A deal beyond belief

A deal beyond belief

What is the purpose, the nature and the capability of the government of Iran? Unless we answer these questions we cannot make any sense of President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

In my view, the deal represents complete strategic capitulation by Obama to a steadfast and ruthless administration in Tehran. Indeed it is simply impossible on the facts to contest the collapse of US strategic ambition in relation to Iran.

At first, US policy was that Iran must not have a nuclear program and it would impose sanctions that it would trade away for Iran abandoning its nuclear program.

Then Washington’s position was that Iran could have nuclear reactors but not a uranium enrichment capacity.

Now, the US position is that Iran is entitled to master the entire nuclear fuel cycle in all its aspects and to sustain a large and growing nuclear capacity, and that within a few short years every single notional restriction should be lifted, except that Iran promise not to acquire nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Washington has abandoned any effort to link concessions on sanctions to Iran’s general political behaviour.

Also at the same time, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop seems to have changed her views on Iran. When she came back from Israel last year, she was convinced that Iran should not be left with any uranium enrichment capacity. Now she thinks this is the best possible deal and better than no deal at all.

These judgments must surely hinge on what we make of the Iranian government’s character and intentions. The Iranian people don’t like their government much and are more liberal than it. In strategic terms, this is not worth a hill of beans. You could always find a jazz club in Soviet Russia. Indeed, under Joseph Stalin himself there was a baseball league in Moscow.

The Chinese people were much more liberal than their government at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Studying the Chinese people’s liberal instincts in 1989 was no guide to Beijing’s future geo-strategic behaviour. It was the Chinese government leadership, not sentiments on the streets, that impelled China’s emerging geo-strategic assertiveness.

What can we conclude therefore about the Iranian government? Wishful Western commen­tators see this as a chance to forge a new Middle East of co-operation between the West and Iran.

Oddly, Obama himself, absurdly Panglossian as he is about this agreement, does not think so, pointing out the profound continuing strategic hostility between Iran and the US.

A comparison is sometimes drawn between Obama’s outreach to Iran and Ronald Reagan’s arms agreements with the Soviets, or Richard Nixon’s overture to China. Both comparisons are profoundly misleading.

Reagan threatened the Soviets with an unsustainable arms race and got an agreement that limited a capability they already had in spades. He did not concede anything to them.

Nixon got Beijing to completely reorient its international behaviour. Critically, it stopped exporting revolution; specifically it stopped backing communist insurgent movements in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

Can we expect a similar reorientation from Iran? Can we at least expect its help in defeating Islamic State? The answer really is an emphatic no. To reach any other conclusion you have to simply ignore every aspect of the Iran­ian revolution’s history and every statement that comes from its leadership and every action that it takes internally and externally. Most emphatically you have to ignore everything that leading Iranians say to each other, to their people, to other Muslim audiences and indeed to us.

Western analysts optimistic about this deal are creating a make-believe Iran in their heads.

For a start, the Iranian regime is the first since Adolf Hitler’s to have official anti-Semitism as a core part of its governing ideology.

It is all very well for The New York Times’ writers to regard Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu as a blatherskite blunderbuss who constantly exaggerates the Iranian threat. But how would Australians react if Iran, for years, repeatedly announced its determination to wipe Australia off the map?

As recently as a few weeks ago, one of Iran’s most senior military commanders, in making it clear that any deal with the US would not moderate Tehran’s political and regional behaviour, declared that the right to wipe Israel off the map was non-negotiable.

Western analysts are routinely disabled from understanding Iran in four ways. No one in the West takes the idea of God seriously any more and cannot conceive of a government whose actual real behaviour is determined by theological goals. Second, very few commentators have a sense of the history of Persian imperialism. Third, there is a misunderstanding about the differences between Shia and Sunni Islam. And, finally, there is almost no awareness of the central role of the Iranian regime in the development even of Sunni jihadism.

The Iranian regime is theocratic. It is ruled ultimately by clerics. Shia Islam is different from Sunni Islam in having a hierarchy. The Iranian constitution defines the Shi’ite hierarchy above its government. If you doubt the theocratic purposes of the Iranian government, read its constitution.

The motivations of any group of human beings are complex and diverse. Because Iran is a long-estab­lished and successful nation-state, with a long, subtle and substantial civilisation behind it, the actions of any Iranian government are likely to be far more predictable than those of a group such as Islamic State or al-Qa’ida.

However, even in this predictability there can be problems. The nationalist commitment to acquiring nuclear weapons transcends even the present Iranian government. The tendency to regional hege­mony has an immensely long history in Persian thought and behaviour. It rein­forces aggressive Iranian behaviour that may spring mainly from the regime’s Islamist character.

The idea Shia Islam is inherently more liberal and moderate than Sunni Islam is extraordinarily difficult to sustain. The truth is it is almost impossible to make political generalisations about either strand of Islam. Shia Iran under the shah was very socially liberal; so was Sunni Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, or Malaya under the sultans or the British, and so on.

Religion is subject to interpretation. Most jihadists have been Sunni rather than Shia simply because most Muslims are Sunni. Violent jihadism is a small minority commitment of either Sunni or Shia populations.

However, the revolutionary regime in Iran has been central to the development of violent jihadism even among Sunnis.

In Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, the great French scholar of Islam, ­Gilles Kepel, argues that the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a critical breakthrough for the development even of Sunni jihadism. The Iranian ayatollahs gave explicit clerical endorsement to Islamist revolution for the first time. Instead of conservative ulema (Muslim religious leaders) backing the established order and opposing revolution, the ayatollahs for the first time gave definitive, authoritative religious support to jihadist revolution.

The Iranian leadership has always aspired to lead the whole of the international Muslim community. This is generally an unsuccessful aspiration as most Sunnis will not accept Shia leadership. However, as literally countless scholars and reporters of modern Islam have documented, the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was a scintillating inspiration to Islamists everywhere.

There has also been a long, profound ideological alliance between Iran’s theocratic leadership and the Muslim Brotherhood. Sayyid Qutb was the Brotherhood’s most important thinker and the direct lineal progenitor of al-Qa’ida. Two of his books were translated into Persian by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In his biography the supreme leader pays tribute to the influence of Brotherhood thinking on his own political development.

None of this is even to scratch the surface of Iran’s continued illegal importation of dual-use technology, its role in killing American soldiers in Iraq, the testimony by American military leaders that the new wealth Iran will receive from sanctions relief will be used to finance more international terrorism, its support for Muslim Brotherhood Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah, still defined as a terrorist group in Australian law, in Lebanon, or extremists in Yemen.

Incidentally, it is impossible to see in the context of all this why on earth Bishop would be contemplating allowing Iran to open consulates in Sydney and Melbourne. Iran may well moderate its recent extreme course. Nothing is written in stone. But to predict this development is faith-based analysis, for there is absolutely no evidence for it.