Sadeq Saba, the head of the BBC’s Persia Service, told an audience in Parliament recently that: “Any foreign intervention in any shape or form will harm Iran’s democratic movement.”
Speaking as part of an expert panel at a meeting entitled “Iran: Which Way Forward?” he argued that the future of Iran must be determined by “the Iranian people, the struggle for democracy and also the economy”. With unprecedented levels of disunity within the Iranian regime, Saba said the tipping point will come “if poor sections of the society come to the streets and demonstrate”. He added: “I think Iran is heading towards this situation.”
The meeting, convened by the Westminster Committee on Iran, explored the current crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme, bringing together parliamentarians, security analysts and Middle East experts to explore ways to resolve the stand-off and assess both the dangers of military intervention and the risks associated with not taking action.
In his analysis, Paul Ingram, executive director of the British American Security Information Council, said there were a number of uncertainties, but even under “ideal conditions”, Iran was several years away from having the capability to field any nuclear weapons, should it choose to do so. The country has yet to overcome some significant technical hurdles. “At current rates, it would take Iran around four years to produce enough of the 20 per cent U235 uranium that would then require further enrichment for a nuclear weapon”, Ingram explained.
Sadeq Saba suggested that: “Both sides are exaggerating Iran’s nuclear capacity for their own motives.” He pointed out that, since the country’s last general election, there has been a significant shift in the attitude of ordinary Iranians to the nuclear programme. “For a lot of Iranians, the main priority has become the democratic issue rather than the nuclear one.”
Warning of the impact of military intervention, security analyst Ben Zala referred to a new report published by the Oxford Research Group. “Military action would not involve surgical strikes, but would be the start of an ongoing war”, he said. The repercussions of such a war would be far-reaching, with Iran withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, redoubling its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and engaging in long-term acts of retaliation.
“The idea of military intervention against Iran makes my blood run cold”, said Lord Phillips, who has been visiting the country since 1961. “It would strengthen all the wrong elements in Iranian society.” He argued that the way to resolve the issue is for Western nations to “back off and treat Iran the way we treat other countries”.
On the subject of air strikes, Alan Mendoza, executive chair of the neo-conservative Henry Jackson Society, said: “It would be foolish to rush to that stage, because the repercussions would be immense”. However, he argued that Iran’s expanding sphere of influence should not go unchallenged. Highlighting Iran’s support of Hezbollah and Hamas, Mendoza said Iran has “malicious intent and we can only imagine how that intent would be amplified, were it to have nuclear weapons”.
He added it was a “well-known secret” that “various security services have been conducting sabotage against Iran’s nuclear programme for some years”. According to Mendoza, a significant tightening of the Western approach would “squeeze the regime”, thus forcing it to shift position in order to stay in power. “One thing we know about this regime is that it does value its survival”, he said.
With both sides becoming increasingly bombastic in their rhetoric, there are concerns that conflict may be more and more difficult to avoid. In the past months, there have been a fourth round of United Nations sanctions, unilateral United States and European Union sanctions and reports of a military build-up in the Gulf.
The Iranian parliament has passed a bill that forces President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to continue uranium enrichment up to the more sensitive level of 20 per cent. “Both sides are throwing away their steering wheels in this game of chicken”, is the verdict of Paul Ingram.
Although sanctions are seen by some as an alternative to military action, they can also be regarded as its natural precursor. The enforcement of sanctions would require the inspection of Iranian vessels by Western navies. Tehran has already made it clear that it will not allow such inspections, so it is easy to see how the current stand-off could rapidly escalate.
While many are convinced Barack Obama would not lead the US into a war from which even George W Bush shied away, it may be the very fact that Obama is not Bush which means he is able to contemplate military action against Iran.
In getting Russian and Chinese support for UN Resolution 1929 last month, the American achieved a level of consensus on Iran among the UN Security Council permanent members of which his predecessor could have only dreamed. That Germany and France are fully involved in the current military escalation in the Gulf is in sharp contrast with the flimsy “coalition of the willing” pulled together by Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
“The demonisation of Iran is such that it appears we are on a one-track punitive response, even though few believe it will work, but lack the imagination or belief in other options”, said Paul Ingram.
This meeting at Westminster, the first in a series, was intended to offer that imaginative space and represents the type of open dialogue which should be going on at all levels if we are to bridge the gap in trust existing between Iran and the West and avert a further disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.
