The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

The
Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan
.)
28
 But comparison, it is famously said, is
the beginning of all serious scholarship. Compared to the upheavals and
revolutions in the Arab world during the early and middle phases of the Cold
War, the regime ushered in by the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution was striking in
its vitality and modernity. The truth is, and this is something that goes directly
back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything about the Iranian past and
present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of its empires from Cyrus
to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who can deny the sheer Iranian talent for running
terrorist networks in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, which is, after all, an aspect of
imperial rule!), or the political thought and writings of its Shiite clergy; or the
complex efficiency of the bureaucracy and security services in cracking down on
dissidents. Tehran’s revolutionary order has constituted a richly developed
governmental structure with a diffusion of power centers: it was never a crude
one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran in neighboring Arab Iraq.
Olivier Roy tells us that the “originality” of the Iranian Revolution lies in the
alliance between the clergy and the Islamist intelligentsia:
The Shiite clergy is incontestably more open to the non-Islamic corpus
than the Sunni [Arab] ulamas. The ayatollahs are great readers
(including of Marx and Feuerbach): there is something of the Jesuit or
Dominican in them. Hence they combine clear philosophical
syncretism with an exacting casuistic legalism.… The twofold culture
of the Shiite clergy is striking: highly traditionalist … and yet very
open to the modern world.
29
In fact, it is this relatively advanced and modernist strain that makes the
“Shiite imagination,” in Roy’s words, “more easily adaptable to the idea of
revolution”: an idea which, in turn, requires a sense of history and social justice
combined with that of martyrdom. The Sunni Arab world, though it has had its
reformers and modernizers, like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, simply lacked for too long the exposure

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to Western political philosophers such as Hegel and Marx to the degree of Iran:
whose mullahs, in the vein of Hegel and Marx, base their moral superiority on an
understanding of the purpose of history. Unlike the conservatism of the Afghan
mujahidin or the suffocating military regimes of the Arab world, revolutionary
Iran in the 1980s saw itself as part of a fraternity that included the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua and the African National Congress in South Africa.
30
Though clerical
rule descended in recent years to mere brutal repression—the mark of a tired
regime in its decadent, Brezhnevite phase—the very doctrinal and abstract
nature of the infighting that still occurs behind closed doors is testament to the
elevated nature of Iranian culture. The Iranian state has been stronger and more
elaborately organized than any in the Greater Middle East, save for Turkey and
Israel, and the Islamic Revolution did not dismantle the Iranian state, but, rather,
attached itself to it. The regime maintained universal suffrage and instituted a
presidential system, even if the clerics and security services abused it through an
apparently rigged election in 2009.
Again, what made the clerical regime in Iran so effective in the pursuit of its
interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, was its merger with the Iranian state,
which itself is the product of history and geography. The Green Movement,
which emerged in the course of massive anti-regime demonstrations following
the disputed election of 2009, is very much like the regime it sought to topple:
greatly sophisticated by the standards of the region (at least until the Jasmine
Revolution in Tunisia two years later), and thus another demonstration of the
Iranian genius. The Greens constituted a world-class democracy movement,
having mastered the latest means in communications technology—Twitter,
Facebook, text messaging—to advance their organizational throwweight, and
having adopted a potent mixture of nationalism and universal moral values to
advance their cause. It took all the means of repression of the Iranian state,
subtle and not, to drive the Greens underground. Were the Greens ever to take
power, or to facilitate a change in the clerical regime’s philosophy and foreign
policy toward moderation, Iran, because of its strong state and dynamic idea,
would have the means to shift the whole groundwork of the Middle East away
from radicalization; providing political expression for a new bourgeoisie with
middle-class values that has been quietly rising throughout the Greater Middle
East, and which the American obsession with al Qaeda and radicalism obscured
until the Arab Spring of 2011.
31
To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies an acceptance of
fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran’s geography, history, and human
capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East, and by extension Eurasia,

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will be critically affected by Iran’s own political evolution, for better or for
worse.
The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a destiny lies in what has
not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me explain. Iran’s geography, as
noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the same extent that it has on
Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union
has brought limited gains to Iran, when one takes into account the whole history
of Greater Iran in the region. The very suffix “istan,” used for Central Asian
countries and which means “place,” is Persian. The conduits for Islamization and
civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and culture. The language
of the intelligentsia and other elites in Central Asia up through the beginning of
the twentieth century was one form of Persian or another. Yet as Roy and others
recount, after 1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the northwest adopted the Latin
alphabet and turned to Turkey for tutelage. As for the republics to the northeast
of Iran, Sunni Uzbekistan oriented itself more toward a nationalistic than an
Islamic base, for fear of its own homegrown fundamentalists: this makes it wary
of Iran. Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but Iran
is constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many Turkic-speaking
Muslims elsewhere in Central Asia.
32
What’s more, being nomads and semi-
nomads, Central Asians were rarely devout Muslims to start with, and seven
decades of communism only strengthened their secularist tendencies. Having to
relearn Islam, they are both put off and intimidated by clerical Iran.
Of course, there have been positive developments from the viewpoint of
Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is among the most technologically
advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with its culture and politics),
and as such has built hydroelectric projects and roads and railroads in these
Central Asian countries that will one day link them all to Iran—either directly or
through Afghanistan. Moreover, a natural gas pipeline now connects
southeastern Turkmenistan with northeastern Iran, bringing Turkmen gas to
Iran’s Caspian region, and thus freeing up Tehran’s own gas production in
southern Iran for export via the Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a rail link
built in the 1990s connecting the two countries.) Turkmenistan has the world’s
fourth largest natural gas reserves, and has committed its entire gas exports to
Iran, China, and Russia. Hence, the possibility arises of a Eurasian energy axis
united by the crucial geography of three continental powers all up through 2011
opposed to Western democracy.
33
Iran and Kazakhstan have built an oil pipeline
connecting the two countries, with Kazakh oil being pumped to Iran’s north,
even as an equivalent amount of oil is shipped from Iran’s south out through the

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Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran will also be linked by rail, providing
Kazakhstan with direct access to the Gulf. A rail line may also connect
mountainous Tajikistan to Iran, via Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the shortest
route for all these natural-resource-rich countries to reach international markets.
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along with its
substate, terrorist empire-of-sorts in the Greater Middle East. Clearly, we are
talking here of a twenty-first-century successor to Mackinder’s Heartland Pivot.
But there is still a problem.
Given the prestige that Shiite Iran still enjoys in some sectors of the Arab
world, to say nothing of Shiite south Lebanon and Shiite Iraq—because of the
regime’s implacable support for the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-
Semitism—it is telling that this ability to attract masses outside its borders does
not similarly carry over into Central Asia. One issue is that the former Soviet
republics maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, and simply lack the hatred
toward the Jewish state that may still be ubiquitous in the Arab world, despite
the initial phases of the Arab Spring. But there is something larger and deeper at
work: something that limits Iran’s appeal not only in Central Asia but in the
Arab world as well. That something is the very persistence of its suffocating
clerical rule that while impressive in a negative sense—using Iran’s strong state
tradition to ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and rape
people—has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan appeal that throughout
history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense. The Technicolor
disappeared from the Iranian landscape under this regime, and was replaced by
grainy black-and-white.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from whose
vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian Khorasan have
always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and pilgrimage, in stark
contrast to Turkmenistan’s own sparsely populated, nomadic landscape. But
while trade and pipeline politics proceeded apace, Iran held no real magic, no
real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly secular and were put off by
the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its in-your-face
challenge to America and Israel, I don’t believe we will see the true appeal of
Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or is toppled. A
democratic or quasi-democratic Iran, precisely because of the geographical
power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize hundreds of millions of
fellow Muslims in both the Arab world and Central Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only because of the
example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq, but also
because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and historically eclectic

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Shiite Iran. And such an Iran might do what two decades of Post Cold War
Western democracy and civil society promotion have failed to, that is, lead to a
substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions in former Soviet Central
Asia.
Iran’s Shiite regime was able for a time to inspire the lumpen Sunni faithful
and oppressed throughout the Middle East against their own tired, pharaonic
governments, some of which have since fallen. Through its uncompromising
message and nimble intelligence services, Iran for a long time ran an
unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities including Hamas in
Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Mahdi movement in southern Iraq.
And yet the Iranian regime was quietly despised at home in many quarters,
where the concept of Islamic Revolution, because Iranians have actually
experienced it, has meant power cuts, destruction of the currency, and
mismanagement. The battle for Eurasia, as I have explained, has many fronts, all
increasingly interlocked with one another. But the first among equals in this
regard is the one for the hearts and minds of Iranians, who comprise, along with
Turks, the Muslim world’s most sophisticated population. Here is where the
struggle of ideas meets the dictates of geography: here is where the liberal
humanism of Isaiah Berlin meets the quasi-determinism of Halford Mackinder.
For as irresistible and overpowering seem the forces of geography, so much
still hangs on a thread. Take the story of the brilliant eighteenth-century post-
Safavid conqueror Nader Shah. Of Turkic origin, from Khorasan in northeastern
Iran, Nader Shah’s Persian Empire stretched from the Transcaucasus to the
Indus. His sieges numbered Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, and
Kabul, places that bedevil America in the early twenty-first century, and which
were rarely strangers to Iranian rule. Had Nader Shah, as Michael Axworthy
writes, not become deranged in the last five years of his life, he could have
brought about in Iran “a modernizing state capable of resisting colonial
intervention” from the British and Russians in the nineteenth century. But rather
than be remembered as the Peter the Great of Persia, who might have
dramatically altered Iranian history from then on for the better, his regime ended
in misrule and economic disaster.
34
Or take the fall of the Shah in 1979. Henry Kissinger once told me that had
Jimmy Carter’s administration handled the rebellion against the Shah more
competently in the late 1970s, the Shah might have survived and Iran would now
be like South Korea, a dynamic regime, with an imperfectly evolved democracy,
that always has its minor disagreements with the United States, but which is
basically an ally. The Shah’s regime, in his view, was capable of reform,
especially given the democratic upheaval in the Soviet Empire that would come

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a decade later. Though blaming President Carter for the Shah’s fall may be too
facile, the possibilities raised by even a slightly different outcome to the Iranian
Revolution are still intriguing. Who knows? I do know that when I traveled
throughout Iran in the 1990s, having come recently from Egypt, it was the
former that was much less anti-American and anti-Israeli than the latter. Iran’s
relatively benign relationship with the Jews stretches from antiquity through the
reign of the late Shah. Iran’s population contains hope and possibilities.
Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of
September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President
Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain
terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran, even as
crowds in parts of the Arab world cheered on the attacks; or the help Iran gave to
the U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for
substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003. These are
all indications that history, up to this point in time, did not need to turn out as it
did. Other outcomes were possible.
Geography dictates that Iran will be pivotal to the trend lines in the Greater
Middle East and Eurasia, and it may dictate how it will be pivotal, but it cannot
dictate for what purpose it will be pivotal. That is up to the decisions of men.
As I write, true to the innovative imperialist traditions of its medieval and
ancient past, Iran has brilliantly erected a postmodern military empire, the first
of its kind: one without colonies and without the tanks, armor, and aircraft
carriers that have been the usual accompaniments of power. Rather than classic
imperialism—invasion and occupation—Iran, notes author and former CIA field
officer Robert Baer, is a superpower within the Middle East by virtue of a
“three-pronged strategy of proxy warfare, asymmetrical weapons and an appeal
to the … downtrodden,” particularly legions of young and frustrated males.
Hezbollah, Tehran’s Arab Shiite proxy in Lebanon, Baer points out, “is the de
facto state” there, with more military and organizational heft, and more
communal commitment, than the official authorities in Beirut possess. In Gaza,
Shiite Iran’s furtive military and financial aid, and its “raw anticolonial
message,” seduced poor Palestinians trapped in Soweto-like conditions, who
were alienated from contiguous Sunni Arab states run by the likes of the former
dictator Mubarak.
35
 Iran, a thousand miles away to the east, felt closer to these
downtrodden Palestinians than did Gaza’s border with Egypt under Mubarak’s
rule. This, too, was the Iranian genius. Then, at least through 2011, there were
the friendly governments in Syria and Iraq, the former of which clung to Iran for

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dear life as its only real ally, and the latter of which has a political establishment
enmeshed with the Iranian intelligence services, which can help stabilize the
country or destabilize it, as they wish. Finally, there is the Persian Gulf itself,
where Iran is the only major power with its long and shattered coastline opposite
small and relatively weak Arab principalities, each of which Tehran can
militarily defeat on its own, undermine through local fifth-column Shiite
populations, especially in Bahrain as we have seen, or economically damage
through terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz.
Though forbidding and formidable, that most important element, again,
having to do with enlightenment, is absent. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid,
Safavid, and other Iranian empires of yore, which were either benign or truly
inspiring in both a moral and cultural sense, this current Iranian empire of the
mind rules mostly out of fear and intimidation, through suicide bombers rather
than through poets. And this both limits its power and signals its downfall.
Iran, with its rich culture, vast territory, and teeming and sprawling cities, is,
in the way of China and India, a universe unto itself, whose future will
overwhelmingly be determined by internal politics and social conditions. Yet if
one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating Iran’s fate, it would be Iraq. Iraq,
history and geography tell us, is entwined in Iranian politics to the degree of no
other foreign country. The Shiite shrines of Imam Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and
son-in-law) in Najaf and the one of Imam Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet)
in Karbala, both in central-southern Iraq, have engendered Shiite theological
communities that challenge that of Qom in Iran. Were Iraqi democracy to ensure
even a modicum of stability, the freer intellectual atmosphere of the Iraqi holy
cities could have an impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a democratic
Iraq will serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers might in the
future take advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply embroiled in Iraqi
politics, the very propinquity of the two nations with a long and common border
might work to undermine the more repressive of the two systems. Iranian
politics will become gnarled by interaction with a pluralistic, ethnically Arab
Shiite society. And as the Iranian economic crisis continues to unfold, ordinary
Iranians could well up in anger over hundreds of millions of dollars being spent
by their government to buy influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. This is to
say nothing of how Iranians will become increasingly hated inside Iraq as the
equivalent of “Ugly Americans.” Iran would like to simply leverage Iraqi Shiite