Dariush Zahedi is a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist and blogger, is a visiting scholar at the university's Graduate School of Journalism.
IN defying international monitors and breaking the seals on its nuclear facilities, Iran seems to be courting confrontation. But Western leaders would do well to consider what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bravado really says about Iran's likely posture in the region and at the nuclear talks that are scheduled to resume at the end of January. To continue down the path of conflict could be very costly, both for the regional interests of the United States and most of all, for the territorial integrity of Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is surely motivated by ideology and the desire to solidify the position of the security faction within Iran's ruling elite. But he also appears to be acting on the perception that the United States is in a position of considerable, indeed unprecedented, weakness. America's military is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington has focused on monitoring North Korea's nuclear program rather than Iran's. If threatened, Iran could wreak havoc in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel. These observations may lead Mr. Ahmadinejad to an incorrect assessment of Iran's strength relative to any American threat.
In fact, Iran has serious domestic frailties, including a shaky economy and its attendant unemployment and popular resentment, not to mention soaring levels of drug abuse and a brain drain. But President Ahmadinejad no doubt takes comfort not only in his belief in divine protection but also in the knowledge that Shiite religious parties aligned with Iran are now the dominant political forces in Iraq, while the American public hardly seems amenable to waging another war in the region. Moreover, Mr. Ahmadinejad very likely believes that the best way to guard against regime change from without is to emulate North Korea by swiftly advancing Iran's nuclear capacity.
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But the Iranian regime is not invulnerable, and Washington knows this. Just as Iran can use the Shiite card to create mischief in the region, the United States could manipulate ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iran, which has significant, largely Sunni, minority populations along its borders.
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Many of Iran's ethnic and religious minorities see themselves as victims of discrimination, excluded from Iranian economic, political and cultural life.
Some two million disgruntled Arabs reside mainly in the oil- and gas- rich province of Khuzestan. The United States could make serious trouble for Tehran by providing financial, logistical and moral support to Arab secessionists in that province.
There are other aggrieved Iranian minorities. They could be emboldened by the Arabs' example - Kurds and Baluchis, or Azeris.
The plummeting Iranian economy will only worsen if the United States succeeds in referring Iran's nuclear file to the Security Council, whether or not meaningful sanctions follow. Why? Because such a referral would accelerate capital flight, deal a blow to the country's already collapsing stock market, devastate its real estate market, and wipe out the savings of a large part of the middle class, and cause run away inflation, hurting Iran's dispossessed (whom the Ahmadinejad administration claims to represent) and Bush's new nemesis - the Iranian, Euro based, oil bourse.
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