The view from Iran: anxious about war in a region that might explode
By Christopher Kremmer
February 20 2003
When it comes to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, just ask the neighbours.
Iran lost 600,000 people in its war with Iraq in the 1980s, many of them to chemical and biological weapons.
Yet still it remains opposed to a war that might disarm and bring about regime change in its turbulent neighbour.
"Every country agrees that Iraq should be disarmed. Iran especially has suffered from this problem, but the problem cannot be solved by war," the reformist parliamentarian and head of the Iranian Journalists Association, Rajabali Mazrooei, said in Sydney yesterday.
A political solution, probably involving beefed-up United Nations weapons inspections, is Tehran's preferred option.
But probe further and Iran's "no war" stance begins to appear qualified. The key issue is not war itself, but the duration of any conflict.
"If it takes two to three weeks maybe it will help to stabilise the situation. Longer than that it is very dangerous," said Mr Mazrooei, who has been in Australia over the past week as a guest of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
It is precisely because of its proximity to Iraq - the
two countries share a 1500-kilometre border - that Iran is nervous about the impact of war. Its concerns range from instability in the global oil market - oil exports provide 95 per cent of Iran's foreign exchange earnings - to the risk that Iraq might collapse, unleashing demands for a separate Kurdish state in the north.
Iran's own Kurdish minority, concentrated in the north-west near the Iraqi border and accounting for 7 per cent of its population, could be drawn into any greater "Kurdistan".
"If anything like that happens it will destabilise the entire region. There are so many ethnic, tribal and religious differences in the Middle East," Mr Mazrooei told the Herald.
Labelled as part of US President George Bush's "axis of evil", Iran's reformist government worries that after Iraq and North Korea, it might be the next country to feel the heat of America's robust unilateralism.
Tehran supported the US intervention in its other neighbour, Afghanistan. It welcomed the collapse of the Taliban regime, with which it almost went to war on one occasion.
But as in Afghanistan, Iranians doubt that war in Iraq will promote democracy. "Democracy is not like a car you can export. It's based on education, on historical background," Mr Mazrooei said.
Nor, he fears, will toppling Saddam do much to defeat terrorism, especially if significant civilian casualties unleash widespread popular anger in Muslim nations. "They say this will be a war against terrorism, but we think this war will produce more terrorists."
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