We should be more worried about Pakistan, I have been arguing recently: a full-fledged nuclear power that is ripe to fall to the Islamists. But we should still be plenty worried about Iran.
On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced the toughest sanctions against the regime of the ayatollahs since it seized power in 1979, and its servants incarcerated the staff of the American Embassy in Tehran as a test of President Jimmy Carter. The failure of this remarkably liberal peanut-farmer from Georgia to grasp what was at stake, and respond at the appropriate level of seriousness, led to the entrenchment of the modern world’s first Islamist regime, and by extension to the metastasizing of radical Islam throughout the Muslim world. A regime that could have been disposed of then, at little cost beyond public relations fallout, can now be removed only at a terrible cost, likely to be denominated in human lives.
It is important to remember that catastrophic mistake—the failure to strangle “Revolutionary Iran” at birth—not only for the historical record. For it is a history that keeps repeating itself, in the West’s dealings with fanatical regimes. We do not seem to be able to learn that confrontation is cheaper now than later; that fires are worth putting out before they spread. Or that “containment” is only a workable strategy for a very rainy day.
The new U.S. sanctions officially “target” the Revolutionary Guard—the paramilitary organization commanded from the centre of the Iranian revolution, with tentacles caressing every part of the country’s daily life, from business and banking, to the protection of nuclear investments, to the routine intimidation of students and other domestic opponents. They also reach through Hezbollah and various purchased clients, from Hamas to “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” to tickle Iran’s enemies abroad. I put the word “target” in quotes for this reason: that there is little to distinguish the operation of the Revolutionary Guard from the operation of the regime itself.
Accordingly, various European interests are already chafing against the American sanctions, which, as they rightly complain, inevitably complicate their own commercial transactions. Why should, for instance, a German company have obstacles put in the way of making extremely profitable sales of high-tech equipment to Revolutionary Guard-controlled companies, when the German government wants no part of the American sanctions? Sanctions tend to irritate fairweather friends as much as foulweather enemies, and create further, unintended trade restrictions unrelated to their original purposes. The costs they impose on the enemy are often exceeded by the cost of their enforcement.
Iran has responded by condemning and mocking the sanctions, and predicting that they will fail—which Iran would do even if they promised to be effective. But they are doomed to fail, as all legalistic sanctions have always failed to deter criminal regimes. They will, to some mild degree, make Iran depend more on trade with Russia and China, and to that degree, happily enough, a more reliable customer for inferior technology.
This does not represent much change, however. To use perhaps the best example, the Iranians are already saddled with a Russian air defence system with loopholes to compare with those in the sanctions. The Israelis demonstrated this in early September, while penetrating Syrian air space en route to an “alleged” nuclear reactor under construction on the upper Euphrates—right across the breadth of the country from where the Israeli planes went in. The Syrians clearly did not know what was happening until this airborne commando operation was over. And the Syrians bought approximately the same air defence system as the Iranians.
But that is in itself a demonstration of the pointlessness of sanctions. For what the Israelis began taking out (leaving materials that the Syrians have since removed to some other location, according to satellite photos published this week) was built in defiance of all kinds of sanctions. Sanctions do not stop uninspected ships from entering and leaving a nation’s harbours, to say nothing of the airports and land frontiers.
Blockades are necessary for that; yet an effective blockade is a very discernible act of war. A blockade that, for instance, prevented Iran from exporting her crude oil, and importing refined, would of course play havoc with world oil prices already headed for $100 a barrel, while entailing retaliation risks. But it would bring the regime of the ayatollahs to their knees in fairly short order. Whereas, sanctions are not going to do that.
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