Home OpinionComment Tehran optimistic after all


Tehran optimistic after all

Despite expectations, Iranian government rides resistance into 2013

by Gareth Smyth

Lebanon is presented with the most serious challenges it has faced in the past decade. The economy is struggling, the internal security situation is deteriorating and the country’s neighbors pose real threats. In these circumstances the very fact that the country continues to operate can be seen as a success. And amidst everything, there are opportunities — not just in newfound offshore oil and gas but also within the country’s ingenious population.

As we head into 2013, what can be done to help the country unite, to overcome its challenges and ultimately to grow? Over the course of this week, eight influential figures will address seven important topics, each suggesting one proposal to help the country move forward. In this first article, former Labor Minister Charbel Nahas argues that the country’s economy needs fundamental reform.

Iran is looking at 2013 with more optimism than seemed likely just a few months ago. True, tougher United States and European Union sanctions introduced in the summer have halved oil exports to around 1.1 million barrels a day, but predictions of economic implosion have fallen flat. 

Likewise, the durability of the Syrian regime has confounded many expectations, with varying reports of Iranian assistance. Above all, to Iran’s satisfaction, November’s conflict between Hamas and Israel brought the Palestinian cause back up the agenda, thereby challenging the narrative of a bipolar region defined by tension between Sunni and Shia camps.

When Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal publicly thanked Iran for its “unconditional” support, he evoked a better past relationship: Six years ago, Iran transferred resources to help Hamas govern Gaza after the party won the Palestinian legislative elections and its new government was snubbed by Arab leaders and the West. 

Now, the acknowledgment from General Mohammad Ali Jafari that Iran supplied Hamas with the know-how for ‘home-made’ versions of the longer-range Fajr-5 rockets painted a stark contrast between Tehran’s military help and the caution of the Sunni-led regional states. Perhaps, we wondered, Iran could now recover some of the influence lost when Hamas’ leadership moved from Syria to Qatar early in 2012 and expressed support for the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. 

No wonder, then, that Tehran’s assessment of the conflict in Gaza was upbeat. On a trip to Syria, Ali Larijani, Iran’s parliament speaker, extolled a renewed rhetoric of “resistance”, linking Hezbollah to “the victories won up to now” by the Palestinians and even claiming that Syria was playing a “fundamental role”. Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah questioned whether an Israel “shaken by a handful of Fajr-5 rockets” could cope with Hezbollah’s far greater arsenal. And this too brought back golden memories, in this case the early 1990s, when Israel deported to South Lebanon several Palestinian leaders, mainly from Hamas, where they were welcomed by Hezbollah.

The Iranian media has been quoting military analysts suggesting Gaza highlights the challenge Israel might face in a war on three fronts, including Hezbollah and Hamas, if it attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. And there was another common theme: that Israel lacks the public support and appetite for any sustained conflict.

Iran has another calculation. While the Sunni triumvirate of Egypt, Qatar and Turkey played a successful role in helping end the conflict and may be now hoping to draw Hamas into a ‘peace process’ with Israel, their chances of success hang on Israel taking a far less confrontational approach — and Tehran sees little chance of this happening.

True, there is for Iran no simple way to improve relations with the Sunni world, damaged by developments since at least the shift in Iraq toward a Shia-led government after the 2003 US invasion. And the war in Syria, while showing the resilience of the regime, is also radicalizing militant Sunnis to the extent that Khaled Oweis, former Reuters bureau chief in Damascus, spoke recently of Syria as “the new Yemen”: it seems a long time since ‘experts’ saw the demise of Al Qaeda in the ‘Arab Spring’. 

Alongside discussion in Iran about Gaza has been a lively debate about the possibility of talks with the US. Some parliamentary deputies and Revolutionary Guard officers opposed to talks have extolled the values of a “resistance economy” in which sanctions encourage self-sufficiency. But there are many others taking up the notion, put forward last spring by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, that Iran can talk to the US if there are “equal conditions and mutual respect” and that “not talking and not having relations with America…[is] not sustainable”. The pragmatists will have welcomed the reports that officials from the two sides met quietly in Qatar in October.

The Obama administration — anxious to avoid an early Israeli military attack — likes to argue that sanctions will force a weakened Iran into a diplomatic solution and the acceptance of stringent limits on its nuclear program. At the same time, those in Iran who want talks have to argue that their country can enter them with confidence from a position of relative strength. Hence, in the roundabout, interconnected way the Middle East fits together, Hamas may have helped their case.

Gareth Smyth has reported from the Middle East for almost two decades and is the former Financial Times correspondent in Tehran

Support our fight for economic liberty &
the freedom of the entrepreneurial mind
DONATE NOW

Gareth Smyth

Gareth Smyth has reported from around the Middle East for more than two decades and is the former Financial Times correspondent in Tehran.
--------------------------------------


View all posts by

You may also like