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Iran is well on the path to winning on almost all fronts whichever way the ongoing talks on its nuclear programs pan out tomorrow in Lausanne, Switzerland, or in the near future.
Iran is winning in Lausanne because its nuclear fuel enrichment programs will simply be delayed by a maximum of 15 years and will not be prohibited definitively, whatever the framework deal’s contents this week and subsequent conclusions in June.
In return, the severe financial sanctions against Tehran will be eased. Secretary of State John Kerry might say that he intends to lift the sanctions at a glacial pace but he will not be credible because the United Nations Security Council must endorse any decision about sanctions.
Russia and China are most unlikely to allow Kerry’s desires on sanctions to cause a breakdown in the Lausanne talks.
If a breakdown does occur, Kerry would have to seek renewal of sanctions from the Security Council. There, both Russia and China have veto powers and are unlikely to acquiesce as they did for the original sanctions.
Iran will win because disputes in the Security Council would break the current international unity behind the sanctions and make them so leaky as to erode their raison d’être.
If there is a deal and the US Congress rejects it, the international sanctions would disintegrate leaving only American and perhaps British and French sanctions in place. They were not enough in the past and will not be enough in the future to stop Tehran from speeding up and deepening its nuclear skills.
Apart from what Kerry or the Congress might do on the nuclear program and sanctions, Tehran finds itself holding a unexpectedly strong hand that makes its rise to regional great power status irresistible.
Those wins are emerging from the mess in Iraq and Yemen. Once again, Washington has been tricked into helping Iran to consolidate its position in Iraq by adding US airstrikes to the fight to snatch Tikrit from the Sunni extremist Islamic State (ISIL).
The Iran-backed Shia-dominated military of the Baghdad government and its Shia militia allies suffered severe reverses earlier but claimed victory in Tikrit today on the back of those US airstrikes.
Washington may try to spin the Shia gains in the traditionally Sunni city of Tikrit as a win for secular Baghdad government forces. But this is delusion. Those forces are not secular and the Shia militias still play central roles.
This scenario could be repeated when Baghdad government forces try to free Mosul from ISIL with US help later this year.
It is likely that Iran-backed government and Shia militias on the ground will have dislodged ISIL and its Sunni tribal allies from Mosul with help from US airstrikes by the time the Lausanne nuclear deals are finalized in July this year. That is a huge win for Tehran.
The cherry on the cake for Tehran is the likely crumbling of Saudi power in the region. The canny Saudis, who are the region’s strongest Sunni power closely allied to Washington, have kept out of all civil wars in Iraq and Syria including Sunni-Shia fights.
They let Americans spend treasure and fight and die to preserve their Kingdom’s power against both internal civil wars in their neighbors and Iran’s interference on the Shia side.
They also outsourced to the US all the diplomatic arguments in the Security Council concerning the region, including sanctions against Tehran.
Suddenly a week ago, they stepped directly into the region’s worst emerging civil war in Yemen. They have conducted hundreds of airstrikes, gathered a Sunni Arab coalition, blockaded the port of Aden, and developed a plan for ground war including Pakistani troops.
Saudi Arabia’s military might even win and occupy Yemen quickly, as the US military did in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it has almost unlimited money and the best weapons.
But as in America’s case, the real deaths, injuries and expenditures would come after those victories. Occupying a country or using local allies as proxies to govern has never worked for the US and is most unlikely to work for the Saudi rulers and their conservative Sunni theocratic clerics.
Yemen was a mostly Sunni majority country ruled for about 1000 years up to the 1970s by a minority government run by a Shia sect that Shia religious authorities of Iran have always seen as apostate.
Imposing Saudi control over Yemen will be almost impossible because Yemen’s Sunnis and Shias have a long history of intermixture and coexistence. Yemenis also practice Sunni theology very differently from Saudi clerics. Most of them live in Yemen’s southern coastal regions and are far less insular than Saudi Sunnis.
Obama had the luxury of announcing departures from America’s distant interventions but has still not succeeded after nearly seven years in office.
The Saudis do not have that luxury and are likely to be bogged down in Yemen for years if not decades. That would allow Tehran’s regional power and influence to increase regardless of whether it says yes or no in Lausanne and regardless of opponents in US Congress.