http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Nasr/nasr-con5.html
Vali Nasr, 2002
Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, was following a strategy which is very much like the strategy of Hezbollah, namely to focus attention on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and to try to divert attention from the Shia-Sunni issue. And Hezbollah sort of emerged, if you would, as a reaction to Amal, as a way of saying: "Look, Shia power in Lebanon cannot rise against the grain of Arab politics, which is anti-Israeli. It has to rise by taking over that cause." And that's exactly what Hezbollah is doing today. A Shiite organization has come and taken over the Palestinian cause, and that is what angers Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other predominantly Sunni nations so much.
They were also able to get a following on the street because the perception grew among the Shiites in the south that Israel was not going to leave, and that the Shiites in the south were going to end up like the Palestinians in the West Bank did. Israel was worried that if it left south Lebanon too quickly the PLO would come back because there was a political vacuum after they crushed the PLO. But Israel's single biggest mistake was not to withdraw quickly because once a country's stuck on the ground, very quickly liberator became occupier.
Why do you think Iran provided Hezbollah with so many missiles unless it really wanted Hezbollah to take on Israel?
First of all, they want to preserve Hezbollah. It is the one major success case they have had in building and in getting basically a foothold in the Arab world since the 1980s. Iraq's new government is not as close to Iran as Hezbollah is. There are a lot of people among Iran's military leadership now who have trained Hezbollah. They have a personal, organizational relationship, and there is a relationship between clerics that has spawned since Khomeini took over power. So Iran will continue to help Hezbollah. And Iran is also caught in a situation where once you become associated with a force, which it has been since the 1980s, if that force gets defeated, you are going to pay a political cost. It's kind of like the dilemma the Soviets were stuck in. Once a country became Communist, they could not allow it to be lostthat's what got them into trouble in Afghanistan.
Second, Iran has begun to look at Hezbollah and Hamas essentially as a part of its confrontation with Israel for regional hegemony. In other words, it looks at these organizations as ways of creating an irritant to Israel, diverting Israel's attention, bogging Israel down in local conflicts. In other words, they do serve a strategic purpose for Iran. Iran may not have nuclear weapons to threaten Israel, but it has Hamas and Hezbollah. So they're bargaining chips, they're irritants. And thirdly, in this conflict it's not just the missiles. Iran has given Hezbollah a particular kind of weapons systems, so Israelis and Americans will see what Iran has.
What do you think will happen now as far as the nuclear confrontation with the Security Council goes? Do you think Iran might compromise on the negotiations, or is that not likely?
Basically Iran is stronger now, and the United States' hand is weaker, partly because the United States and the Security Council members are still bogged down in getting it together. And in getting the Lebanon situation stabilized, the West is going to be far less able to deal with Iran. Secondly, Hezbollah is still standing. Th[ese] early goal[s] of destroying it and disarming it are not likely to be achieved. By the time of the cease-fire what the United States and Israel are going to get out of the cease-fire will be far short of the goals they probably set for themselves when the war began about a month ago.
Much more important is that Hezbollah and Iran are now widely popular on the Arab street. All of this makes Iran's hand a lot stronger and the United States' a lot more constricted. In other words, if you looked at Lebanon you would say: "Well, military action against Iran is not likely to be easy. If Hezbollah is this tenacious, Iran is going to be worse." Air wars cannot finish things off. Israel cannot finish Hezbollah with an air war, nor will the United States be able to damage the Iranian regime with an air war. The Lebanese population has not risen in revolt against Hezbollahthe opposite is happening. That could also be the case in Iran as well.
Does Iran really want to negotiate normalization of relations?
I think that's what Iran wants. It doesn't want to negotiate about nuclear weapons. It doesn't want to negotiate about Iraq. It wants to guarantee its own regime's survival, and regime survival will only happen if there is some kind of engagement with the United States that is going to de-escalate the tensions in that relationship. If Iran only negotiated over nuclear weapons, they give something, they get something, and then the next morning the United States is still committed to changing the regime in Tehran. What they want, in other words, is a strategic breakthrough, not a tactical agreement.
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