Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along with its substate,
terrorist empire-of-sorts in the Greater Middle East. Clearly, we are talking here of a
twenty-first-century successor to Mackinder's Heartland Pivot. But there is still a problem.
Given the prestige that Shiite Iran still enjoys in some sectors of the Arab world, to say
nothing of Shiite south Lebanon and Shiite Iraq—because of the regime's implacable sup-
port for the Palestinian cause and its inherent anti-Semitism—it is telling that this ability to
attract masses outside its borders does not similarly carry over into Central Asia. One is-
sue is that the former Soviet republics maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, and simply
lack the hatred toward the Jewish state that may still be ubiquitous in the Arab world, des-
pite the initial phases of the Arab Spring. But there is something larger and deeper at work:
something that limits Iran's appeal not only in Central Asia but in the Arab world as well.
That something is the very persistence of its suffocating clerical rule that while impressive
in a negative sense—using Iran's strong state tradition to ingeniously crush a democrat-
ic opposition and torture and rape people—has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolit-
an appeal that throughout history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense. The
Technicolor disappeared from the Iranian landscape under this regime, and was replaced
by grainy black-and-white.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from whose vantage
point Tehran and Mashad over the border in Iranian Khorasan have always loomed as cos-
mopolitan centers of commerce and pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan's own
sparsely populated, nomadic landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded
apace, Iran held no real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly sec-
ular and were put off by the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its
in-your-face challenge to America and Israel, I don't believe we will see the true appeal
of Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or is toppled. A democratic or
quasi-democratic Iran, precisely because of the geographical power of the Iranian state, has
the possibility to energize hundreds of millions of fellow Muslims in both the Arab world
and Central Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only because of the example of the
West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq, but also because of the challenge
thrown up by a newly liberal and historically eclectic Shiite Iran. And such an Iran might
do what two decades of Post Cold War Western democracy and civil society promotion
have failed to, that is, lead to a substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions in
former Soviet Central Asia.
Iran's Shiite regime was able for a time to inspire the lumpen Sunni faithful and op-
pressed throughout the Middle East against their own tired, pharaonic governments, some
of which have since fallen. Through its uncompromising message and nimble intelligence
services, Iran for a long time ran an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities
including Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Mahdi movement in southern
