The Iran Factor

When I visited Iran a few years ago, my favorite question was, "Who runs this country?" The response often was nervous laughter, followed by a raised eyebrow, a shrug and a stage whisper: "The dark forces." My next question—"The dark forces?"—would elicit the weaving of my interlocutor's own fabulously intricate conspiracy theory. "It's very Persian," a young businessman told me. "We're very conspiracy-minded." So let's indulge ourselves and think like Persians about recent events in the Middle East. Here's my conspiracy theory: It starts with the fact that no one really does know who runs Iran. There are all sorts of competing institutions—governmental and religious and bazaari. There is a secular President, mouthy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a supreme leader, the Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. There is a constitutional tension between those two offices, a tension that may have been heightened in the past year by Ahmadinejad's close relationship with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Corps is a strange institution. It is an extremist religious militia that exists outside the Iranian state apparatus. It is funded by semiprivate charitable institutions, called bonyads, that manage the Shah's confiscated assets, which are enormous. The bonyads aren't part of the government, either. They—and the Revolutionary Guards—are the patrons of Iran's external terrorist organization, Hizballah. In fact, there are Iranian Revolutionary Guard trainers currently stationed in Lebanon. Complicated enough for you? I haven't even begun to conspire yet.

So let's speculate that there's a difference of opinion between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei about how to proceed on nuclear negotiations with the West. Let's say Ahmadinejad doesn't want to negotiate. Let's say he wants to send a message to the West, to the Israelis and also to Khamenei: I'm not a powerless figurehead like my predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. My friends in the Revolutionary Guards give me veto power over any deal. It would not be difficult for Ahmadinejad to send the message, via the Guards, to both Hizballah and the military wing of Hamas, which is based in Damascus and funded in part by Iran: Let's rile up the Israelis and start a crisis. Let's change the subject from the Iranian nuclear negotiations. At the very least, let's lay down an opening marker in the negotiations: If you mess with Iran, we have a multitude of ways to mess with you. Just a theory, of course. "We really don't have any real idea about what goes on inside that government," a senior U.S. diplomat told me recently. But it's not implausible, either. "My sense was that Khamenei didn't want to start trouble anywhere else in the world because it might hurt the nuclear negotiations," says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, author of a recent book about Iran. "But I don't think Hizballah would have crossed the border into Israel without approval from a much higher—Iranian—authority, either."

If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue—and the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran's oily economy. But it is also clear now that a major consequence of George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy has been an emboldened Iran. The U.S. "has been Iran's very best friend," a diplomat from a predominantly Sunni nation told me recently. "You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq."

Indeed, last week's Middle East confrontation had Bush-folly written all over it—and not just because the Iranian government's cowboy faction might be strutting its stuff. Bush's failure to patiently broker a real Middle East settlement—mostly because he refused to speak to Yasser Arafat or demand concessions from the Israelis—helped lead to Israel's unilateral withdrawal policy in Gaza. Peace isn't made unilaterally. An unstated part of Israeli policy was that provocations by Hamas and Hizballah would have to be met with real force, lest it seem that Israel was merely retreating from a tough fight. Furthermore, it was the Bush Administration—not the Israelis, not the Palestinian Authority—that insisted the Palestinian elections go forward last January, with disastrous consequences. "The only people who want those elections are Condi Rice and Hamas," a prominent member of Israel's Kadima party told me just before Hamas won the election. A more careful and collegial U.S. Middle East policy might have forced the simultaneous disarming of Hizballah as Syrian troops left Lebanon in 2005. This is not to say that the Bush Administration caused last week's explosion, or even that meticulous diplomacy might have prevented it. But it couldn't have hurt. Instead, the U.S. and Iran may have become unwitting co-conspirators, pouring gas onto a petroleum fire—a dreadful twist that only a Persian could love.