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[ 94 ] iran Burying the Hatchet Today’s wisdom may be tomorrow’s folly, unless political leaders are able to combine their current imperatives with foresight. For the past halfdozen years American foreign policy has aimed at containing revolutionary Iran and has been based on the conviction that an Iranian victory in its war with Iraq would shatter the structure of the industrialized democracies’ interests in the Persian Gulf region. Startlingly enough, scholars, no less than leaders, who obviously must prepare for the worst, have uncritically accepted the current conventional wisdom about an Iranian victory, even though it is not shared by most NATO members (including Turkey), Japan, or Pakistan. But emerging changes in Iranian foreign policy indicate that pursuing a stern containment policy alone may create risks of its own, risks arising from a missed chance at reconciliation with the Islamic Revolution. Specifically, America ’s failure to temper its containment policy as soon as possible could destroy any chance of exploring any opportunity for reconciliation that may already exist. It would in effect make escalating conflict the centerpiece of U.S. policy toward Iran. And it would continue to subject American interests and lives to an ever-expanding hostile environment in the Middle East. U.S. fears about an Iranian victory revolve around a facile domino theory of Persian Gulf politics that assumes that if Iraq were overrun by the Iranian hordes, all the other Arab states of the region would also fall sooner or later. Even if these states could somehow survive the immediate shock of Iraq’s defeat, a decisive Iranian victory would bring economic, military, and political disaster in the Persian Gulf and beyond. Economically, it is feared, the Iranians would dictate ever-higher oil prices and ever-lower oil production to the rest of the world through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As the self-appointed champions of such indebted oil producers as Nigeria and Venezuela, have not the Iranians already made life miserable for Saudi Arabia and other rich Persian Gulf sheikdoms ? Have not the Iranians gleefully proclaimed in OPEC meetings that “any reduction of Saudi oil production that is added to ours means victory,” while adamantly demanding an increase of their own production quota from 2.4 million to 3.2 million barrels per day? And have not the Iranians vociferously advocated “Iran: Burying the Hatchet” was originally published in Foreign Policy 60 (Fall 1985): 52–72. Burying the Hatchet [ 95 ] at a minimum linking oil prices to the rate of world inflation, or at most raising them to about “$60–$70 per barrel”—presumably the price of substitute forms of energy? What could stop the Iranians from becoming even more hawkish if they won the war? Militarily, many warn, after an Iraqi defeat, massive waves of Iranians would press on to greater victories in the name of Islam, overrunning the tiny city-state of Kuwait and easily overwhelming the meager ground forces of Saudi Arabia and the other sheikdoms. Having sacrificed nearly 200,000 soldiers in the fiveyear struggle against Iraq, Iranian leaders would like nothing better than to get revenge against all those countries, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that repeatedly have failed to heed their warnings to stop aiding the “infidel” Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s president. Politically, would not the Iranian vanguards of the Islamic Revolution proceed from the Iraqi stepping-stone to realize farther afield their dream of an Islamic world order? Given the putative power of this most populous Shii Muslim state in the world, would not the triumph of “Islam over blasphemy” in the IranIraq War incite the poor Shii communities throughout the Persian Gulf to rise up against the United States and the ruling monarchies that have befriended it? Given the Iran-Syria axis, would not such a spectacular success by Middle East radicals threaten the Jordanian monarchy and encourage the pro-Soviet Syrians to push for an even greater hegemony in Lebanon and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean? And, finally, would not the establishment of an Islamic republic in predominantly Shia-inhabited Iraq embolden the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shii factions Islamic Amal and Hezbollah to try to create yet a third Islamic republic in Lebanon and then to press forward to destroy Israel by replacing it with a Palestinian state, as Iran has urged? The extent to which such apocalyptic scenarios actually shape America’s Iran policy is difficult to say. But clearly, such scenarios have...

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