Financial Times
David Gardner
Iranians go to the polls on Friday to elect two parliaments: one for the people and one for the mullahs (the 290-seat parliament and the 88-member Assembly of Experts).
The Islamic revolutionary elites and the vested interests clustered around them have already more or less gamed the outcome, while allocating enough space to reformists to keep them inside a system in which theocratic institutions ultimately dictate to republican ones.
The message Iran’s leaders want to send is clear: despite the nuclear pact intended to enable Iran’s reintegration into world markets, they are not relaxing their grip on power.
What about their position abroad? Can this former pariah play a constructive role in a region fast being reduced to ruin? Should Iran not fear reaping the whirlwind if Russia — Tehran’s ally in defence of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria — continues its scorched-earth policy? As the full extent of President Vladimir Putin’s agenda becomes clearer, Iran should worry.
Like Mr Assad, the Russian air force has largely ignored Isis. Instead, they have trained their fire on other Sunni rebel groups threatening the Assad regime. The extent of the Russian campaign is breathtaking. It not only seeks to liquidate the Sunni forces fighting the regime, it is assassinating their leaders, destroying their towns, enclaves and infrastructure and driving out the civilian population. To adapt a saying of Mao Zedong, Russia is not just killing the fish but draining the water in which they swim.
Credible sources inside Syria report that Russian fighter-bombers have adopted a two-step approach to air strikes: looping round after the first assault to rain death on those seeking to rescue victims of the first assault — emulating the lethal techniques of the Assad regime’s barrel bombs and Isis’s suicide and car bombs. Millions of displaced Syrian civilians have somehow survived the latter; it is hard to see how they can survive this higher-tech mimicry.
Mr Putin’s aim seems to be to drive out the overwhelmingly Sunni population. Aside from the local equation, this has the added bonus of sending more refugees into Turkey, with which Russia is at loggerheads over Syria, and thence on to Europe, intensifying its migrant panic.
One struggles to think of a better recruiting sergeant for Isis than despairing Sunni finally rendered helpless. The horrific multiple bombings carried out by Isis at the weekend, one near a revered Shia shrine close to Damascus, the other a massacre of Alawites in Homs, should be seen in this light. The jihadis are now in effect saying to the Sunni population: come to us, we can protect you against the Shia heretics and their allies.
The Iranian and Russian defence ministers are meeting in Tehran. Shia (and Persian) Iran, however, will never secure legitimacy with the (mainly Sunni) Arabs as a regional power if it signs on to the Russian prospectus.
Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, had tacitly pushed their clients in Lebanon towards the minimal co-operation needed to prevent it being overwhelmed by the spillover from Syria. But Riyadh just ended $4bn of aid pledged to the Lebanese army, because Hizbollah, Iran’s paramilitary ally in Lebanon (and strike force in Syria), has overweening control of the army and security services.
As a result, Saudi allies in Beirut’s tottering coalition government have started to abandon ship. Antipathy towards Iranian power projection can even be seen in Iraq — under a majority Shia government. Haider al-Abadi, the Shia Islamist prime minister, recently ejected from a security cabinet meeting Major General Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian revolutionary guard commander marshalling Shia militia in Iraq and Syria.
The repercussions of Iran’s aggressive defence of its Shia axis in Arab lands stretch beyond the Middle East. To continue on a path now charted by Russia will sabotage any re-engagement with the west. A Russian victory abetted by Iran in what is left of Syria cannot but be perceived as a huge setback for the US — as well as for a Europe divided by a refugee crisis which still has a long way to go.
An Arab foreign minister says he asked Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and lead negotiator in last year’s nuclear talks: “Does Iran want to be the leader of the Persian world, or the leader of the Shia world?” In other words: a recognised regional power or the spearhead of a sort of Shia supremacism in permanent conflict with (ever more radical) Sunni supremacism. There is not much time left for Iran to decide whether its international and regional face is that of Mr Zarif or General Soleimani.
