A Way Forward with Iran

Seldom, if ever, does a mere newspaper reporter combine a superb piece of journalism with a pathbreaking coup in international intelligence. But that’s what NYT reporter and UN Bureau Chief Farhad Fassihi did with a piece published today.

She discovered and published something at which reporters and spooks have been guessing ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She mostly figured out how Iran works.

And she figured that out for today, after the most cataclysmic event in the Islamic Republic’s history. In the opening days of our War on Iran, we killed its second and (by far) longest-ruling Supreme Leader and gravely wounded and hence marginalized his son and anointed successor Mojtaba. So it’s unlikely that, any time in the near future, Iran will be ruled absolutely by such an old man, or by a younger cleric with no worldly experience.

I won’t insult Fassihi’s superb analysis by attempting to summarize it, except to make three points. First, the Ayatollah Khamenei was eighty-six years old when assassinated. In comparison, Joe Biden was 82 when he stepped down, and Trump today is 79. If you think either was or is senile, imagine how the Ayatollah was when about half a decade older. I’m not aware of any worse gerontocracy in human history except perhaps among the ancient Pharaohs, whose rudimentary medical knowledge made the seventies more than equivalent to the eighties today.

Second, as Fassihi analyzes in some detail, political and military power and decisionmaking in today’s Iran are widely dispersed among dozens of people (a “deep bench”), most of whom have known and worked with each other for decades. That means decision-making will be slow, ponderous and contingent. But it also means that it will be based on realism and practical strategy, not vague abstractions derived from the words of Islamic Prophets in the Middle Ages.

Third, although there are many so-called “hard liners” among surviving Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) active leaders, there are also some moderates. They include the duly elected Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. It is reasonable to conclude that leaders like him have significant influence, at least in domestic affairs, if not foreign military adventures. It’s also not unreasonable to conclude that Iran is in the formative stages of democracy, as was England in 1215, when the Barons met King John on the Fields of Runnymede and, instead of fighting, he signed Magna Carta. (All the IRGC leaders, plus the remaining Ayatollahs and elected civilian officials, would be analogous to the Barons.)

One other point is my own. I have never believed that Iranians are hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Why? I think that nukes are literally against their religion, Islam. It’s one thing to contemplate individual “martyrdom” and sacrifice yourself for a communal and “holy” cause. It’s quite another to vaporize millions of people, good and bad, willing and not, in a single explosion. That’s not heroic martyrdom; it’s senseless slaughter, an appalling atrocity, and, I suspect, entirely un-Islamic.

Anyway, I went to UC Berkeley with an Iranian physics student in 1962 (when the Shah was in power). Iran surely had sufficient expertise in physics to build a nuke even then. If it had desperately wanted one, it could surely have had several by now, if only by borrowing technology and fissionable material from North Korea or Pakistan. Accordingly, my view has always been that Iranian leaders have kept a skeleton nuclear program going as a feint and something to bargain away. (And the knowledge that we have enough big nukes and stealthy delivery means, like submarines, makes intelligent Iranians aware that a nuclear war with us would be national suicide.)

One other thing is worth mentioning. I once called Russia modern history’s most battered nation. That’s probably been true for the last two centuries. But in the grand scheme of all of human history, the world’s most battered nation may be Iran. It’s one of the most unfortunate nations in the middle of the vast Eurasian land mass that has had armies marching over and through it since the dawn of time. (There’s an interesting twenty-minute clip circulating on YouTube streaming these days, recounting some five thousand years of Iran’s battering and survival.) With all our plaintive angst about “ungrateful” Canadians and our relatively paltry (but real) problems with Mexican drug cartels, we might try applying a little empathy to what may have been human history’s biggest punching bag.

So what does this all mean for the immediate future? First and foremost, Fassihi’s superb reporting suggests that Iran may be more likely to do something sane and practical now than at any time since 1979. But second, it means that progress will be slow and halting. It will require patience, restraint, forbearance and perseverance, all qualities that our own Supreme Leader, with his eye ever on our fickle stock markets, self-evidently lacks.

So what should we Yanks do? We should do precisely what Iranians have been doing for the past several years, if not a decade. We should marginalize our own Supreme Leader by putting deal-making with Iran in independent hands, perhaps under an independent body of our own Executive or, even better, the UN. We should work to make a deal and, at the same time, strive hard to bring Iran and its 93 million people into the circle of modern nations that benefit from, and contribute to, a global economy with global technology.

Protected by vast oceans and historically weak neighbors, it’s easy to get lost in hate, or just distaste, for a nation that’s spent five thousand years learning every form of deception and treachery to resist battering from every direction. But as our British “betters” and our own Founders might have said, “noblesse oblige”. We can find a way out of this if we are patient and harbor a modicum of sympathy. But it’s going to take time and leaders a lot smarter, more thoughtful, more skilled, and more experienced than those we’ve put to the task up to now. Maybe Ms. Fassihi should be one of them.