The Desert Storm allies thought they had dodged confrontation with Iran. Just a year ago there was hopeful talk of a “Teheran Spring”; in the aftermath of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani swept into office at the head of a Parliament purged of Islamic radicals. But Rafsanjani’s main gesture to the West has been to accept foreign loans. “The hopes that Iran would develop into a moderate, relatively pro-Western power have evaporated,” says British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Iran is spending $2 billion a year to buy conventional arms, mainly from Russia and China. It is also building a nuclear chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and developing a long-range missile and submarine force, according to the CIA. It has stepped up support for Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Sudan, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza and the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, intelligence sources say. As a new, global balance develops in the aftermath of the cold war, Iran seems more eager than ever to challenge the world’s only remaining superpower. “Teheran has become the Moscow for the Muslim world,” says Assad Homayoun, a former Iranian diplomat. “Iran wants to become the power in the region that promotes fundamentalism and terrorism.”
In purely military terms, Iran has a long way to go before it can push its neighbors around. Indeed, Iraq’s defeated army still is stronger than Iran’s. And Iran is at least eight years away from producing a nuclear weapon, says the CIA. Even though it is rushing to rearm, Iran won’t be able to project much force for several years. But intelligence analysts are worried, partly because of what they don’t know. “Iran may emerge as a military threat equal to that of prewar Iraq, yet without the strict U.N. inspection regime that was established for Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War,” warns a forthcoming Congressional Research Service report. Iran already has enough clout to make a mockery of the idea that “collective defense” by the gulf emirates alone might deter their big neighbor. Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council stood by impotently last spring as Iran seized a strategic island claimed by the United Arab Emirates. Since then they have scrambled to cut separate deals with Iran.
Is the gulf headed for another explosion? Iran claims it is interested only in ending U.S. meddling. “Any reliable security in the region should depend on regional cooperation,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati told Le Figaro last week in Paris, where he signed an accord banning chemical weapons. Some Iranian officials complain Washington is whipping up anti-Iranian sentiment simply because it needs a new bogeyman. But many non-American analysts also predict that Iran’s mullahs won’t rest until conservative Arab regimes topple. Israel is taking the lead in sounding an alarm, even though Iran may not be able to threaten Israel directly for years. Joseph Alpher of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies predicts that the next Mideast war will break out in the gulf; Iran, he adds, has supplanted Iraq as Israel’s “public enemy No. 1” because of its nuclear program and support for the Hamas movement. Hurd says the West must confront Iran diplomatically. The gulf, he added, “has never been stable,” and it “remains a place of anxiety.” All the more so if Iran runs away with the race for regional dominance.
