By: Mr.Fog on Venerdì 28 Gennaio 2005 21:30
Che si stia pensando alle elezioni in Iraq e' fuor di dubbio.
Che le tensioni non svaniranno dopo di esse e' altrettanto sicuro.
Anzi la parte piu' complessa e meno facile da decifrare sara' proprio il post-elezioni e credo che sia per questo che a NY hanno il mal di schiena.
The Three-Power Game
By George Friedman
Now the question becomes Iran. But the Iran question is not the simplistic "next target" issue that has been framed by the media -- or the Bush administration for that matter. The Iran question is far more complex, subtle and defining. It divides into two questions. First, once Iraq holds elections, what will Iran's policy be toward Iraq's new Shiite government? Second, since the Shiite-Sunni split is fundamental to the Islamic world, how will the United States manage and manipulate that divide?
To approach these questions, we need to look at the world through Iran's eyes. Iran has a single, overwhelming national security interest: protecting itself from encroachments by foreign powers. After World War II, the primary threat came from the Soviet Union. Another threat, both ancient and continual, came from Iraq. Under both the shah and the ayatollahs, Iraq constituted what became Iran's major national security threat.
The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s had a devastating effect on Iran. There is hardly an Iranian family that did not suffer a loss in that war. Iraq came out ahead in the war militarily, but had it simply defeated Iran, the result would have been catastrophic. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Iraq has been Iran's nightmare.
This is why the Iranians did not seriously object to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Iranians did everything they could to encourage and entangle the Americans in the war -- including providing intelligence that triggered American responses. There was nothing more important for Iran than seeing Saddam Hussein's regime collapse.
For Iran, the best outcome of the war would be a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The second best outcome would be chaos in Iraq. Both provide Iran with what it needs: a relatively secure frontier and an opportunity to shape events to the west. The third -- and least acceptable -- outcome would be a neutral Iraq. Neutrality is highly changeable.
It had been Iran's hope that the U.S. invasion would create a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad. The United States certainly dangled this possibility in front of the Iranians. Ahmed Chalabi, the original fair-haired boy of the Pentagon, had a dual role to play. He was the conduit the Iranians used to pump intelligence into Washington that justified and required the invasion. He was also the channel used by the United States to convince the Iranians to keep the lid on the Iraqi Shia. Chalabi told Iran that the United States would give them what they wanted if the Shia remained quiet. Chalabi, like a figure in a Cold War espionage novel, was used and used up by both sides.
The Iranians will get a Shiite government in Baghdad after the election. It is not clear at all that it will be a puppet state. The Iraqi and Iranian Shia have diverging interests and somewhat different views of the kind of regime they want. Nevertheless, whatever the tensions, any Shiite regime is better than a Sunni regime as far as the Iranians are concerned. Even for this there will be a price. The new government will continue to control Shiite regions and probably have the cooperation of the Kurds. It will not control Sunni regions, where the insurgency is in place. There will not be a real Iraqi state unless the Sunni insurgency is defeated. The Shia -- with the Americans -- can potentially defeat the Sunnis, but Iranian cooperation is necessary. At the very least, the Iranians will have to avoid destabilizing the Shiite government by manipulating the Iraqi Shia to get more pro-Iranian officials in place. They will also have to share tactical intelligence on the Sunni i nsurgency with the Americans.
Alternatively, they can go with their second-best choice: chaos in Iraq. Under that scenario, the Shia in Iraq are pressured not to fight the Sunnis and the Iraqi regime becomes the government of Shiite Iraq and nothing more. At that point, Iraq, in effect, becomes divided into three states -- Shia, Sunni, Kurd.
This is a tempting proposition. The problem the Iranians have is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If Iraq collapses and the Iranians dominate southern Iraq, then the road is open militarily to Kuwait and Saudi oil fields. The Iranians might not want to take advantage of this, but the Arabs cannot hope for the best as a foreign policy.
The Saudis cannot afford chaos in Iraq or for the road from Iran to be wide open. They will increase their dependence on the United States and will be forced to do whatever they can to reduce the rebellion in the Sunni region. A united Iraq under a Shiite-dominated coalition government will secure Iran's western frontiers, but will deny it the opportunity to dominate the region. A divided Iraq will give Iran secure borders, an opportunity for domination and serious responses from Arab states. It will drive the Arabs into the Americans' arms. Things could get dicey fast for the Iranians. The United States is letting them know -- via the convenient conduit of Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker magazine -- that it is ready to push back hard on Iran. U.S. President George W. Bush directly warned the Iranians on Jan. 26 to stay out of the Iraqi elections. The Iranians are signaling back that they are a nuclear power -- which is not true yet.
The Iranians have a fundamental strategic decision to make. They can work with the United States and secure their interests. They can undermine the United States and go for the big prize: domination of the Persian Gulf. The first is low risk, the second incredibly high risk.
Behind this all there is a complex three-power game. There is the United States, in a war with factions of the Sunni. There are the Sunnis themselves, divided and unsure of their direction. There are the Shia, maneuvering to shift the political balance with the Sunni without becoming American puppets. Within each of these communities -- including the American -- there are deep divides, complex contradictions and political tensions. Each side is trying to use these to its advantage.
How this relationship plays out is the real issue. The question of the Sunni insurrection in four provinces of Iraq is not unimportant, but it is not defining. It is simply the arena in which the basic strategic complexity is being played out. But the real game is: Three players, each trying to create an alliance that locks out the third without limiting its own freedom of action, with none of the players really in control of the situation. It reminds us a bit of the U.S.-Soviet-Chinese game in 1968-1970. But even there, although internal factionalism was rife in all three countries, the decision-making process was not that chaotic.
That's why, in the end, it does not boil down to the Shia as much as to Iran. Iran can opt to align with the United States and define the terms under which it will accept a united Iraq under a Shiite-led coalition government, or it can go for it all, undermine the Shiite leadership in Iraq and open the door to the division of Iraq into three parts, with southern Iraq in the Iranian sphere of influence and the road to the western littoral of the Persian Gulf wide open -- except for the United States.
Iran has a low-risk, low-reward choice and a high-risk, high-reward choice. How lucky is Iran feeling?
