Is Iran, the enemy's enemy, an enemy of the U.S.?

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): The United States has, to use a phrase of the late Richard Nixon, "tilted" in favor of the Iraqi Kurd faction which was previously propped up by Iran. This is an ideal time for Washington to review its deep antagonism toward Iran and ponder anew its nonstop attempt to isolate Iran as one of its five outcast nations (the others being Cuba, Iraq, Libya and Sudan).

The U.S. policy of dual containment of both Iran and Iraq has never looked more insupportable. Not a single allied government has been prepared to back Washington by cutting its economic links with Tehran. Why is Washington paying this price? Is Iran really in the same league as Iraq? Isn't the job of isolating Iraq of such paramount importance that Iran's common view on this should be welcomed?

The worst that can be said about Iran is that it is a major source of funding for the most intransigent and militant anti-Israel movements. And that Iran is dead set on acquiring a nuclear bomb, part of its confrontational policy with Israel and its need to stand up to Saddam Hussein. If Iraq had built the nuclear weapons it was developing during its war with Iran, from 1980 to 1988, it may well have used them. After all it used chemical weapons, and hardly anyone cried foul.

While funding terrorists and building nukes are formidable negatives they must be seen in proportion. The state of Palestinian-Israeli wellbeing is essentially a prerogative of the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Between them, for better or worse, they control the agenda. However, Iran and Syria do enlarge their room for maneuvering when the relationship between the two deteriorates.

On the bomb issue--unless Iran has already stolen or bought one, and there has been no confirmation of the earlier rumors of acquiring two from Kazakhstan--it's likely that the present regime in Iran will fade or fall away long before Iran's bomb-making project comes to fruition.

Indeed, with every new day the Iranian revolutionary regime looks increasingly wobbly. As Robin Wright eloquently puts it in the current issue of Foreign Policy, "The better way to undermine those responsible (in Iran) for repression at home and extremism abroad may be to let them do it themselves. They are already on their way."

The facts speak loudly. Iran's oil wealth has been squandered; mainly on arms, to protect itself against Iraq. But after many years of falling oil prices, soaring rates of population growth and inflation, it is deeply in debt and its resources are severely strained. After 17 years of theocratic rule, since the overthrow of the Shah, its people are worse off in every material way.

Large parts of the middle and working classes are disillusioned and so is the bazaar, the merchant class whose alienation finally pulled the rug from under the Shah. Important intellectuals who backed the revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power have turned into sharp critics: Abdol Karim Soroush, the country's leading philosopher who now argues for Islamic democracy, is among them. So deeply do these counter-currents run that the clergy, once the harbingers of a new future, are increasingly held in contempt. Yet the Iran of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is very different from that of Khomeini. Privatization, birth control, Mozart and pale shades of nail polish have been tolerated and religious militancy sidelined; censorship has been less rigorous and criticism allowed into the newspapers. But as Rafsanjani's term in office draws to a close, religious authoritarianism has reasserted itself and it is clear that he is still very much hemmed in by the social conservatives who dominate parliament. The clergy's influence, although waning, is still too strong.

This, however, illustrates an underrated side of Iran. Although an Iranian would be hard-put to show that parliament was elected in true democratic fashion, there is, nevertheless, a separation of powers. There exists in Iran some sort of attempt to reconcile democracy and Islam that could one day bear fruit.

It is not sensible for the United States to be so actively hostile. Washington is unlikely to have a positive influence on Iran. Politically its name is mud, (although not socially and economically). It has intervened twice recently, in 1953 and in 1979, and both times it made the situation worse.

Constructive engagement, as the wise man of Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, keeps arguing is the most sensible course of action. Be tough on arms sales and the traffic of nuclear materials, of course. Be outraged when human rights are abused as they often are. But let the regime change tack--or collapse--in its own way. Although it would be going too far too fast to suggest that Saddam's enemy does not have to be Washington's enemy, the present enmity is overdone. In Tehran, time is probably the regime's worst enemy and Washington's best friend.