Today’s news from the Middle East was revealing at best, as the Turks are dealing with a bit of a PR nightmare in the wake of a mosque bombing which killed 32 Kurds. From the Irish Independent:
Thousands of foreign fighters have crossed through Turkey to join Isil over the past few years, fuelling accusations from the government’s opponents that the state is turning a blind eye.
The US and other Western allies have also urged Turkey, a NATO member which shares a 900km border with Syria, to do more to tighten security on the frontier.
Anger among Kurds and their sympathisers has boiled over since the attack at Suruc.
Of course, the Turks have been helping the Syrian rebels for the better part of three years now. Assad is grimly hanging on.
Meanwhile, Sunni tribes in eastern Syria and northern Iraq are under the banners of ISIL, and receiving assistance from Sunni and Wahabbist factions within Saudi Arabia. Turkish Sunnis, loathe to oppose fellow Sunnis but refusing to contemplate an independent Kurdistan of any form, don’t seem terribly interested in stopping the free flow of weapons and material to ISIL fighters.
Amidst all of this, we have Shia elements in Lebanon and southern Iraq, as well as Houthi rebels in Yemen ticking the Saudi’s southern flank. Who is kicking all of this off, you ask?
The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Yet if there’s one publication that has done a marvelous job of conflating all sides of the Iranian nuclear arms agreement, pro and con, it is The Atlantic — perhaps the best publication on the planet right now (the UK Economist and VICE are good reads too… but I digress).
One article in particular has struck me, from Shadi Hamid over at the Brookings Institute on whether the deal is good or bad. Hamid has his concerns:
In other words, your position on the Iran deal is likely to depend on how you view the Middle East and America’s role in it more broadly. If you see the Syrian civil war as a, or even the, core regional conflict, then you’re probably worried about the $100 billion in potential sanctions relief for Iran. Even if we assume that Iran chooses butter over guns (as U.S. officials hope) and uses, say, only 3 percent of that total, it will have $3 billion more to prop up the Syrian regime and other regional allies and proxies. Your interpretation of the agreement also depends on your starting assumptions about the nature of the Iranian regime. Are Iranian leaders “rational,” and do you think it matters whether “moderates,” such as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, are empowered over their “hardline” counterparts?
Well stated, and it’s pretty clear that the Iranian hardliners haven’t softened their tone one iota vis a vis Israel and the United States.
…and yet:
One other factor has pushed me to be more supportive of the Iran deal than I expected to be. It’s striking how little discussion there has been about what Iranians think and want. As small-d democrats, Americans should always at least take into account public opinion in other countries. Presumably, Iranians know their country better than American politicians do. According to opinion polls, a majority of Iranians favor a deal. Many of us saw the pictures of ordinary Iranians celebrating the framework agreement in April. This time around, the regime has been more careful, closing off public spaces, with hardliners warning of the dangers of Iran deal-induced “happiness.” Importantly, as Nader Hashemi notes, “some of the most vociferous defenders of a nuclear deal with the West are Iranian civil society and human rights activists.” It makes little sense for Americans to say that an Iran deal will make progress on human rights in the Islamic Republic less likely, when Iran’s own human-rights activists seem to think the opposite. In a 2014 survey of 22 leading human-rights activists, support for ongoing negotiations was “unanimous,” while over half believed that a deal would lead to a significant improvement in human rights in Iran. Of course, they could be wrong, but it’s unwise to bet on that.
Americans tend to see time in weeks. Other parts of the world, months. In the Middle East, time is seen in decades and centuries.
If the Iranians are truly three months out from a nuclear weapon, then this is a great deal that binds Iran to inspections, puts them on a hard path towards weaponization should it go wrong, and effectively buys time for this new generation of Iranians to rise. So goes the American perspective.
If you are Israel or Saudi Arabia, you see this for what it is — a path towards weaponization in 20 years. For cash rich and nuclear poor Saudi Arabia, going to cash poor and nuclear rich Pakistan and slapping a few billion on the barrel head isn’t an outrageous proposition. For the State of Israel, the existential threat of a nation begging for the end times isn’t exactly a rational actor. In fact, it is something Israel is practically duty bound to prevent for its own survival.
An argument can be made for the “westernization” of the Islamic Republic. The lifting of sanctions by rights ought to liberate the country with the soft power of American culture. After all, what’s more persuasive? The wind and vinegar of bombs and violent revolution? Or the sun and honey of Coca-Cola and Britney Spears (or Taylor Swift… or… well, pick your pop star).
Of course, this is all well and good if the problem in the Middle East is Iran.
The counterpoint to all of this? ISIL continues to gain strength, it’s capacity to project force is effectively balkanizing the Middle East well beyond the effects of Sykes-Picot, and a strengthened Iran can only mean a strengthened Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, a strengthened Iraqi national government (or at least the Shia part), all of which will in turn provoke a response from predominantly Sunni states: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, potentially Egypt, and prospectively Turkey.
The Obama administration is at pains to use the military power it so effectively opposed during the Bush era. Obama’s reputation will not suffer a re-imposition of the Bush Doctrine. Which means that a military option in Syria is off the table. Diplomacy by drone will continue until ISIL’s morale improves… or something to that effect.
Iranian assistance against al-Qaeda is probably one of the unsung stories of the War on Terrorism, and the active fact that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are on the ground pushing back against ISIL is yet another underreported fact in the great withdrawal. In the void of American leadership or Ba’athist terror, the Iranians have stepped up.
Moreover, in the long history of Iran and Persia, it is noteworthy that not once have the Persians instigated an offensive war — ever. For all the rage and histronics from the mullahs, they have been ultimately quite reticent in projecting force. In terms of national DNA, the Iranians simply aren’t culturally programmed to seek conquest.
In the interim, ISIL’s ability to project force is eroding day by day. Assad is entrenched and gaining in places, while the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels are becoming more and more the target of ISIL’s attacks in the Syrian theater of operations. Hezbollah fights near Lebanon, while Iranian-backed Shia press from Baghdad. Turkey seems to consent to the existence of ISIL so long as Turkish interests are not targeted (for now), the Saudis are content to create trouble for the Iranians, the Iranians are content to play ball in Yemen. Lebanon and Egypt — momentarily — are at peace.
The question in Iran and by extension Syria is whether this crisis is a tribal one with natural limits of geography and culture, or whether the sharpening divisions between Sunni and Shia in the absence of either secular Ba’athism will eventually engulf the region into a hot war rather than a proxy one.
So where does the cautious pessimism come to the fore?
America has long established a principle of nuclear non-proliferation, one that has cemented alliances and created trust among the free world. We dismantled the nuclear arsenals of the Ukraine, we offered Poland our missile shield, we frowned upon rumors of an Israeli deterrent and winced when Pakistan and India continued their long-standing rivalry with nuclear detonations of their own. South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina have all given up on nuclear ambitions. Iraq is no longer capable or desirous of nuclear arms. North Korea seems incapable of properly detonating a controlled nuclear explosion. Japan and Turkey rest comfortably under the American shield.
By and large, despite the ubiquity of uranium, nuclear power — even for peaceful purposes — remains rather elusive, nevermind the additional headache of actually deploying medium to long range missiles to deliver same.
By delivering on “the path to the bomb” that the Israelis and the Saudis are so concerned about, the principle concern policy makers should have is that we are inching up to the line of the NPT without crossing it. More to the point, is it really nuclear non-proliferation when we cut deals with other nations? Are we really building a cage, or a starting block?
That’s the principle concern that Congress should take up in the fall when the Iranian nuclear treaty comes to the floor. Preoccupation with what Israel might do is nothing — the Israelis aren’t currently fighting a proxy war in Syria. The real concern here is that the Saudis, seeing the example of the Iranians, will simply purchase the bomb outright. The signal to other nations seeking the ultimate form of deterrence against aggressors — Poland? Japan? Turkey? — would be irresistible.
Nuclear non-proliferation has been a successful tool for American diplomacy and soft power in the decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather than reset the terms of what NPT should mean in the first half of the 21st century, diplomats should be wary of cutting deals, and Congress — should it reject a deal — should be prepared for the use of hard power in order to enforce the Pax Americana. One need not engage in the regime change of Bush 2003. Rather a NATO-led air campaign much as President Clinton engaged in over Serbia in 1999 would be the model to employ.
That would, of course, require the compliance of Turkey. At the moment, they seem to have their own problems… and so the circle goes round and round. The realpolitik of the Iranian nuclear deal should be seen through the lens of Syria and the proxy war being fought through ISIL. Even if the insurgency has expanded to its natural boundaries, one still has to weigh the ultimate cost of a proxy war becoming a hot one.
It is tough to see Israel hanging in the balance… but without America’s fingers on the scales, the very real problem of Israel sliding off is not one the Israeli public will tolerate. At some point, in the face of real questions and the absence of decisive answers, someone else may very well do the answering in the only language terrorism understands. Force of argument resorts to the argument of force.
