The crisis facing the Middle East

EVEN at the best of times, the abrupt removal of an Israeli prime minister would be destabilising for the country and the Middle East. But Ariel Sharon’s stroke, which prematurely ended his political career on Wednesday, comes as the Middle East faces its greatest test for three decades. The region is staring catastrophe in the face, though Great Britain’s increasingly parochial media and political establishment, gripped by the unsurprising admission that the B-division politician who until saturday led Britain’s third party has a serious “drink problem”, has failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. But if London’s attentions are elsewhere, it cannot be said that the other major world capitals have shown themselves up to the challenge either.

Mr Sharon’s departure will be felt most starkly if his successor turns his back on his successful strategy of unilaterally creating a Palestinian state by withdrawing from untenable areas and by ensuring the safety of Israel through a security fence. Already, his exit has made a volatile situation that bit harder to manage, further increasing the chances of a 1914-style chain reaction to events that could eventually lead to the worst international conflict since the end of the Cold War.

The root of most of the Middle East’s current problems is Iran, the world′s most active state sponsor and paymaster of terrorism of (among many others) the Lebanese Shi-ite militants of Hezbollah (which Iran helped found in the 1980s); the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas; the Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and many of the barbaric terrorists who are murdering people every day in Iraq in an effort to destroy its first glimpse of freedom. While financing and encouraging the world’s worst terrorists, Iran is also moving ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons (Tehran denies any military motive in its nuclear power programme, saying it is for purely peaceful purposes, a claim believed by no independent analysts or serious governments). In addition, Iran is developing an intercontinental missile, the Saharb 3, with an 800-mile range that could hit Israel.

All this is happening at a time when Iran is calling for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. So it is hardly scaremongering to portray a frightening picture of a rogue regime preparing for war, with the even scarier possibility that terror groups could end up with nuclear weapons before the end of the decade. Yet nobody, apart from Israel, seems to want to do anything about it.

It was obvious to all but the naïve and intentionally blind, descriptions which cover most Western capitals these days, that matters were spiralling out of control when Iran re-launched its uranium conversion programme last August, ignoring objections from the United States and the European Union (EU).?But Washington is mired in Iraq and London, Paris and Berlin thought they could sweet-talk Teheran out of its nuclear ambitions. Iran took them for the suckers they are and carried on regardless. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now warns that if Iran converts enough uranium and begins enrichment procedures it could be only “a few months” away from building nuclear explosives. So much for American might; so much for European diplomacy.

Iran’s intensification of its nuclear programme – last week it announced it was ending its freeze on nuclear fuel research – comes as a confluence of forces increases the risk of an explosive clash in the region: an erratic and imperialistic Russia under President Putin has taken sides with Iran, further undermining any Western leverage with Iran; the same is true of China, whose reflexive and outdated anti-Americanism includes signing energy deals with Iran; and the collapse of the Bush administration as a force for stability and progress in the Middle East after the Iraqi debacle and a series of domestic scandals. The EU has long cosied up to dangerous dictators in exchange for commercial contracts. It is now also in the grip of a debilitating pacifism, which it will not abandon, even though its diplomatic efforts to bring Iran to the bargaining table have been a complete failure. That should surprise nobody; but add to EU impotence the complicity of Beijing and Moscow plus the power vacuum in Washington and you are left with a stark conclusion: there is nobody left to tame Iran.

Indeed, the opposite is true: Iran can count on some powerful allies, above all Mr Putin, whose impact in the Middle East is baleful. Consider the following: on Christmas Eve, Russia’s military commanders were engaged on a mission almost entirely ignored by the Western media – the deployment of the newest version of a deadly nuclear missile, the Topol M. It is fired almost into space, then descends on its target like a bullet. It is designed to penetrate America’s missile shield, paraded by the US navy two months ago when it destroyed a test missile some 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The arms race did not die with the end of the Cold War; now it is back on with a vengeance. In 2004 Russia conducted 15 ballistic missile test launches, more than any year since the Soviet era. Last year 28 tests were carried out. The Christmas Eve deployment of the Topol M along the Volga River shows Mr Putin is serious.

The significance of this for Iran? Simple: this renewed (albeit barely reported) renaissance in US-Russian rivalry threatens to spill over in the Middle East, thanks to Iran. Russia has confirmed a deal to sell TOR-M1 surface-to-air missiles to Iran. The most advanced system available, it uses mobile launchers to shoot down multiple targets such as missiles or planes. Also on Christmas Eve, the Kremlin offered to process uranium for Tehran, a deal which has since been rejected by Iran, preferring to do it itself. Moscow has also refused to condemn Tehran’s nuclear programme, arguing that it should be handled by the toothless IAEA rather than the UN Security Council.

China has also behaved badly, refusing to haul Iran in front of the Security Council. The Iranians have cleverly ensured China’s support by signing a $200bn trade deal with Beijing to supply energy-hungry China with gas and oil. Iran will export 10m tonnes of liquefied natural gas annually for 25 years; the Chinese will help in exploration and drilling. So if military action against Iran is ruled out, so too are sanctions. Russia and China will veto any move by America, Great Britain and France to slap sanctions on Iran. The situation could hardly be grimmer, though few in the West seem to realise it.

The unshackling of Iran could not be happening at a worse time: Tehran is in the grip of a new wave of extremists. In common with other Iranian hardliners and Islamo-fascists worldwide, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad believes that all non-Muslims should be removed from the Middle East. That is why he has repeatedly supported the removal of Jews from Israel and the creation instead of a Jewish state in Europe, most recently last Thursday when he also repeatedly doubted the Holocaust and called the Israelis violent criminals. It is worth quoting him at length: “So you claim during World War II, some of the Jews were burnt in crematoria. Well, we ask you: If this is true, who did this? It was you [the West], your governments and your regimes that did this. If you accept that you did this, you should be held accountable. Why should the Palestinian people pay the price for your crimes? Give them a piece of your land, and the whole thing will be over. There is no need for meetings, conventions, peace treaties, and so on. If, however, this is not true, and it is a big historical lie, why do you inflict such a violent and corrupt [Zionist] regime on the peoples of the region?”

On 14 December, President Ahmadinejad denied the reality of the Holocaust in a speech broadcast on Iranian TV: “They have created a myth in the name of the Holocaust”, he said. Last October, Mr Ahmad-inejad chaired a “World Without Zionism” conference, complete with banners demanding Israel be “wiped off the map”. Given the views of their president, few of the viewers of Jaam-e Jam 2 Iranian TV on 20 December will have been surprised to hear two analysts denying the existence of crematoria at Auschwitz, refusing to believe that there could possibly have been 6m Jews in Europe during the Second World War and claiming that it had long been proved that Jews had murdered hundreds of British and French children in the 19th century and drunk their blood before the Passover holidays.

With re-heated Nazi propaganda rife on Iranian TV, an official policy of Holocaust denial and presidential calls to wipe Israel off the map, it beggars belief that Western bien pensants can still think that Iran poses no threat to world peace. The chattering-class line is that Iran’s rabid anti-Semitism is just the meanderings of a few hotheads. The same sort of people said much the same about Hitler in the 1930s. When a powerful country’s leaders spout and encourage fascist drivel it is as well for the democracies to take it at face value and act accordingly, until there is good reason not to. That is the lesson of history, which too many in the West seem determined to forget. Appeasement is once again very much a la mode. European diplomats are too easily assuaged by Iranian Foreign Ministry officials; these are not the people in charge of Iran’s nuclear programme. Iranian diplomats never meet the Revolutionary Guards, the true fanatical guardians of the 1979 Revolution. Deluded Europeans often also claim that Mr Ahmad-

inejad will be kept in check by the clerics who really run the country. It is true that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, not the president, is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and that he alone can declare war. But Mr Khamenei also openly advocates the destruction of Israel. For example, in 2000, he said that “Iran’s stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumour of a state should be removed from the region”.

The so-called Iranian moderates are little different. Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who is consistently but wrongly described as a moderate in the West, gave a speech on 14 December 2001 that called the establishment of Israel among the worst periods of recent history. He said: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything”. The blunt truth is that the entire Iranian establishment is committed to its nuclear programme; and to the destruction of Israel.

The crisis will finally come to a head in early March, when IAEA presents its next report on Iran. At the same time, many in Israel are convinced that the end of March will be the “point of no return” after which Iran will have the technical expertise to enrich uranium in sufficient quantities to build a nuclear warhead in two to four years.

Given the abject failure of any diplomatic solution, rumours are that the Israeli armed forces have pencilled in March to launch military strikes on Iran to try and take out its nuclear facilities. But this is where Mr Sharon’s stroke will have the greatest immediate impact: a domestic political struggle could easily delay any action, though it is unlikely to kill it off completely.

In any case, while Israel’s 1981 attack against Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor succeeded because it was an easy and single target, the Iranians have spread their installations across the country; even a superbly organised Israeli strike would be unlikely to succeed while it would undoubtedly be condemned by every Great Power bar America and trigger a massive explosion of rage in the Middle East, with unpredictable consequences. The stark truth is that only a wholesale invasion of Iran or a counter-revolution which saw the regime overthrown and destroyed could conceivably work – and none of these two scenarios is on the cards, especially not the first after the Iraqi debacle.

Bitter experience shows that when tyrants call for genocide they usually mean it – or at least that it doesn’t pay to ignore what they say, especially when they are busily developing a nuclear programme. But not only have the Great Powers failed to do anything to contain Iran, they have no strategy to cope with a nuclear Iran – and cannot even start to think how to deal with a further proliferation across the Middle East and the horrifying possibility of nuclear terrorists. This is the first great test of international relations since the end of the Cold War. It looks as if the world’s leaders are about to flunk it.