“More Than Just Enrichment: Iranian Strategic Aspirations and the Future of the Middle East”

Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, Chairman

House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia

In February 1946, at the dawn of the Cold War, George Kennan, an American diplomat whose name has become iconic in American diplomacy, wrote a cable to the Secretary of State about the challenge posed by the Soviet Union: “Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with the same courage, detachment, objectivity, and the same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which a doctor studies an unruly and unreasonable individual.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not the Soviet Union. It’s not even close. It is, by comparison, a medium-sized state whose national economy is $25 billion smaller than that of Massachusetts, and whose population enjoys a per-capita-GDP of $12,300–that is, $200 less per person than in Mexico.

Until the advent of the Bush Administration, with its sometimes arrogant, even pugnacious, rejection of history, diplomacy, strategy and planning, Iran faced a strategic situation most of us can scarcely contemplate. To the west, it faced Saddam Hussein, a bitter enemy whose war in the 1980s against Iran left several hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers and civilians dead. To the west, Iran shared a border with hostile, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. America’s place in the Middle East was more entrenched than ever before, even though the cost to the United States of maintaining the containment of both Iran and Iraq was quite modest.

Internally, the mullahs controlling Iran were hustling to deal with a restive and increasingly youthful population unhappy with Islamic rule, poor economic performance and high unemployment. The government of the ayatollahs was deeply unpopular, stagnant, thoroughly corrupt, and reform candidates seemed to be ascendant. And with a population of about 65 million people, only half of whom are Persian, Tehran has always struggled to deal with constant minority tensions.

Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon held out hope of defanging Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, and the resumption of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was all the more shocking because the two sides had recently seemed so close to a settlement.

In short, the picture for Iran in January 2001 was not especially promising. Today, it could hardly be better. The United States has not only removed Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, it has mired and exhausted itself in an unnecessary conflict in Iraq that is daily sapping our military capability, and narrowing the options available to the next President of the United States. Iran’s own relationships in Iraq and Afghanistan are flourishing and, for very little cost, its influence in both countries has never been greater.

Every day for several years now, Iranian weapons and military training have been used to kill American soldiers. Predictably, President Bush has labeled these activities, like Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium, as “unacceptable,” a word so debased by this Administration that I suspect it is translated in Farsi as “unassailable.”

As I said in mid-April, the President has been aware of the threat of Iranian nuclear proliferation from day one of his administration. He has known, and done next to nothing. And now we face the real possibility that within the next two years Iran will have the means to make an atomic bomb.

But even without waiting for the successful culmination of its nuclear proliferation efforts, Iran’s strategic reach has grown far beyond its immediate neighbors to touch the entire Middle East. In Lebanon, and among the Palestinians, Iran is very successfully instigating trouble and funding militancy. Whether facilitating the deaths of American soldiers, arming Hezbollah in defiance of Security Council resolutions, financing and funneling arms to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or supporting Shia opposition groups throughout the Middle East, Iran pays no price, absorbs no cost, and bears no consequence.

Iran’s tactics are shrewd, effective and alarming. But they’re nothing new. There is a word for these methods, though we may have to dust off some Cold War cobwebs to put it back in use. The word is ‘subversion,’ and in the days of George Kennan, when America had political leaders who knew the difference between talking tough, and getting results, we knew how to fight against subversion without bankrupting the nation or destroying our armed forces. Quite simply, we made ourselves the ally of every nation and every people fighting to remain free. We built institutions to share the burden, and to give other nations a stake in the fight, and a feeling of equality in the struggle. We established and promoted norms of behavior through international treaties. We provided allies with economic support significant enough to make a difference and used effective communications to nurture the hopes of people struggling for their freedom. Where the Soviets tried to apply pressure, we responded with countervailing pressure. Today, where Iran applies pressure, we respond with just counter-wailing.

But most of all, America’s leaders in the late 1940s understood, as Kennan said, that “We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in the past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own.”

We are in Iraq largely because we, as a nation, didn’t think. We can’t afford to make the same mistake twice. To face the challenge from Iran we must start by learning and questioning. What are Iran’s strategic aspirations? Who controls Iran’s foreign policy? Are there schisms and weaknesses in Iran’s political system that we can exploit? How do Iran’s leaders see their country’s place in the world, and what does that imply about our ability to effect its foreign policy choices? What’s behind the rhetoric–especially the threats to Israel and the repellent Holocaust denial? Who controls the balance between ideology and realpolitik in Iranian security policy?

The threat from Iran to our vital national security interests is real. It is real, but I am absolutely convinced it is manageable. When compared to the United States, Iran is a mere pest. Our economy, our resources, our military, our alliances, our hard and soft power all vastly outstrip Iran, not just by a little, by orders of magnitude. But most of all, what Iran is selling–the rule of turbaned clerics, the straightjacket of Islamic law, and an unblemished history of failed governance, violence and corruption is an option desired by no people I have ever encountered.

Kennan concluded his historic telegram with these words: ‘Finally we must have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. ...[The] greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem... is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

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