19 April 2024

How dangerous is Iran?

Iran’s drone and missile strike last week was its first direct attack on Israel, and a sign that the mullahs in Tehran are becoming more hawkish.

Why does Iran hate the West?
For good reason, it would say. The beginning of the 20th century saw the country dominated by European colonial powers, at the heart of a struggle for influence between Britain and Russia known as the Great Game. Britain, which ended up in control of Iran’s formidable oil reserves, worked with the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected PM Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 – mostly because he had just nationalised those oil reserves. The subsequent Western-leaning regime was ruled with an iron fist by the Iranian monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah. When he wasn’t skiing in St Moritz, he had a penchant for locking up and torturing dissidents – which is why he was then overthrown in 1979. Hard-line Islamists led by the cleric Ruhollah Khomeini promptly turned on their fellow secular revolutionaries, and they have been in control ever since.

Have the mullahs acted on that hatred?
Under the Shah, Iran had quite a close relationship with Israel, says Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics. That changed after the Islamic Revolution, though during the 1980s – when Iran was at war with Iraq – there continued to be covert connections between Israel and Iran, with the Israelis helping fund the Iranians because they saw Saddam Hussein as a more dangerous enemy. In the 1990s, however, once the war was over, the relationship quickly grew worse – for three reasons. Hussein was no longer the “common enemy”; Iran started to provide serious funding to Hezbollah, the anti-Israel terrorist group in Lebanon; and the mullahs began to “lean into” their nuclear weapons programme.

So why has Iran become more belligerent?
In recent decades, advisers to the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, have counselled a doctrine of “strategic patience”, seeking to avoid direct conflict with Israel and the West. Even the direct missile attack last week was signposted days in advance. But a new, less pragmatic group of “ideological diehards” are now taking control, says The Economist. The Paydari Front are religious fanatics “who oppose any kind of compromise”, and in recent years they’ve tightened their grip on the government. Against the advice of “old-timers”, they are seeking to reimpose the mandatory hijab, after its de facto suspension following major protests in 2022. But their power makes the regime itself “more brittle”, with many Iranian citizens increasingly alienated from their theocratic overlords. One bit of graffiti which recently appeared in Tehran read: “Hit them, Israel. Iranians are behind you.”

How powerful is Iran’s military?
Views differ. Tech-wise, they’re left in the dust by US-backed Israel – most of Iran’s jets, for example, date from before the 1979 revolution. Nevertheless, they have a formidable arsenal of cheap drones, what’s thought to be the largest ballistic missile programme in the Middle East, and the eighth-largest army in the world, with roughly 600,000 active military personnel. (It is the 17th largest country in the world by population, with 90 million residents.) As Saddam Hussein discovered, invading the country is a fool’s errand, says Malcom Kyeyune on the Multipolarity podcast. Iran is “essentially shaped like a fortress”, with mountains protecting Tehran from three sides. Because the country is so big, bombing campaigns could leave enemy fighter jets without enough fuel for their return trip. Iran can also draw on a “massive wave of nationalism” – communists were let out of jail and happily fought for the mullahs when Iraq invaded.

Who are its allies?
Among the big players, China and Russia – Tehran has been doing a roaring trade in drones with the latter. But in the Middle East, its only state ally is Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has his own internal problems to deal with. Iran mostly projects power through proxy forces: various militias in Iraq and Syria; the Houthis in Yemen, who have been wreaking havoc in Red Sea shipping lanes; Hamas in Gaza; and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has tens of thousands of long-range rockets and missiles right on Israel’s doorstep. Uri Bar-Joseph, a security expert at Haifa University, says Israel only has the capability to neutralise less than 10% of this arsenal.

What about Iran’s enemies?
They include most of the Arab world. This goes back centuries: namely, to a doctrinal split in the Muslim world between Shia (Iran) and Sunni (most Arabs). In modern times, this rivalry has taken the form of a proxy war in Yemen between Iran-backed Houthis and a Saudi-led Arab coalition. Western-allied Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Jordan also helped repulse last week’s Iranian missile barrage. But overall, Arabs dread a regional war and are doing their best to prevent it: Oman and Qatar in particular have been crucial intermediaries in behind-the-scenes negotiations between the West and Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”.

How dangerous is Tehran’s nuclear programme?
Since Donald Trump pulled America out of a three-year-old nuclear deal with Tehran in 2018, Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium have grown dramatically. Washington’s Institute for Science and International Security believes Tehran could now build seven nuclear weapons in one month. If that happened, says William Hague in The Times, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt might decide that they needed “their own nuclear arsenals”. A military campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities could never be fully successful – operations are dispersed across the country, and often take place deep underground. And it could spur the mullahs to revive their programme “with a vengeance”.

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