Published:
03/05/2012 08:09pm
Is War with Iran Necessary?
One nice thing about being a former intelligence officer is that I am no longer required to apply the rigid objectivity which can rob the written word of useful context. Now I can say what I believe and why I believe it.
To the many people in the foreign affairs arena who have legitimate worries about the spreading influence of Iran in the Middle East, the following declaration may sound insane. Nevertheless, I stick by it: the Islamic Republic of Iran is dying.
Of course, the date of the final demise is unpredictable, but the likelihood of a collapse is a virtual certainty. My gut feeling is that it will occur well before 2030, probably before 2020.
The CIA took a lot of flak for failing to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how that mistake was made. When Gorbachev started his attempts at reform and increased openness, the now famous glasnost and perestroika, there was no serious alternative to the Communist Party. The Party and the KGB still had their hands on all the levers of power. How, then, did it collapse so quickly that the CIA didn’t see it coming?
What few in the West truly appreciated in the late 1980s was how profound the level of disaffection with the Soviet system was, even within the ranks of the apparatchiks who were at the top of it. It was not a yearning for democracy that destroyed the Soviet Union, just a longing to get out from under the yoke of a failed economic and social system.
Of course, one of the key ingredients of Soviet disaffection was the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which led to almost 15,000 dead Soviet soldiers and over 50,000 casualties from injury or disease. The Soviet Union might have staggered on for another decade or two if Afghanistan had not accelerated and deepened the spread of discontent within the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the invasion of Afghanistan only hastened the process. The inefficiency and brutality of the Soviet system were the seeds of its own demise, and they were growing fast throughout the Brezhnev era in the late 70s. The Afghan conflict was simply fertilizer.
The Soviet Union is not a perfect equivalent for Iran. Iran is not fighting a war (currently) and the Iranian version of an “apparatchik” professes loyalty to a hard-line Shia theology instead of socialist ideology. Despite those differences, Iran is rapidly moving towards the same set of preconditions that existed before the Soviet Union collapsed.
More than 70% of Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They have little or no stake in seeing the current regime propped up. As the Soviets did, the current regime in Iran strives to isolate Iran from Western influences, and even more than the Soviets, the Islamic Republic is failing miserably at this goal. Many, many Iranians have friends and relatives in the US and elsewhere. These ex-pats relate that Muslims, while they may face some discrimination, are not actively persecuted in the West, nor is Islam suppressed in the US, the UK, or most other Western countries. At the same time, economic, educational, and other opportunities for success are far greater in the West.
Meanwhile, the Iranian economy is in shambles, not least due to the spectacular incompetence of Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadi-Nejad, who has managed to auger the economy straight into the ground despite record oil prices to prop up Iran’s budget.
As if the current state of the Iranian economy weren’t bad enough, the Iranian government, especially the Council of Guardians, consistently blocks economic and political reform by blocking all reform candidates for the parliament, the Majlis, and voiding any reform legislation.
Hard-line Shia clerics in the Supreme Leader’s faction appear to be so bent on maintaining control and beating back any notion of reform that they have put Iran unmistakably on the path of revolution camp (it is worth pointing out there are many senior Ayatollahs who oppose the Supreme Leader, but they have been vigor
