Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with 133 billion barrels, but number two in natural gas reserves, with 970 trillion cubic feet.
Yet it is Iran's locational advantage, just to the south of Mackinder's Heartland, and inside
Spykman's Rimland, that, more than any other factor, is truly something to behold.
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 radiate and will 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. 10 The Persian Gulf
possesses by some accounts 55 percent of the world's crude oil reserves, and Iran dom-
inates the whole Gulf, from the Shatt al Arab on the Iraqi border to the Strait of Hormuz
615 miles away. Because of its bays, inlets, coves, and islands—excellent places for hid-
ing suicide, tanker-ramming speedboats—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 nautic-
al miles. Iran also has 300 miles of Arabian Sea frontage, including the port of Chah Bahar
near the Pakistani border. This makes Iran vital to providing warm water access to the land-
locked 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
four hundred miles from Astara in the west, on the border with former Soviet Azerbaijan,
around to Bandar-e Torkaman in the east, by the border with Turkmenistan.
A look at the relief map of Eurasia shows something more. The broad back of the Zagros
Mountains sweeps down through Iran from Anatolia in the northwest to Baluchistan in the
southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the roads are all open to Mesopotamia. When
British area specialist and travel writer Freya Stark explored Iranian Luristan in the Zagros
Mountains in the early 1930s, she naturally based herself out of Baghdad, not Tehran. 11 To
the east and northeast, the roads are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and
Kyzyl 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 in-
vasion 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 Cen-
tral Asian prospect. Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and
Central Asia is potentially vast, even as these same former Soviet republics, because of eth-
nic compatriots in northern Iran, could theoretically destabilize the Iranian state. Whereas
Azerbaijan on Iran's northwestern border contains roughly eight million Azeri Turks, there
are twice that number in Iran's neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azer-
is were cofounders of the Iranian polity. The first Shiite shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was
an Azeri Turk. There are important Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran. The point
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