On Global Affairs: A Weapon of Mass Distraction
By: Peter Durning, Stanford Daily (Stanford)
October 31, 2006 8:05 PM
(U-WIRE) STANFORD, Calif. - What will Iran do with a nuclear weapon? The many hypothetical answers to this question are behind so much of the urgency in the international situation today.
Will so-called "apocalyptic Shiites" in the Islamic Republic seize the initiative and destroy the state of Israel? Will the Iranians take a lesson from rogue nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and sell their technology to the highest bidder or to suicidal anti-Western proxies? Will they do none of these things, but still unbalance the fragile India-Pakistan detente enough to bring south Asia into a nuclear war? Or will the Iranian acquisition of a nuclear bomb merely spark a regional arms race, spurring undemocratic and less-than-stable regimes like Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Egypt to build nuclear warheads of their own?
All of these options would lead to a drastically more dangerous world, and they are all fairly plausible. But among the many stabs that have been taken toward evaluating Tehran's objectives and policy, few have considered a motive that I believe to be at least as likely as any other. Iran is not building the bomb to use it. They are building it to build it.
To explain what I mean by this, you have to know something about Shiite Islam. In the face of the Iraq war and the growing Iranian nuclear program, Shiite Islam has become an important social element of the international crisis that belongs to all of us now. This is certainly not to blame the Shiite faith for recent developments, but if we want to understand the impasse confronting the diplomatic community, it's worth knowing the basics about the cultures involved.
The origins of the Sunni-Shiite split lie in a dispute over who should succeed Muhammad as the leader of the Islamic community. Shiites favored a blood relative of Muhammad as their leader, while Sunnis preferred to choose a ruler by election.
In the year 680 C.E., the conflict between Shiite-supported Hussein and his rival Yazid met a tragic end with the slaughter of Hussein and his followers at Karbala. Hussein became the central martyr of the Shiite religion, and modern Shiites commemorate his death yearly. Sympathy for Hussein is a central feature of Shiite Islam, and bitterness against Yazid has reached such extremes that, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian media ceased calling Saddam Hussein by his last name, preferring instead "Saddam Yazid."
Iraq is a historical center of Islamic tradition, especially with respect to Shiite Islam, but also from the point of view of Islam in general. Not far from the original Hussein's burial shrine in Karbala is the city of Najaf, where his father (Ali, a lawful successor of Muhammad revered by both Sunnis and Shiites) is enshrined. North of Baghdad, meanwhile, is Samarra, which contains the shrines of three of the 12 Imams, the historic leaders of the Shiite community. While these cities are unparalleled in their significance to the Shiite religion, the whole mass of eastern Iraq is populated with cities that have great significance for all Muslims, from Basra to Kufa to Baghdad.
Not only does Iraq contain the heartland of Shiite Islam, it also has ancient links with pre-Islamic Iran. The Persian Sassanid Empire was centered at Ctesiphon, near the eventual site of Baghdad. Not only does a great part of the Iraqi state have immense cultural links to the Islamic ideologues in the Iranian government, it also has some value to the considerable force of Persian nationalism.
Given all the attractions for an expansionist, Persian, Shiite state like Iran, is it really a far-fetched notion that the Ayatollahs are interested in Iraqi territory? Not only is there oil and manpower to be gained, but also considerable religious and symbolic capital.
Are the Iranians holding out to pick up the fragments of Iraq, in terms of oil, holy sites and an enthusiastic mass of Iraqi Shiites? Do the Ayatollahs believe that the Shiite population of Iraq, persecuted and brutalized by Saddam and terrorized by Sunni militias, might be eager to align themselves formally with the Islamic regime in Tehran? Are they hoping that their fervor might be the antidote to the lagging support and religious apathy of Iran's secularist middle class? Or are they merely hoping to build the bomb that Saddam failed to build (thanks to the Israeli Air Force) in the 1980s, in order to beat back Iraq once and for all?
In other words, when we talk about the Iranian bomb, we should stop thinking so much about Israel, the U.S., Russia, China, Korea and Pakistan. More than most have realized, the road to Tehran -- literally -- is through Baghdad. But because we have tossed the Iranian crisis into the proliferation bin, we have failed to recognize how much the nuclear program is a smokescreen for Iranian ambitions in and vis-a-vis Iraq.
The painful irony of this situation is that it is a side effect of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." It is inconceivable to me that policy planners neglected the possibility of Iran being an incidental beneficiary of an American invasion of Iraq. But it seems that American diplomats once more undervalued the importance of historical enmity.
During the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, one of the major disappointments of the Ayatollahs was that Iraq's Shiite population did not do more to destabilize Saddam's secular rule during this struggle. Conversely, Saddam's fears that this might happen were the principal reason for his savage persecution of the Shiite majority.
This in turn is one of the reasons why inter-factional cooperation has been so difficult for Iraqis to attain. If you have trouble understanding why Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites don't trust each other, think about Vichy France, 1945, where the Nazi collaboration problem was so severe that President Roosevelt thought a civil war in France was a realistic possibility.
In contrast, the Bush team continues to insist that there will be no civil war in Iraq, even as observers on the ground are declaring that it has already begun.
| 
