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  Iran's Growing Power in the Middle East: The Spider's Web

Iran's Growing Power in the Middle East The Spider's Web

By Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand

More people than ever are dying in Iraq while the United States looks on powerlessly. In the wake of its invasion of Lebanon, Israel is riven with self-doubt, while Europe tries to establish peace. But there is one country that is benefiting from every crisis in the region: Iran.

There has been a sharp shift in tone in the Iraqi Special Tribunal since Abdullah al-Amiri became its presiding judge. He has put a stop to Saddam Hussein's habit of using the disrespectful informal address in his frequent verbal duels with the court's judges. Now, when the defendant and deposed dictator wishes to speak, he addresses the judge as "Sayyid al-Qadi," or "Your Honor."

Amiri has also been tough on Saddam's lawyers. He ordered two of them, an Egyptian and a Jordanian, to leave the courtroom and managed to avoid the shouting matches his predecessors had triggered. He informed the attorneys that, as foreigners, they were of secondary importance, and the Iraqis who remained behind that "no one will address this defendant as 'Mr. President' anymore. This man is the defendant. And I'm the judge."

Amiri opened the Special Tribunal's second trial last week. Ali Hassan al-Majid, widely known as "Chemical Ali," sits next to Saddam in the dock. The defendants stand accused of being responsible for the killing of an estimated 50,000 Kurds in the 1980s. The murderous offensive by Iraqi forces, as part of the Iran-Iraq war, was ordered to punish the Kurds for their alliance with Tehran's mullahs.

While the witnesses describe the horrors of an almost forgotten era, the defense attorneys seek to downplay the massacre as collateral damage in the Iran-Iraq war. But Amiri, formerly a criminal judge under Saddam, is the wrong man for these kinds of arguments. The executioners, it appears, are finally dealing with a judge who speaks their language.

The chaos that is consuming the country, and part of the world along with it, also affects the courtroom in Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone. On the third day of the trial, one of the defense attorneys told the judge that he needed more time to study documents. When the judge asked him why he hadn't done this earlier, the attorney replied: "because no one has been permitted to leave the house in my neighborhood for days. I can't even go to the Internet café to read my court mail." The tribunal was suspended until Sept. 11, the five-year anniversary of the day when it all began.

"The door to hell"

Thousands have died in Iraq in recent weeks, far more than those killed in Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which has dominated this summer's headlines. The world seems to have grown weary of the misery, the mounting death toll and the bad news constantly coming out of Baghdad or the Sunni triangle, which has been poisoning the Middle East since the spring of 2003. Amr Mussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, once warned that a war in Iraq would open "the door to hell." Who would disagree with him today?

A word now being used is "spillover," or the spreading of the Iraq fiasco across the entire region. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still seen as the driving force behind terror and violence in the Middle East. But the upheaval triggered by the most recent Iraq war -- in Iraq itself, in Lebanon, in Israel and in Arab autocracies from Egypt to Syria to Saudi Arabia -- now exceeds that core conflict in terms of danger and unpredictability. "This combination of explosive elements," says seasoned foreign policy expert Richard Holbrooke, "is the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis."

Meanwhile, Washington continues to indulge in rosy rhetoric about the "new Middle East" it claims to have created. The Chinese word for "crisis," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is made up of the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." Rice prefers to call the crisis a "big shifting of tectonic plates," insisting that newer and better things will emerge out of fire and blood. "I'm confident in our capacity to leave behind a better world," announced US President George W. Bush, sounding more defiant than triumphant.

Nothing seems to be going well at the moment for the United States, the superpower with its vastly superior military might. The Taliban is on the rise again in Afghanistan, Iraq is in the throes of civil war and Washington's reputation in the region has plunged to a historic low, its authority as a broker in the region's conflict frittered away for now -- and probably for a long time to come.

Israel's mistakes

Israel, the US's staunchest ally in the region, isn't faring any better. Far from achieving any of its war objectives, the country has only managed to bomb Lebanon's remarkable "Cedar Revolution" into distant memory. Israel seems determined to repeat the Americans' mistakes. It became involved in an asymmetrical war against terrorist organization Hezbollah, and its bombardment of areas filled with civilians has done nothing but strengthen the adversary it tried to destroy. In Lebanon, an international force numbering several thousand, initially under French leadership, will be expected to secure the peace, apparently with a far-reaching mandate, the details of which are being worked out.

But everything seems to be going well at the moment for America's greatest foe, the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It has crafted a finely woven web of relationships stretching from Ankara in Turkey to the Gulf and on to Russia, India and China. And what the regime hasn't developed itself seems to be falling into its lap. The United States has done Iran a favor by eliminating its two worst enemies, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq. The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, jokes that he'll send Tehran the bill one day. Iran has also emerged as a winner in the Iraq war, without having fired a single shot. Whether in Baghdad, Beirut or Kabul, everything is going according to the Iranians' wishes -- badly, that is.

Iran, like a spider in a web, it steadily collecting its prey, and has become astoundingly weighty in the process. Despite a general lack of clarity over its domestic situation, the regime deals with the rest of the world with the gravitas of a major power. Last week Tehran sent a detailed, 20-page treatise outlining its proposals to the United Nations Security Council, the regime's response to UN demands that it stop its uranium enrichment activities and hold talks on its nuclear program. Despite having failed to meet the UN's key demands, the country -- thanks to the goodwill of China and Russia, both of which are interested in Iranian oil, gas and business deals -- is unlikely to face major sanctions. The UN ultimatum formally expires on Aug. 31.

Iran benefiting

The Islamic Republic has established itself as a regional power, even without nuclear weapons. According to a recent report by Chatham House, a British think tank, Iran has more influence in Iraq than the United States does. Although the Americans have 135,000 troops stationed there, Iran controls the Shiite militias, whose membership numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

"The debate is over," says Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East expert who once supported the war. "By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war." According to Pollack, Washington would be well advised to dust off the humanitarian emergency plans the State Department put together for the spring 2003 campaign and never used, because they'll need them soon. One hundred thousand Arabs have fled from the Kurds in northern Iraq, 200,000 Sunnis from war-torn regions in the west, and between 50,000 and 100,000 Shiites from mixed districts in central Iraq.

Large segments of the Iraqi middle class have already left the country. "If the violence continues to escalate," says Pollack, "the poor will soon make their way to huge refugee camps in neighboring countries." With Iran unlikely to join forces with the Americans in establishing refugee camps at the Iran-Iraq border, the refugee issue will put other countries in the region at risk, says Pollack. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have large Shiite minorities, and spillover from Iraq could upset the social balance in these countries -- as is already the case today in major Jordanian and Syrian cities. Indeed, Iraq could end up exporting its civil war.

How Arab autocrats will react to the mounting crisis remains unclear. The disaster in Lebanon has once again highlighted their powerlessness. After initially condemning Hezbollah's provocation of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were soon caught by a wave of outrage effortlessly transported by Tehran and Damascus. Now more than ever, Iran, 17 years after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, is the opinion leader in the anti-American and anti-Israeli discourse raging in the Islamic world.

Al-Ahram, an English-language weekly published in Cairo, writes that it is "sad to have to admit how much Egypt's position as a regional power has been eroded." Commentators in Riyadh and Amman have voiced similar complaints. Instead of supporting their own Sunni rulers, Middle Eastern media are now celebrating Shiite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a hero and an Arab freedom-fighter.

Nasrallah and his Iranian backers can be credited with two things. While the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq becomes bloodier from one day to the next, Hezbollah's supposed victory has had a calming effect on religious strife in the region. Nasrallah has taken pains to avoid any reference to his movement's Shiite underpinnings, instead portraying himself as a defender of the Umma, or entire Islamic nation. Unlike Osama bin Laden, the head of the al-Qaida terrorist network, the Hezbollah leader appeals to the masses. And despite his radical refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, he comes across as pragmatic compared to other Arab icons in the modern struggle of cultures. Men like Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri or Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in June, could hardly be expected to consider a truce.

In Israel, meanwhile, the government and the country's military leadership are at odds over who is responsible for the outcome of the Lebanon war. It's a painful debate of the kind only possible in a democracy. The army, the pride of the nation, has been criticised because its leadership was initially convinced that the Israeli air force was capable of destroying Hezbollah without ground troops. A special commission has now been formed to expose and examine the mistakes that were made.

Washington helpless

Will the government survive the crisis? The outcome of that debate is as unclear as the nation's next move to extract itself from the current mess. Israeli Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter has proposed seeking a dialogue with Syria -- despite all reservations -- and negotiating the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vehemently opposes Dichter's position.

Washington is just as helpless as it confronts the ruins of its Middle East policy. "I don't like that Iran has now emerged as one of the real powerhouses in a part of the world that houses vital American interests," says Richard Haas, head of the influential "Council on Foreign Relations" and former director of policy planning under Secretary of State Colin Powell. "But it is a fact of life." Henry Kissinger, the old master of cold-blooded realpolitik, says: "Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such an importance to the rest of the world."

It appears that President Bush is now ready to listen. Iranian-born Vali Nasr, who teaches political science at the Naval Postgraduate Academy in Monterrey, California, recently explained the situation to Bush over iced tea and Texas steaks. According to Nasr, America, by marching into Iraq, destroyed the Sunni wall that had kept the mullahs in check. "This genie won't go back into the bottle," he told the US president, adding that the old allies of the US have lost control of the region.

How can America regain control? Washington is currently filled with rumors of a possible military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz and elsewhere, but also of bold, new diplomatic offensives. Perhaps there will be direct negotiations with the Iranian leadership after all. But the offer Tehran is presumably waiting for would inevitably include recognition of Iran as a regional power.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan