Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

I hope the title of this article scared you. It should. Knowing that one madman has the power to harness a country’s resources to develop a nuclear bomb and then wipe Israel off the map is a very frightening thought indeed. It is very convenient to have a hard-line figure like Mr. Ahmadinejad to rally against as we gear up for war. But before you run to the store for extra duct tape it might be worth your while, our while, to learn a little bit about where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fits into the Iranian Government power structure. I know it is easier to pin the tail on one donkey rather than many and project our collective fear, anger and hate like a laser beam onto it’s ass; but, the facts may give you pause and surprise you.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is no doubt the public face of Iran today. But, how powerful is he? How much control does he exert over Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Over Iran’s military or intelligence services? Not much, actually.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As such, he is the head of the executive branch. He is also not the commander in chief of the armed forces of Iran. Iran is the only country in the world where the executive branch does not control the armed forces. Iran is a unique flavor of Islamic Theocracy. The highest-ranking official in the Iranian Government is not the President - instead it is the Supreme Leader. According to Iran’s Constitution, the Supreme leader controls the military and the intelligence services, sets domestic and foreign policy, and appoints many officials in the Government. The Supreme Leader alone has the power to declare war. Iran’s nuclear policy is managed by the Supreme National Security Council, which reports directly to the Supreme Leader and is charged with carrying out his policies. The Supreme National Security Council’s members include the President, the speaker of the Parliament, the head of the Judiciary and heads of the armed forces and intelligence services. The President chairs this council and coordinates the Supreme Leader’s policies.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, as the President of Iran, has very limited to non-existent war-making powers. The primary responsibility of Iran’s President is over the country’s economic policies. In most other areas, the President is more of a ceremonial figure rather than one with actual execute authority.

Iran’s Constitution has written into it a complex power structure, and in its unique way contains checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. The Iranian Government is a complex mix of elected officials and appointed officials. The primary elected body is the Assembly of Experts. This body is composed of clerics that are elected by the public. The Assembly of Experts appoints and periodically reconfirms the Supreme Leader. The public also elects the Parliament and the President. Click here for a comprehensive discussion of the structure of the Iranian Government and the relationship between the different bodies of the Government.  The figure below depicts the organizational structure of the Iranian Government. Click on the image below for a larger, clearer image.

The Iranian Government is not a monolithic structure. There are conservatives and reformists in the Government. There have been ebbs and flows in the past in the balance between conservatives and reformists. There is likely to be similar political shifts in the future. Iran is not a cult of personality, and certainly not one in the figure of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Ahmadinejad has significant restraints in his power to control foreign policy. We in the United States have a tendency to reduce countries to personalities. We do this at our own peril. If we are to engage in effective management of crises vis-à-vis our adversaries we must first understand them. We do ourselves an injustice and we miss significant opportunities by dealing with a caricature of a foreign country rather than the country itself.

We cannot hope to deal effectively with the challenges that Iran poses without an understanding of the Iranian Government, its politics and its history. We have failed in this once in Iraq. We cannot afford to make the same mistake with Iran. The costs are likely to be much higher.

[Author’s Note: This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles aimed at understanding the nature of the challenge we face from Iran.]

The United States has threatened a nuclear strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Government of Iran has responded to this threat by publicly humiliating the United States. Iran has declared that it has officially joined the Nuclear Club. Though Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon, its announcement that it is now capable of enriching uranium puts the United States, and the international community, on notice that Iran is rapidly becoming the newest nuclear power in the world.

In his latest column in The Washington Post, David Ignatius compares the current impasse with the Cuban Missile Crisis. He writes about the choices President Bush is presented with:

[Professor Graham] Allison argues that Bush’s dilemma is similar to the one that confronted Kennedy in 1962. His advisers are telling him that he may face a stark choice — either to acquiesce in the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a dangerous adversary, or risk war to stop that nuclear fait accompli . Hard-liners warned JFK that alternative courses of action would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning, and Bush is probably hearing similar advice now.

He argues that an attack on Iran will undermine America’s pre-eminent position in the world. He cites Zbigniew Brzezinski to drive home the point:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, makes a similar argument about Iran. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America’s present role in the world," he told me this week. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it’s still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we’ll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world."

While I agree with Mr. Ignatius and Mr. Brzezinski that an attack on Iran will further undermine America’s relevance in the world, I disagree with the suggestion that we are not already there. I think it is a direct consequence of the war in Iraq that Iran and to a similar extent North Korea are able to throw dirt in America’s face with impunity. By threatening war we have rendered impotent our ability to wage war. Our adversaries know this and know that the vast diplomatic playing field between war and peace belongs to them.

While Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis realized that the goal of war is to achieve your will and not war itself, the Bush administration considers war as an end by itself. Kennedy deftly employed the tools of war, gunboat diplomacy, and the art of political communication in combination to achieve the primary goal - to avoid a nuclear Cuba. His genius, as Mr. Ignatius points out, was to realize that the other side does not necessarily want war. Kennedy cultivated this notion and pounced on it in one brilliant act in high stakes diplomacy: he received two contradictory messages from the Soviet Union, one belligerent one conciliatory, he chose to ignore the belligerent and act on the conciliatory. That single act shifted the dynamics of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The detente that followed can be traced back directly to this triumph of uncommon common sense alone.

The Bush Administration, by contrast, has played the diplomatic game with the subtlety of a jackhammer. It may work well in movies, where you draw a line in the sand and your opponent quickly crumbles and grovels at your feet, but in the real world a show of force is underpinned by multiple of acts of mutual compromise. The Administration however, due to its misadventure in Iraq, has lost the ability to make a credible show of force. When the United States says that we will strike you militarily if condition A is not met, the opposing party knows that this is not a starting point of diplomacy but an inflexible ultimatum. The choices for the adversary now are either capitulate or wage war. From anyone else’s perspective except perhaps that of the United States, the sounder choice is to prepare for war. It is better to fight a war under these circumstances with the final political outcome in doubt than to capitulate with its assured outcome of defeat. This is not to say that the United States cannot win militarily against Iran, it certainly can. But war is not about military victories. War is a political act and its final outcome must be measured with a political yardstick. By that yardstick, a prospect of an American victory in Iran is remote.

President Ahmadinejad of Iran has in recent days struck both a conciliatory and a belligerent tone in his public remarks. This is not a sign of an unstable personality, as many in the Administration appear to believe. It is, on the contrary, a sign that Iran is practiced in the art of diplomacy. The Bush Administration should now be at a moment of decision. Past experience suggests that the Administration perhaps does not realize this and may already have made the decision to go to war. That is a shame. This crisis offers the United States the opportunity to truly remake the Middle East - but perhaps not in the way they had originally envisioned. Iran is destined to be, with an assist from the United States in Iraq, a major power in the Middle East. The United States has an opportunity here to get ahead of this development and broker a new status quo in the Middle East that can usher in an era of regional and global stability. This development is in our National Interest, far more so than a full-scale war in the Middle East.

It is now time to move the conversation to the achievement of this new order in the Middle East.