived...
...For the Iranian regime, such an assumption is a logical one to make...
...Over the years, Iran’s ayatollahs have learned to love the bomb...
...Rather, mounting evidence indicates comprehensive, multifaceted national enit is making serious progress towards that goal, in At first blush, the persistence of the Iranian nuclear effort may seem puzzling to outsiders...
...deepening crisis that has beset the internaa controversial opposition group disclosed previously unknown details about Iran’s not simply developing a nuclear program for “peaceful purposes,” as its officials stubbornly claim...
...a politically and economically devastating war with rival Iraq...
...In response, Bush pledged, “America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security...
...Paradoxically, the War on Terror has provided the Islamic Republic with the opportunity to reclaim this role...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
