With the Syrian Army out of Lebanon it is time to look for winners and losers.
The chief loser, of course, is Syria’s Baathist regime that had made its military presence in Lebanon the cornerstone of its overall strategy for the past three decades. Syria’s clients in Lebanon are also losers; some may never find a place in any future political configuration in Beirut.
The big winner, of course, is the Lebanese people. It is now possible to press Damascus to abandon its 60-year old refusal to recognize Lebanon as an independent nation-state and not as part of a mythical Greater Syria.
Less obvious is the feeling in both Tehran and Washington that also regard themselves as benefiting from Syria’s expulsion from Lebanon.
How can that be? Surely, the “Great Satan” and the “Arch-terrorist State” cannot both be winners in the same game.
But, in this case as in a few others, they are. The difference is that Iran’s win is immediate while that of the US is deferred.
Tehran wins because Syria’s expulsion leaves Iran as the only regional power with significant influence in Lebanon. The US win, as already noted, is a medium to long-term investment, and conditional on Lebanon becoming a Western-style democracy sympathetic to the United States. Such a development would fit into President George W. Bush’s strategy of democratization which is supposed to drain the marshes of despotism that breed the mosquitoes of terrorism.
Lebanon is only the latest spot where the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, sworn enemies though they seem to be, emerge as joint winners.
Until 2001 Iran was the only major power seeking to alter the status quo in the Middle East while the US was its principal guarantor.
US opposition to any change in the Middle Eastern status quo was demonstrated repeatedly and in a number of often bizarre ways. In 1987 the US sent a naval task force to the Gulf to protect the flow of oil against Iranian attacks on Kuwaiti tankers. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US helped both sides so as to prevent either from winning a decisive victory that would have altered the status quo. It was also to preserve the status quo that the US led the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1990-1991. The same desire to preserve the status quo persuaded the first President George Bush to allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power after his loss of Kuwait. US fear of change was so deep-rooted that it also opposed any attempt at overthrowing the much-disliked Iranian regime. All that Washington wanted was for Tehran to alter aspects of its behavior.
All that changed with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the US. Within weeks President George W. Bush had abandoned Washington’s 60-year old policy of supporting the status quo in the Middle East, and adopted regime change as its strategic goal. That meant that both the US and Iran were now anti-status quo powers in the region. But while both agreed that the Middle East should change they had conflicting and possibly irreconcilable visions of what should replace it.
Agreeing on preparing the ground for change was not difficult.
Iran had a strategic interest in the destruction of the Taleban regime in Kabul, something that it could not have achieved on its own. Thus, not surprisingly, Iran offered a helping hand to the US-led coalition that liberated Afghanistan in 2002. With the end of the Taleban, Iran won in two ways. First, it no longer had a vicious ideological enemy to its east and, second, it could see its Afghan clients, notably the Hazara Shiites win a share of power in Kabul for the first time.
Tehran also welcomed the demise of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime that had been Iran’s archenemy both under the Shah and under Khomeini. Again, Iran would not have been able to eradicate the Saddamite regime on its own. That job required the kind of heavy lifting that only the US could provide. Change in Iraq has removed the single biggest threat that Iran had faced since the mid-1970s. It has opened the Shiite “holy” sites in Iraq to Iranian pilgrims for the first time since the mid-1960s, and, for the first time ever, enabled Iraq’s Shiites to secure a share of power commensurate to their demographic strength.
Iran has also benefited from other, milder, American efforts to bring change to the Middle East.
Even Libya’s surprise “surrender” to the United States has benefited Iran by removing from the regional scene the only Arab regime preaching an alternative version of revolution in competition with Iran’s Khomeinist ideology.
To put it starkly, Iran wanted change and the US has achieved it.
But it is only now that the interesting part begins. The question is: What will the Middle East look like in 10 or 20 years’ time? Will it be a democratic region with a market economy and a well— defined place within the US-dominated global system? Or will it be a solid, self-confident bloc of Islamist regimes seeking a seat at the high global table under Iranian leadership?
The present leadership in Tehran believes that time is on its side. It regards the Bush administration as an aberration which has to be tolerated for just another four more years after which the US will revert to the largely defensive posture it had adopted before the 9/11 attacks. From Tehran’s point of view only three nations can provide Islam with leadership: Turkey, Egypt, and Iran.
Turkey has knocked itself out of the Muslim world by pursuing its European dream.
Egypt has been and is likely to remain a pawn in the large game played by the United States.
That leaves Iran that can offer an alternative to the vision promoted by the US in the region and beyond. If need be Iran could forge broader alliances, notably with Russia, China, and India to oppose “American hegemony”. By capitalizing on anti-American sentiments in Western Europe, Iran can also play the European Union against the United States.
At some point the rival visions of Iran and the US are certain to clash in the Middle East. Bush’s dream of a pro-West and democratic Middle East could not be realized without change in Iran. At the same time Iran does not have the power to exclude the Americans from the region.
One of three things could happen.
First, the US and Iran could become engaged in a mini-version of the Cold War that could last decades. In it Iran would play, albeit on a smaller scale, the role that the now defunct Soviet Union played during the big Cold War. There could be coexistence and even detente at some point, producing a fishtail situation that while preventing military conflict would satisfy no one.
Secondly, Iran and the US could, theoretically, develop a consortium for jointly reshaping the Middle East. This could be based on a revised version of the Nixon Doctrine that recognized Iran as the principal regional power in the early 1970s. Forging such a partnership was a dream of President Bill Clinton who offered Iran a “grand bargain” in 1998 but was rudely rebuffed.
Finally, Iran and the US could go for a head-on collision. As the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said it is logically inconceivable that change in the Middle East would leave Iran unaffected. It is hard to envisage a configuration in which the US is the total loser and Iran the ultimate winner in a game of status quo change started by President Bush.
As controversy over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and sponsorship of terrorism dominate the headlines the real issue is whether it would be Washington or Tehran that rewrites the medium to long-term political script in the Middle East. The real cause of tension is a clash of ambitions between the two rivals; all other issues are merely symptoms.
