Iranians debate parameters for a global role

TEHRAN -- Behind Iran's defiant stance on its nuclear program lies an anxious debate over the country's role in the world.

To Amir Mohabian, a conservative journalist who is seen as close to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic republic's destiny -- maybe in 50 years -- is to lead a Muslim bloc that could rival the United States, Europe, and China for global influence.

``The US is the superpower, but this is not permanent," Mohabian said from behind thick glasses in his small news agency office. ``It's possible that the Muslim bloc can be one of the superpower blocs. . . . We should prepare ourselves."

To that end, he said, Iran is right to refuse international demands to suspend nuclear development, and it is right to leave the world in the dark about how close it may be to having a nuclear bomb.

``Dark corners are very important," he said. ``Having dark corners increases the costs of any action [against Iran], and helps delay a decision."

Behind the scenes in Iran, moderate and hard-line factions in the government typically jockey for position in an opaque decision-making process, motivated in part, Iranian analysts say, by the divergent futures they picture for their country.

Some analysts, such as Mohabian, favor a hard line. But others closer to the reformist faction in government are pushing for Iran to embrace a more realistic pursuit of security and regional influence -- goals they believe can't be achieved without improving relations with the West. These analysts view themselves as pragmatists and see great risk in ``dark corners" that could trigger sanctions or military action.

Some argued over the past month -- unsuccessfully -- that the government should have accepted a deal proposed by six world powers, including the United States, under which Iran would suspend the nuclear program in return for economic incentives and assistance developing peaceful nuclear power.

Accepting the deal is ``in Iran's interests," said Davood Hermidas Bavand, a political scientist at Tehran University, who argued in newspaper articles and roundtable discussions that the government should accept the deal and head off conflict, especially with the United States, even if Iran believed its nuclear program was singled out for unfair scrutiny.

But last Thursday, Iran edged closer to the brink of international confrontation by rejecting demands from the UN Security Council that it suspend uranium enrichment, a key step in developing nuclear weapons, as a precondition for further negotiations. Iran says the program aims to generate electricity for peaceful purposes but the United Nations, Europe, and the United States believe that it is a covert weapons program.

Iran issued a response suggesting it was open to negotiating the scope of its program, but because it rejected the preconditions, sanctions are likely. The Associated Press, citing UN and European officials, reported yesterday that the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Ali Larijani, Iran's senior nuclear negotiator, had agreed tentatively to meet tomorrow in a last-ditch attempt to bridge differences over the nuclear program.

Behind the conflict is an Iranian identity crisis, said Said Leylaz, an economist and sometime adviser to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist cleric who heads a council of clerics that is powerful within the government but who lost his presidential bid last year to hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

National pride and 27 years of revolutionary ideology, he said, make it impossible for Iran's theocratic regime to accept US domination in the Middle East or to sign on as a US client like the late shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose monarchy it overthrew in 1979. But, Leylaz added, Iran isn't strong enough to go it alone.

Playing on Iranian pride, Ahmadinejad has adopted a policy of flamboyant defiance that ranges from a decree banning non-Persian words such as ``pizza" and embracing Hugo Chávez, the populist anti-American leader of Venezuela.

Ahmadinejad has raised more serious fears by vowing to destroy Israel and declaring the Holocaust a myth. And he has become increasingly confident after Israel failed in a month of fighting to decisively defeat the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Iran's one real regional client and the centerpiece of its dreams of influence.

Ray Takeyh, an analyst on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said that even relative moderates in the government now reject suspending uranium as the precondition for talks because a previous suspension during three years of talks with Europe didn't lead to a deal -- and because their fear of the United States is waning.

``Iran, rightly or wrongly, sees itself as empowered and ascending, and the US as a declining power in the region," he said, so the government has concluded, ``We're not going to pay tribute just to engage in a negotiating process."

But Bavand, a snowy-haired academic whose living room is decorated with European-style statuettes and photographs of his ancestors serving in various Persian uniforms , believes Iran is overestimating its hand.

He said conventional wisdom holds that the United States is too bogged down in Iraq to attack Iran, but that the Israel- Lebanon conflict changed the equation: If the cease-fire remains shaky and tensions rise between Israel and Syria, Iran's ally, the chances of a US or Israeli attack on Syria would increase and ``a dark shadow will fall on Iran."

Iran has never been certain who its allies should be. In the 19th century, Britain and Russia vied for influence. In the 20th century , largely Persian and Shi'ite Muslim Iran clashed with Sunni Arab neighbors. The shah allied with Israel to counterbalance the Arabs; the Islamic Republic went to war with Iraq. Now, with a Shi'ite -led government in Iraq and many Muslims across the world taking pride in Hezbollah's tenacity, Iran has new hopes for its longstanding goal of exporting Islamic rule.

But Bavand has his doubts. Iran holds sway in Lebanon, with its large Shi'ite population, but in Sunni Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt, he said, ``I don't think we'll be accepted as a leader."

Iran should distance itself from Syria, he argued, adding that Iran's focus on opposing Israel -- a key reason that a nuclear Iran alarms the West -- ``brings high risks without any national interest."

Similar debates play out among ordinary Iranians. Volunteering at a ``resistance station," a propaganda booth in a main square where she extolled Hezbollah and praised the nuclear program, Najme Tehranshi, 20, called Iran ``a big cultural, economic, and military player in the region and even beyond."

``The ideals of Islam don't belong only within the borders of Iran, they belong all over the world," she said. ``It's our responsibility to promote Islamic revolution to freedom-lovers everywhere."

But a few blocks away, Azadeh Haghiga, 26, a magazine editor, declared, ``Iran thinks it's more powerful than it is. . . . We need to adapt ourselves to more technologically advanced countries, not the other way around."

Soaring oil prices are allowing the government to dole out jobs to loyalists and business contracts to Revolutionary Guard officers, analysts say, masking rising unemployment. Still, the government had to rescind a 40-percent minimum wage hike this year, and many conservatives who like Ahmadinejad's hard-line foreign policy object to his populist economic programs.

Some Iranian leaders are pushing for better ties with countries such as China, which has been less tough on Iran's nuclear program. But those plans -- such as building a pipeline across Afghanistan to India -- probably can't be realized without Western companies and financing, Takeyh said.

Leylaz, the economist, said that deep down, Iran knows it's not as strong militarily and economically as it would like to be, which is why it won't renounce nuclear weapons unless it receives security guarantees. He said domestic politics drive Ahmadinejad's defiance and his anti-Israeli rhetoric to distract from growing economic and social problems and crush reformers.

But Murad Saghafi, a secular reformist editor at another magazine, who has close family ties to the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said Iran might well accept a package that saved face and safeguarded its interests.

``If they say, Iran has a place in the world, we don't want to attack Iran, let's make Iran a leading gas producer, [Iran] will say yes," he said.

But not right away, he added. That's a matter of cultural pride: ``It's like buying a carpet in the bazaar, or negotiating a marriage. Even with a marriage proposal between families that are friends, people will usually have to ask twice."