Iran's imperial ambitions

Amir Taheri:

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ALTHOUGH presented in religious terms, Ahmadinejad's ambition to restore Iran's position as the dominant regional power has deep roots in Persian nationalism.

Ever since it emerged as a state over 25 centuries ago, Iran has always tried to extend its western frontiers and reach the Mediterranean. Iran's westward expansion, however, stopped in 610 AD when the Byzantine Empire succeeded in driving the last Persian forces out of their footholds along the eastern Mediterranean. In the 15 centuries that followed, successive empires - Roman, Arab, Mameluke, Mongol, Ottoman and British - frustrated Iran's attempts at regaining what historian Sepehr Zabih has called "Persia's western lung."

With the shattering of the balance of power in the Middle East, partly thanks to U.S. intervention that destroyed Iran's enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, regaining that "lung" is no longer regarded as a fantasy in Tehran.

Iran is already present in Iraq and hopes to dominate the county once the United States has abandoned it. Iranian influence is also expanding in Syria, where Iran maintains a major security presence while thousands of Syrians are converting to the Khomeinist brand of Shiism.

With Syria already a client state, Iran is also trying to seize control of Lebanon through its Hezbollah proxies, who have declared war on Premier Fouad Siniora's democratic government. According to U.N. reports, Iran has been pouring money and arms into Lebanon while increasing the number of its security personnel in Beirut fourfold over the past weeks.

ENCOURAGED by the defeat of President Bush's Republicans in America's mid-term elections, Ahmadinejad has clearly moved onto the offensive.

Speaking to voters at a polling station in Tehran on Friday, Ahmadinejad claimed that the United States was already defeated in the Middle East. "They are like rubble, and we are like the flood," he said.

"That kind of talk can only lead to war," says Sami Faraj, an expert in regional security. "Ahmadinejad feels that, with the United States wavering in Iraq, nothing can stop him. The region may have to pay a high price to prove him wrong."

Religion is the current vehicle for ancient Persian ambitions. What is interesting about the current ambitions is how similar they are to those of Darius and Xerxes over 2500 years ago who also thought they were on a mission from God. Then it was the much smaller Greek city states that saved Europe from the corrupt slave culture of the Persians. Today it is the US. Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the rise of Western Power, includes a chapter on the naval battle of Salamis where Xerxes was defeated by a smaller Greek fleet.

The US should explain that Iran's time for negotiating an agreement on its nukes has run out. Its support for terrorism and its arming of our enemies in Iraq is no longer to be tolerated. If it does not rein in its ambitions, it risks the destruction of its war making assets. We must now be preparing to destroy them.