Iran feels it’s on a roll.
In September, the government signed a $2 billion deal with a French, Russian and Malaysian consortium to develop oil and gas fields in southern Iran. It was seen by Iranian officials not only as a big boost for a struggling economy but also as a splendid poke in the eye for the United States, which strongly objected to the deal.
The tense showdown between Iraq and the U.S. has been another cause for celebration. It was hailed in Tehran as a lose-lose situation for Iran’s two most despised enemies.
Finally, the failure of last week’s economic summit in Doha, Qatar–attended by Israel and backed by the U.S. but boycotted by almost every Arab state–sets the stage for the Dec. 9-11 Islamic summit in Tehran. It is expected to be conspicuously well-attended by those who snubbed Doha.
Iran sees the event as a major coming-out party after years of relative diplomatic isolation in the region.
All that’s needed to complete the grand slam is for Iran’s soccer team to beat Australia for the final qualifying slot in next year’s World Cup.
After years of self-imposed isolation and stagnation, Iran is suddenly moving again. The stunning landslide victory of Mohammed Khatami, a moderate cleric who took 68 percent of the vote in last May’s presidential elections, has set all sorts of wheels in motion, although no one is quite sure exactly where the country is headed.
On the domestic front, Khatami’s election is widely interpreted as a mandate for loosening the strict religious constraints that govern nearly every aspect of life in the Islamic Republic.
In Tehran’s more affluent districts, women are wearing more makeup and allowing more hair to peak out from beneath their black head scarves than they would have dared six months ago.
Everyone seems to think the government ought to crack down on the self-appointed religious vigilantes who invite themselves to weddings to make sure that no one is having too much fun. There also are growing demands from the public for more access to satellite TV and the Internet–those two insidious purveyors of un-Islamic notions.
The election was not a repudiation of the Islamic revolution. Khatami, a descendant of the Prophet, is, after all, a member of the religious establishment. But it is seen as a call for more personal freedoms and less religious interference.
“What we are seeing now is real panic on the part of the conservative power centers. The election was repudiation of them,” said a Western diplomat in Tehran.
Conservative hard-liners recently orchestrated disturbances at a Tehran university and a “moderate” religious seminary in the holy city of Qom–a signal of their determination to thwart Khatami’s attempts at reform. How far and how fast Khatami will be able to carry his mandate for change remains uncertain.
On the international front, Iran is determined to normalize relations with as many of its neighbors as possible and again become a major player in the region.
Last week, while the U.S. was moving its aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf, Kamal Kharrazi, Iran’s energetic new foreign minister, was busy hopping from one gulf capital to another, wrapping up a highly successfully charm offensive aimed at repairing ties between Iran and its Arab neighbors.
As a result of Kharrazi’s efforts, Iran and Bahrain announced that they would soon exchange ambassadors and renew relations, which have been suspended for more than a year. Similar pronouncements of cooperation with Iran were forthcoming from Qatar, Oman and Yemen.
A series of high-level meetings between Iran and Saudi Arabia, America’s main client in the gulf, has produced a noticeable thaw in their previously chilly relationship.
These friendly overtures make some in Washington a bit uneasy, undermining, as it does, the U.S. policy of isolating Iran and Iraq as much as possible, the United States’ “dual containment” policy.
The key to Iran’s recent success with the conservative gulf monarchies has been its apparent decision to back off what had been one of the original pillars of its Islamic revolution: the determination to export it to those countries.
Iranians close to the new government’s thinking insist that the Islamic Republic has not abandoned this holy mission. Najaf Gholi Habibi, director of the Imam Khomeini Research Center in Tehran, lists Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon as proof of Iran’s “success” in spreading the revolution and boasts that the “West has paid a high price for resisting us.”
It is clear, however, that a measure of pragmatism has taken hold in Iran. No longer are Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers ridiculed as corrupt lackeys of the U.S.
Iran hopes the Islamic summit will showcase its return to the family of Islamic nations and cement its importance as a regional player.
Even Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons against Iran, has been invited to attend. As a show of good will, the Iranian government sent its health minister to deliver the invitation. But the Iraqi leader was said to be miffed, feeling that the invitation should have been carried by the foreign minister. Hussein, who never leaves Iraq, is not expected to attend.
Despite its doctrine that the West is the source of all evil, Iran has been working to improve relations with Western Europe, which it now sees as a useful counterbalance to the U.S. During the last 18 months Iran has been able to secure more than $5 billion in loan guarantees from EU members and Japan.
The eagerness of European and Japanese credit agencies to lend money to Iran is a slap at the United States’ Iran-Libya Act, sponsored by Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) and signed last August by President Clinton. The legislation is part of an overall strategy to maintain the economic isolation of Iran until the U.S. is convinced Tehran has abandoned terrorism.
Khatami might be the man to do it. Khatami, who has lived in Germany and is said to be fluent in English as well as German, has spoken of a “dialogue of civilizations.” In a sharp step away from the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini legacy, he has praised the West for its “superb civilization, which has influenced all parts of the world.”
However, a grand rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran does not seem to be in the cards. Officially, the U.S. remains the “Great Satan” (although the preferred term these days is the “World Arrogance”). The 18th anniversary of the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran was celebrated this month with great gusto.
U.S. concerns in the region are twofold: to secure the flow of oil from friendly states and prevent the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons to unfriendly ones.
With the help of Russian technicians, Iran is well on the way to completing its first nuclear power plant. Situated in Bushehr in southern Iran, it is scheduled to come on line early next year. Iran says it needs nuclear power to meet growing energy needs, but in a country where gasoline costs 12 cents a gallon at the pump, one may well wonder what the Iranians are really planning.
The larger problem facing the U.S., according to one friendly diplomat in Tehran, is that dual containment is no longer workable.
“Iran and Iraq are not two of a kind,” he said, noting that Iran elects its leaders democratically and does not starve or brutally repress its people.
Assassinating dissidents and putting a bounty on the head of writer Salman Rushdie might be despicable, but it is not in the same class as using chemical weapons. Iran does not threaten to invade its neighbors. Arguably, it has become a pretty stable place, the diplomat said.
Business–big, big business–may ultimately stir the U.S. to rethink its approach toward Iran.
Iran sits astride the most expedient pipeline routes for exploiting the vast new oil and gas fields of the Caspian region.
U.S. companies have signed deals worth billions to begin tapping Central Asian reserves that might be equal to those of the Persian Gulf. The first oil began flowing this month, the start of a gusher the U.S. government won’t be able to hold back.
The Clinton administration, in what was seen as a conciliatory gesture toward the new Iranian government, raised no fuss about plans to open a trans-Iranian pipeline to carry gas from Turkmenistan to Turkey.
That was in August. In recent days, the administration has taken a harder line against Iran, pushing oil companies and the Central Asian states to consider pipeline routes that would bypass Iran.
The administration favors a pipeline beneath the Caspian Sea to the Azerbaijan port of Baku and then across the politically unsettled lands of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and eastern Turkey. Some oilmen think Iran is a better bet.
Kazakstan, one of the main beneficiaries of the new oil boom, has determined how to play off the U.S. against Iran. Its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was in Washington last week, announcing that he was giving the U.S. until next fall to line up the financing for a trans-Caspian pipeline before he would turn to Iran.
“A grandiose reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran would solve a lot of problems for everyone,” a Western official familiar with the Caspian situation said. “There are a lot of people on both sides who would like to see it happen, but for now, it’s out of the question.”
