Yeah, I know. “Fox News”, right? But one of the reasons Iran is so mysterious is because US and other western leaders don’t know what the regime’s leadership is thinking, much less that they’re obsessed with the “end times.”

“The Evil Has Landed” screamed the New York Daily News. “NYers In Rage over ‘Tehran’ting Lunatic” exclaimed the New York Post. (Why not “‘Iran’ting Lunatic”?) Overall, it was a week of ugly intolerance for even the idea of discussion. Apparently some things are out of bounds even to talk about, and allowing the Iranian president to present his views was well beyond the pale.

Which is a shame, considering how necessary Iran is to the United States’ plans in the Middle East. Iran is a major power that has its own interests which could be brought in line — a little, at least — with America’s. So, just to be a little bit naughtier than the New York tabloids, let’s talk about an idea that’s probably beyond discussion. Given the charges that Iran is on the march across the Middle East, is looking to “take it over” and drive the United States back into its own hemisphere what’s so bad about Iranian hegemony?

To answer that question, we first have to ask a more basic one: What does Iran really want? Most observers, including the noted Iran scholar Vali Nasr, believe Tehran wants Washington to accept Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf as its “near abroad” — “a zone of influence in which Iran’s interests would determine the ebbs and flows of politics unencumbered by American interferance.” Tehran also wants its presence in in Syria and Lebanon recognized.

It’s not like it’s never happened before. More than 2,500 years ago, Persia was the world’s first superpower and threatened Greece for its upstart refusal to bow to Xerxes, king of kings. Its empire stretched from the Ganges to Macedonia — the greatest empire the world had known. Rich and powerful, it brought culture and civilization to millions. It wasn’t an enlightened rule and Xerxes was a tyrant, but neither was it as bad as it could have been; subject people had considerable autonomy. (The Phoenicians, for example, were particularly nettlesome for the Persians, given they were the best sailors around and more or less ran the Persian navy in the Mediterranean. An invasion of Sicily was scuttled because the upstart Levantines decided they didn’t feel like doing it. Sicily never fell into the Persian orbit.)

Today’s Iran is, of course, a different thing. The knee-jerk response among the neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz set is that they’re a terrorist regime, so screw ‘em. But it’s a bad idea to dismiss Iranian concerns over their influence in a region where they have traditionally had a great deal of sway. Imagine if someone tried that with, say, Latin America and the U.S. So again, what would be so bad about Iranian hegemony or, more accurately, the accommodation of Iranian interests and influence throughout the region? Can working with the Iranians instead of against them be a form of diplomatic jujitsu?

First of all, Iran already has more influence in Iraq and Afghanistan than America does. Especially in Iraq, it’s got more chips in the game and more players on the field, able to move them at will and check American ambitions to turn Iraq into a friendly bulwark against Iran. (Under Saddam Hussein it was an unfriendly bulwark against Iran.) But if President Bush continues on his quest to reformulate his Middle East policy as one that promotes stability instead of democracy, the U.S. and Iran will have a joint interest.

“The Iranians are very eager to replace the United States as a regional leader,” says Trita Parsi, an Iranian specialist and author of “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.” “But that’s not necessarily bad news.”

Much of American policy in the Middle East has been a zero-sum, balance of power arrangement, where the U.S. supported regimes such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while Iran backed Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories. Each country is the leader of its own bloc of allies, but it’s a costly form of leadership, Parsi says, because it doesn’t allow for any kind of collective security like you find in Europe. And while he admits the Middle East is “a long, long way from that, so was Europe in 1945, but we did it.” War between European states is now inconceivable.

“The balance of power has created wars,” he says. “There hasn’t been peace in the region.”

Instead of attempting to lead rival blocs against one another, the U.S. should work with Iran to take its interests into account while at the same time demanding changes in behavior for that accommodation. For instance, in exchange for allowing it a large degree of influence in Baghdad and Lebanon, Washington could demand that Iran cease its military support for Hamas in Gaza and work to disarm Hezbollah so that it could turn into a full member of Lebanon’s political culture.

The losers in such an arrangement? Israel and Saudi Arabia, mostly. American and Israeli positions would no longer automatically be the law of the land, he says. “The Israelis would not be able to impose unilateral peace deals on the Palestinians.” And that, too, is a good thing in the long run. Instead of dictating peace terms to a resentful people, Israel would be forced to deal with the Palestinians on a more equal level. And a less aggressive Israel would take the wind out of the sails of the more militant anti-Israeli groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who draw much of their support for their anti-Israeli stance.

Saudi Arabia would lose because when it’s not allied with the United States to contain Iraq, it’s trying to counter Iran. A U.S. and Iranian rapprochement means Riyadh can say goodbye to some of those sweetheart arms deals.

It should be noted that a similar arrangement with Iran was offered, by Iran, in 2003. Iran offered to end military support for Hezbollah and Hamas and work to stabilize Iraq in exchange for an end to hostility from the U.S. and an end to sanctions. The State Department was reportedly keen to followup on the offer, but Vice President Dick Cheney nixed it.

So while there’s no easy answer or path forward to working with Iran, accepting that they have legitimate interests in the region could go a long way toward calming the place down. But Iran has to accept that the U.S. has interests, too, and those need to be taken into account as well. If the U.S. steps away from the zero-sum politics of the last 28 years, then Iran has a responsibility to do so as well.

*[Originally appeared on Spot-on.com](http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/09/iranian_hegemony_whats_not_to.html)*.

And so the most promising opportunities for a rational settlement have all passed us by. Instead of a moderate reform president and a group of nervous ayatollahs anxious to cut a deal, America now has Ahmadinejad — and the dawn of what could conceivably become an explicitly fascist regime in Iran, or at least a very close substitute for one.
The good news, such as it is, is that Ahmadinejad’s end-times ideology doesn’t seem to include any grand territorial ambitions: no “Greater Iran” (Iran is already a greater Iran), no lebensraum in the east. We also have time — time to see how things shake out, to see if the ayatollahs can hamstring their troublesome protege, to see if the democracy movement can make a political comeback. Time for Ahmadinejad to lose some of his popular shine as Iran’s internal problems worsen. Time for our own hardline warmongers to be booted out of power.
But unfortunately, our divinely ordained president may not be prepared to wait (and the last sentence of the preceding paragraph appears to be one of the reasons.) Which means at this point we probably should be worrying less about what happened in Munich in 1938, and more about what happened there in 1972, when the German police moved in and tried to disarm the terrorists.
Multiply that carnage by a thousand, or a million, and you’ve got more than a political slogan; you’ve got a war.

MATTHEWS: Where is the heart of the zealotry here? Do you have a name of a person who is really saying, we will do anything it takes to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon?

HERSH: The one that’s on the record is George Bush, and so is Mr. Cheney. Bush has said repeatedly, again, people talk to me and they use the word messianic. He has had two red lines that the Iranians cannot cross. _One is Iran is planning to run a small pilot program for enriching uranium, probably in the next month or two, maybe six week. If they do that, that’s it for Bush. That’s a line they can’t cross._

*Chris Matthews and Seymour Hersh on “Hardball,” April 10, 2006*

… and chaser.

TEHRAN — Iran announced Tuesday that its nuclear engineers had advanced to a new phase in the enrichment of uranium, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a series of the country’s ruling clerics declared that the nation would now speed ahead, in defiance of a United Nations Security Council warning, to produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a speech that was broadcast live from the city of Mashad, said Iran is determined to develop production on an industrial scale.
“Iran has joined the nuclear countries of the world,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said during a large, carefully staged and nationally televised celebration in Mashhad, which included video presentations of each step of the nuclear process that he declared Iran had mastered. “The nuclear fuel cycle at the laboratory level has been completed, and uranium with the desired enrichment for nuclear power plants was achieved.“

“Iran Reports Big Advance in Enrichment of Uranium”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html?hp&ex=1144900800&en=b9ad13587321bba1&ei=5094&partner=homepage
New York Times, April 11, 2006

Oh, President Bush, you rascal. You do so like to repeat yourself. Now that Iran is, unsurprisingly, number one — with a bullet! — on the “Countries We Don’t Like” list, the question in the White House is, what to do about it?
Why, “bomb the snot out of them, of course.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040801082.html I don’t think I need to go into why this is a horrible, no-good, very bad idea, but apparently, “Bush views Tehran as a serious menace that must be dealt with before his presidency ends, aides said, and the White House, in its new “National Security Strategy”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf, last month labeled Iran the most serious challenge to the United States posed by any country.” (Page 20)
Sy Hersh also “weighs in”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact with a terrifying article full of extra details. Highlights: nukes are desired option, there’s a widespread belief in the Administration that Ahmadinejad is bonkers and that Hezbollah will not sit idly by should Iran be attacked. Hezbollah spokesman Hossein Nabulsi told me late last year that the group is a religious party and it belongs to Supreme Leader Khameini in Tehran. “‘Interests’ does not begin to describe the depths of the links between us,” he said.
Now, the U.S. makes all sorts of plans. I’m sure there plans to nuke Canada or France mouldering away somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. That doesn’t mean they’ll ever be dusted off and implemented. So the real question is not “Are we making plans to nuke Iran?” but “How likely is it that we will implement plans to nuke Iran?” A friend of mine who follows this stuff closely told me that he doesn’t think Bush has the political capital or time to pull off an attack. As he says, the worst-case/most-likely scenario is that this is a real Bush plan that will never see the light of day after Cheney has little fantasies in the VP bathroom over it. Neo-con porn, in other words. The best-case/least-likely scenario is that this is a feint to convince the Israelis we mean business so they will keep their planes on the ground. Or, alternately, Hersh could be dead-wrong about the whole thing. Maybe he’s just doing that thing he does of dangling sexy rumors with enough meat on them to make them interesting and then seeing what bubbles up to the surface after he’s turned up the heat. It’s a good reportorial strategy to shake things up.
Or it might all be disinformation from the U.S. to get the Iranians to the table. Of course, there’s no reason the buzz can’t be all of these things and, frankly, that’s pretty likely.
At any rate, things are about to get a lot more interesting in the region. I well remember the July 2002 1A story in the NYT outlining the Bush plans to invade Iraq. (4th ID from Turkey! Oops.) As many others have noted, the whole Iranian scenario of WMD, regime change, etc., is stunningly similar to the run-up to the Iraq war.
So if Bush can repeat himself, why not me? I’m in Beirut now for a while, as TIME Magazine and I have decided to start seeing other people. But we’re still friends, and my parting with TIME was most amicable. I’ve not worked with a better organization and I’m happy to still be associated with them, if only on a part-time basis. But I’m now more aggressively freelance. While the URL of this site will probably remain back-to-iraq.com, the focus of the reporting is going to broaden to include all of southwest Asia: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond. So I’m going to open my donations jar back up and start accepting donations again to fund a reporting trip to Iran. (See the button in the sidebar?)
So, if anyone wants to suggest a re-branding campaign, I’m all ears. But for now, I’m going to concentrate on new reporting in Lebanon, and work on getting my ass to Tehran in the coming months. If anyone has advice on visas, fixers, people to contact, groups to connect with, please send them along to chris (at) back (hyphen) to (hyphen) iraq (dot) com. Thank you.