The Economist: Behind the rants, uncertainty grows

 Sep 29th 2012 | from the print edition

Iran’s presidential and nuclear future is in doubt.  

FOR Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, the annual session of the UN’s General Assembly in New York is an opportunity to forget domestic burdens and to shine, however bizarrely, on the world stage. Even before he addressed the assembly, he had created his usual rumpus on his arrival in the United States—by calling homosexuality “ugly”, denying the Holocaust, and describing Israel as a mere “disturbance” in Middle East history that would be “eliminated”. Moreover, he breezily dismissed the recent flurry of speculation that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the American presidential election in November.

A few days later, in his actual speech to the UN, he blasted “the uncivilised Zionists” for “intimidating” Iran. But he heralded a hoped-for second coming of Jesus, to be accompanied by “a perfect human being…named Imam al-Mahdi”, the “disappeared” 12th imam revered by Shia Muslims, who pray for his return, too.

Back home, however, his top brass showed that they take the threat more seriously. On September 22nd a senior Revolutionary Guard commander made clear that Iran would treat an Israeli attack as American-abetted and would respond by attacking American military bases as well as shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. A “third world war”, he said, would ensue.

In his own UN address, Barack Obama did not deviate from his previous line that diplomacy, as well as the sanctions that have isolated Iran and slashed its oil revenue, must be given more time to work. But “the United States will do what it must,” he said, “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

If the Iranians did start turning their growing stockpile of enriched uranium into a bomb, Mr Obama would indeed find it hard not to respond with force. Yet a policy of more of the same—continuing to impose and tighten sanctions and taking covert action to contain a regime that is thought not yet to have taken a definitive bomb-making decision—is the one still apparently being mooted by Mr Obama’s advisers. Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, thinks Iran will eventually make concessions in return for a lifting of sanctions. “This regime cannot survive without some source of external income,” she says.

There is another, less sanguine theory, that Iran will persist in its drive to achieve a bomb—or at least a break-out capacity to get one quickly if it so desired. The Iranians say they never trusted Mr Obama’s offer of detente early in his presidency because of the heavier sanctions and the campaigns of sabotage and assassination that accompanied the offer. In the same vein, they deplore the American administration’s recent decision to drop its longstanding classification of the exiled People’s Mujahedeen of Iran as a terrorist organisation.

So Iran’s rulers will not easily trust future pledges to lift sanctions in return for nuclear concessions. In any event, Iran’s leaders may now believe that such concessions would destroy the Islamic Republic’s credibility and open it to a recurrence of the unrest that followed Mr Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in 2009. So it is possible that an American policy of containment, even an undeclared one, might lead to a long campaign of attrition of the kind that impoverished Iraq in the 1990s, while leaving its leader in power.

Anticipating trouble, Iran’s hardliners have been stifling the remaining repositories of dissent as fiercely as ever. The most notable of these is Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an establishment heavyweight and former president who became an opposition figurehead after the contentious poll of 2009. The two most controversial of his five children—his daughter Faezeh and his son Mehdi—have recently been arrested, undoubtedly with the approval of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Mr Rafsanjani had been expected to put up a fight when Mr Khamenei tries, as he probably will, to install his own nominee as president in elections that are due next spring. But with his children behind bars, the former president may favour circumspection over principle.

Bahman Baktiari