I will post, in three consecutive
installments, excerpts (the portions regarding Iran) from the new
book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming
Conflict and the Battle against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan, which
will be released next month. Kaplan is with the Stratfor consulting
firm, which distributed the material below.
The Geography of Iranian Power
The most important facts about Iran go
unstated because they are so obvious. Any glance at a map would tell
us what they are. And these facts explain how regime change or
evolution in Tehran -- when, not if, it comes -- will dramatically
alter geopolitics from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent
and beyond.
Virtually all of the Greater Middle
East's oil and natural gas lies either in the Persian Gulf or the
Caspian Sea regions. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian
Gulf, pipelines will increasingly radiate from the Caspian region to
the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China and the Indian Ocean. The
only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran,
stretching as it does from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. In a raw
materials' sense, Iran is the Greater Middle East's universal joint.
The Persian Gulf possesses by some
accounts 55 percent of the world's crude oil reserves, and Iran
dominates the whole Gulf, from the Shatt al-Arab on the Iraqi border
to the Strait of Hormuz 990 kilometers (615 miles) away. Because of
its bays, inlets, coves and islands -- excellent places for hiding
suicide, tanker-ramming speed boats -- Iran's coastline inside the
Strait of Hormuz is 1,356 nautical miles; the next longest, that of
the United Arab Emirates, is only 733 nautical miles. Iran also has
480 kilometers of Arabian Sea frontage, including the port of
Chabahar near the Pakistani border. This makes Iran vital to
providing warm water, Indian Ocean access to the landlocked Central
Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Iranian
coast of the Caspian in the far north, wreathed by thickly forested
mountains, stretches for nearly 650 kilometers from Astara in the
west, on the border with former Soviet Azerbaijan, around to Bandar-e
Torkaman in the east, by the border with natural gas-rich
Turkmenistan.
A look at the relief map shows
something more. The broad back of the Zagros Mountains sweeps down
through Iran from Anatolia in the northwest to Balochistan in the
southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the roads are all open to
Iraq. When the British area specialist and travel writer Freya Stark
explored Lorestan in Iran's Zagros Mountains in the early 1930s, she
naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not out of Tehran. To the
east and northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum
(Black Sand) and Kizyl Kum (Red Sand) deserts of Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan, respectively. For just as Iran straddles the rich energy
fields of both the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, it also
straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab country
can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two
energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which
killed hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum and destroyed the
qanat irrigation system, was that much more severe precisely because
of Iran's Central Asian prospect.
Iranian influence in the former Soviet
republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia is potentially vast.
Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran's northwestern border contains roughly 8
million Azeri Turks, there are twice that number in Iran's
neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azeris were
cofounders of the first Iranian polity since the seventh century rise
of Islam. The first Shiite Shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was an Azeri
Turk. There are important Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran,
including current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. The
point is that whereas Iran's influence to the west in nearby Turkey
and the Arab world has been well established by the media, its
influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if the
future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the
southern, Islamic tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran's influence
could deepen still with more cultural and political interactions.
There is, too, what British historian
Michael Axworthy calls the "Idea of Iran," which, as he
explains, is as much about culture and language as about race and
territory.1 Iran, he means, is a civilizational attractor, much like
ancient Greece and China were, pulling other peoples and languages
into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft power, in other words.
Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Pashtu, Hindi, Bengali and Iraqi Arabic are all
either variants of Persian, or significantly influenced by it. That
is, one can travel from Baghdad in Iraq to Dhaka in Bangladesh and
remain inside a Persian cultural realm.
Iran, furthermore, is not some 20th
century contrivance of family and religious ideology like Saudi
Arabia, bracketed as the Saudi state is by arbitrary borders. Iran
corresponds almost completely with the Iranian plateau -- "the
Castile of the Near East," in Princeton historian Peter Brown's
phrase -- even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far beyond
it. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece, "uncoiled,
like a dragon's tail ... as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the
Indus valley," writes Brown.2 W. Barthold, the great Russian
geographer of the turn of the 20th century, concurs, situating
Greater Iran between the Euphrates and the Indus and identifying the
Kurds and Afghans as essentially Iranian peoples.3
Of the ancient peoples of the Near
East, only the Hebrews and the Iranians "have texts and cultural
traditions that have survived to modern times," writes the
linguist Nicholas Ostler.4 Persian (Farsi) was not replaced by
Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in the same form today as
it was in the 11th century, even as it has adopted the Arabic script.
Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane
civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in
the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and Palestine. There is
nothing artificial about Iran, in other words: The very competing
power centers within its clerical regime indicate a greater level of
institutionalization than almost anywhere in the region save for
Israel, Egypt and Turkey.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C.
with the Medes, an ancient Iranian people who established, with the
help of the Scythians, an independent state in northwestern Iran. By
600 B.C., this empire reached from central Anatolia to the Hindu Kush
(Turkey to Afghanistan), as well as south to the Persian Gulf. In 549
B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian house of
Achaemenes, captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in
western Iran and went on a further bout of conquest. The map of the
Achaemenid Empire, governed from Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern
Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex, from the sixth to fourth
centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace and Macedonia in the
northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all the way to
the Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and the Caspian
and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea in
the south. No empire up to that point in world history had matched
it. Persia was the world's first superpower, and Iranian leaders in
our era -- both the late shah and the ayatollahs -- have inculcated
this history in their bones. Its pan-Islamism notwithstanding, the
current ruling elite is all about Iranian nationalism.
The Parthians manifested the best of
the Iranian genius -- which was ultimately about tolerance of the
cultures over which they ruled, allowing them a benign suzerainty.
Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan and the
adjacent Kara Kum and speaking an Iranian language, the Parthians
ruled between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D.,
generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan and Pakistan,
including Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than the
Bosporus-to-Indus or the Nile-to-Oxus scope of Achaemenid Persia, the
Parthian Empire constitutes a more realistic vision of a Greater Iran
for the 21st century. And this is not necessarily bad. For the
Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of strong
influence rather than of outright control, which leaned heavily on
art, architecture and administrative practices inherited from the
Greeks. As for the Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical
regime is formidable, but demographic, economic and political forces
are equally dynamic, and key segments of the population are restive.
So do not discount the possibility of a new regime in Iran and a
consequently benign Iranian empire yet to come.
Notes:
1 Michael
Axworthy. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, Basic Books, New
York, 2008, p. 3.
2 Brown. The World of Late Antiquity,
p. 163.
3 W. Barthold, An Historical Geography
of Iran, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, (1903)
1971 and 1984, pp. x-xi and 4.
4 Ostler, Empires of the Word, p. 31.
[To be continued in the next Red Horse
post.]
No comments:
Post a Comment