Middle East
A new analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security attempts to answer that question, the Washington Post reports.
A military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably only delay the country’s progress toward nuclear-weapons capability, according to a study that concludes that such an attack could backfire by strengthening Tehran’s resolve to acquire the bomb. The analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that Iran’s uranium facilities are too widely dispersed and protected — and, in some cases, concealed too well — to be effectively destroyed by warplanes. And any damage to the country’s nuclear program could be quickly repaired.
Moreover, Albright told the Post, Iran would likely emerge more intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. He said that:
an Israeli or U.S. attack would result in broader popular support for Iran’s ruling clerics and could lead Tehran to sever ties with the U.N. nuclear watchdog. “Iran would likely launch a ‘crash’ program to quickly obtain nuclear weapons,” Albright said in an interview. “An attack would likely leave Iran angry, more nationalistic, fed up with international inspectors and nonproliferation treaties, and more determined than ever to obtain nuclear weapons.”
The Post notes an indicator of deteriorating stability in Lebanon: the price of weapons is rising.
Many weapons that had been stowed away since the civil war ended in 1990 are going onto the market.
Writes the Post, “many people now worry more about the potential for conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Although few expect a conflagration on the scale of the last war, many are preparing for the worst.”
This week provided a clear example of dyschronicity, from Saudi Arabia.
The Washington Post reports that the kingdom’s “most revered cleric” has issued a fatwa demanding apostasy trials for two writers who questioned an aspect of hardline Saudi Islam in articles.
The cleric decreed that the writers should be tried and executed if they do not repent.
Hence the 400-plus year gap between Sweden and Saudi Arabia on the dyschronicity map: Western Europe gave up this conception of the role of religion around the 17th century.
(Image usable with credit and link to FutureAtlas.com)
New polling in Iran offers mixed signals to those who hope for “moderation.”
A strong majority of Iranians favors allowing all reformist candidates to contest elections, and 86% say that all leaders of their country should be elected.
At the same time, a slim majority of Iranians says that Iran should develop nuclear weapons–51% are in favor of this, with only 39% opposed.
So Iran’s potential interest in nuclear weapons is not confined to a tiny ruling group, and even the advent of full democracy might not dispel it.
The International Herald Tribune details the process of Islamization, using the case of Egypt.
In Egypt and other Arab lands, faced with frustrated hopes and poor economic prospects,
the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them. With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.
The article offers these implications:
- “The focus on Islam is also further alienating young people from the West and aggravating political grievances already stoked by Western foreign policies.”
- An Islamized populace has less distance to travel to reach Islamic radicalism.
Curiously, one of the drivers of social frustration in Arab countries is delayed marriage, due to high marriage costs, the article explains. In other words, given that these economies are not producing widespread wealth, the social system has developed a malfunction.
This trend has implications for stability:
- States may find it harder to control populations that have been primed for political Islam.
- Populations used to thinking in terms of Muslim solidarity may be more actively provoked by the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, and hostile to the impotent peace practiced by states such as Egypt and Jordan.
- Political Islam, with its statist inclinations and hostility to aspects of scientific reasoning, could reinforce the economic malaise that many Middle Eastern countries tend to suffer.
In the Nov. 19th New Yorker, John Lee Anderson concludes that “Iraq’s future, for the moment, is in limbo. The best one can say, perhaps, is that the U.S. has bought or borrowed a little space to work with.”
This is partly because the cause of the current decline in violence is not at all clear:
- The surge in American troops seems to be working, but only in some areas.
- On the other hand, “analysts credit much of the recent drop in Iraqi civilian deaths not to the surge but to Sadr’s decision, in August, to order the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have been responsible for much of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian killing in and around Baghdad, to “freeze” its activities for six months.”
- Also crucial is the fact that “the surge also coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening, the decision by some Anbar tribesmen to ally themselves with the Americans and to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—a shift that was not foreseen in Petraeus’s plan.”
In other words, at least two of the elements of recent gains are not under American control at all, and thus subject to reversal, whatever future policies the US pursues.
In a harbinger of future instability, Anderson writes that “Many of the players in Iraq seemed …. to be positioning themselves for the next battle.” A Sunni leader now working with the US says, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.”
A second ominous sign is that, while the American relationship to various Iraqi players has shifted, internal Iraqi reconciliation is not proceeding, despite that being the central goal of the surge. Shiites in the Iraqi government feel the new Sunni “allies” that the US has enlisted are the militias of the future. Meanwhile, efforts to create nonsectarian security forces–essential to a post-occupation Iraq’s stability–are still faltering. The national police, for instance, are “still part of the problem,” an American officer tells Anderson.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that there is a way for things to suddenly get much worse in Iraq: a giant dam could collapse, releasing a 143-square-mile reservoir on the Tigris River. This would destroy much of the city of Mosul, which lies downstream, and could drown as many as 500,000 people.
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No one interviewed for the article ventures an estimate of probabilities for the event. Some Iraqi engineers are skeptical about the level of danger, while some American officials are said to think that “the dam could collapse any day.”
Writing in the Washington Post, Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji says that “The Bush administration may be striving to help Iranian democrats, but any Iranian who seeks American dollars will not be recognized as a democrat by his or her fellow citizens.”
What can the US do, if monetary aid to democratic forces is unconstructive? He writes that “The Iranian people, myself included, need freedom, democracy and peace — not war conditions and constant worries about a potential barrage of U.S. missiles.”
Ganji notes several reasons that US funds are not helpful:
- “Over the past two centuries, many Iranian politicians were paid or influenced by foreign powers. As a result, most Iranian intellectuals and democratic forces are deeply critical of external support.”
- “The Iranian people do not want their democratic movement to be dependent on or subservient to any foreign government.”
- “The Iranian regime uses American funding as an excuse to persecute opponents. Although its accusations are false, this has proved effective in poisoning the public against the regime’s opponents. Fear of foreign meddling is one reason for the regime’s staying power.”
Ultimately, he writes, “Iranians themselves must support the transition to democracy; it cannot be presented like a gift.”
Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, Jackson Diehl argued that events in Iraq are pushing the country to a kind of solution:
This is a loose confederation of at least three self-governing regions, each with its own government, courts and security forces; and a weak federal government whose main function will be redistributing oil revenue so that each region gets a share based roughly on its proportion of the population.
He notes several drivers:
- The Kurds are proceeding with their projects in the long-autonomous north, and have passed their own oil and gas law.
- The south is organizing itself for autonomy as well, with SCIRI, the most powerful Shiite party, pushing the project.
- The ethnically mixed areas around Baghdad that were home to many Iraqis in favor of a stronger federal state are being cleared out (as noted by Future Atlas earlier).
- Iraqi opinion is shifting: as of March, 42% of Iraqis supported “regional” or independent states as a political solution to Iraq’s instability, more than double the 18% who favored that outcome in 2004.
Diehl also suggests that new anti-al Qaeda sentiment among Sunnis provides a future alternative to jihadist rule in Sunni areas even if Iraq fragments. (See this April Future Atlas post.)
There are downsides, Diehl writes: “It’s possible that one of the regional mini-states, in the oil-rich Shiite south, will become an Iranian client, while Sunnis in the West may be ruled by the same toxic Arab national socialism championed by Saddam Hussein.”
It is also clear that an oil-sharing agreement is crucial to any settlement between the regions, and any agreement could quickly unravel as the regions eyed each other with animosity. With the collapse of an agreement, the temptation to shift the new borders to secure oil fields could easily trigger new wars between the fragments of what was once Iraq.
Recent bellicose remarks by French officials underline that one of the more likely future wars for France (and most other Western military powers) is war with Iran.
It remains to be seen, however, whether there are any viable military options for those attempting to block a nuclear path by Iran.