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Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ended up creating a clone of the Saudi faith, Khomeinism, that bears as little resemblance to Shiite Islam as Wahabbism does to Sunni Islam. Among the many common points the two new faiths have is a desire to evangelize. Since 1989, Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini, has sought to proselytize within the Muslim world, in hopes that the Shiite/Sunni ratio could be reversed.
In this drive to win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide, the Palestine issue is seen as the key. This is why Iran has taken a stand on Israel that is even more aggressive than that adopted by Saddam Hussein, who used the issue to blur the hatred religious groups felt at his secularization of Iraq. Although most commentators place the onus for Tehran's doomsday line toward Israel on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the reality is that the much-caricatured president of Iran is simply following orders, albeit with zest.
The majority Persian community within Iran feels little sense of kinship with their Arab neighbors, considering themselves to be "Aryan" and therefore linked with Europe rather than with the Middle East. Few within the population of Iran share the evangelism of the Grand Ayatollah, and most are nervous at the price Tehran is being made to pay by the international community for being one of the few countries that have the destruction of Israel as official policy.
U.N. sanctions have already made the supply of some essential drugs scarce in Iran, while financial restrictions are affecting the ability of Iranian businesses to compete globally or even regionally. Of course, like most sanctions regimes, this one too is alienating the middle and the professional classes from the United States and the European Union, the two players driving the restrictions, thus damping their opposition to the mullahcracy.
Given the task of enticing the Muslim world into abandoning the "compromised" Sunni leaders in favor of allegiance to the "fearless" Shiites, the members of the Supreme Leader's advisory group are aiming at a faith-based alliance between Iran and Iraq. Such a consolidation of relations between the two main Shiite states will, they calculate, give them a platform to expand the faith into countries still in the grip of monarchies close to the United States and the European Union.
While on record the ruling structures in Iraq are allied with the United States, the heavy-handed military tactics and the perceived "overbearing" attitude of even junior U.S. personnel has created a resentment of the occupation that seems in danger of bursting forth into an Iraqi version of the Intifada. The clear tilt of U.S. commanders in favor of Sunni groups has consolidated this opposition, which sees Tehran as a much more natural partner of Baghdad than Washington. It is telling that despite intense U.S. pressure, few within the Nuri al-Maliki government have accepted the Bush administration line that Iran is the primary problem in Iraq rather than the solution.
So long as the United States and the European Union continue to see themselves in the mold of the Western colonizers who freely administered territories during past decades, the drift of both Iran and Iraq toward an anti-Western radicalization will accelerate. The sooner policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic accept that only Iraqis can solve their own internal problems, and that the insertion of foreign mother-henning -- especially of the Blackwater kind -- will only increase rather than staunch the flood of recruits into the ongoing jihad, the better.
While geography and faith will make close relations between Iran and Iraq inevitable, it would be best for the international community if this were under benign regimes that do not share the apocalyptic vision of the present religious leadership in Iran. This can happen only if the United States and the European Union disaggregate the Iranian population from the mullahcracy, and ensure that punitive measures affect only the latter, while leaving out the former. Should there be a strike against Iranian nuclear assets, it needs to be a surgical, Osirak-style operation that leaves the rest of the country's infrastructure intact.
Ultimately, should rational Western policies be pursued toward Iran and Iraq, these may help bring about a transfer of power from the hands of religious fundamentalists into those of the secular majority in both countries. In such an eventuality, Iraq, India, Iran and Indonesia can form an alliance that would contain within itself the overwhelming majority of the globe's Muslims -- an alliance that would be based on moderation, democracy and peaceful intentions toward other nation states.
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(Professor M.D. Nalapat is vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
