For three decades since the Iranian revolution Tehran has exported conflicts as means of keeping internal contradictions in check. Now, writes Galal Nassar, Tehran's strategy is approaching endgame Governments sometimes resort to escalating tensions abroad as a way to solve intractable problems at home. "Crisis exportation", as political scientists and military historians refer to this policy management stratagem, generates or exacerbates conflicts with parties identified as enemies and deflects domestic attention to the outside. Governments that go this route mobilise their media and other agencies behind the propaganda that justifies the belligerency. Any number of pretexts can be cited. Secure impenetrable borders and historic claims to territory in the target country are the familiar pleas of the Zionist entity in its long conflict with the Arabs. Recovering national rights was Hitler's pretext for going to war against Germany's "enemies" in 1939. The Shah of Iran used securing strategic positions for the defence of maritime routes as his excuse for occupying the islands of Abu Moussa, and Greater and Lesser Tunb, which had been part of what is now the UAE. Not dissimilar is the notion of securing natural resources and raw materials needed to supply the industries in the attacking country. This was reason for Belgium's military interventions in the Congo and for many colonial powers' interventions elsewhere in the Third World. More recent and more far reaching pretexts are the prevention of the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the fight against terrorism which served as the US's ostensible grounds for invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Peace, from the perspective of the powers that ignite war, can only be obtained when they achieve their designs in other countries' territories. But given the logic of conflict export the expansionist ambitions arising from a regime's attempt to defuse conflict on the domestic front by deflecting it outside will only subside when that regime manages to resolve the sources of the domestic conflict. Aggressor nations do not go to war unless they are reasonably sure they will win. This is why wars are generally started by larger powers against weaker states. In the Cold War, which lasted from the early 1950s to the end of the 1980s, the US and the USSR refrained from direct engagement because of their nuclear parity, or what became known as the balance of terror. The superpowers preferred to fight by proxy on others' territories. The most protracted and gruelling of such proxy wars took place in Indochina when, with support from the Soviet Union and China, the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos faced American military might. A relatively powerful country might, however, direct its forces towards a weaker country with the aim of evening out the balance sheet with a third power that has significant interests at stake in the weaker country. In this case, war or the threat of war is a pressure card that the first party wields in order to strengthen its negotiating position with respect to the third power. History offers numerous instances of this phenomenon. Lebanon, which suffered three major offensives by Israel (in 1978, 1981 and 2006) and has been the victim of numerous other regional and international interventions into its domestic affairs, offers the most poignant illustration of this dynamic. The foregoing theoretical observations are necessary for a clearer understanding of ongoing conflicts between Iran and its regional neighbours and international powers. These conflicts have nothing to do with what pro-Iranian sources might term the dissemination of the Iranian revolution, or the defence of the weak and oppressed against the "great devil", as is so frequently reiterated in Friday sermons delivered by the leaders of the Islamic Republic. What they do involve is an attempt to avert conflict between the diverse forces that overthrew the Shah. It is thus necessary to reject the notion that ideological differences between Tehran and its neighbours are the cause of the crisis. Ideological dogmatism has had no practical bearing on the confrontations the Iranian regime has precipitated over three decades during which its behaviour has, if anything, been consummately pragmatic. The conflicts between Iran and its regional and international environment are the obverse of the country's internal tensions. Those, too, have less to do with ideology than with conflicting interests. The groups that brought the Iranian republic into being are ethnically, religiously and politically diverse. It was the gravitational pull of a particular historic moment that welded their energies into a cohesive force with sufficient power and impetus to accomplish its objectives. Now what should have happened, if history is anything to go by, is that the revolution would begin "to devour its sons". In Iran's case this particular development was deferred as the focus of conflict was thrown outside. It was a deliberate policy following the first weeks of the revolution to deflect internal tensions by igniting external fires. The occupation of the US embassy in Tehran was the blueprint for a whole host of scenarios that eventually led to the death of hundreds of thousands in the eight-year long Iraq-Iran war, to sabotage cells being planted in many Arab and Islamic countries and to interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq following the US occupation of those countries, as well as interventions in Lebanon, Yemen, the Gulf and Egypt. The most recent form of domestic crisis export is Tehran's nuclear programme, the controversy over which has been raging for three years. In short, there is nothing random about the train of crises, confrontations and threats set into motion with the fall of the Shah. They have to keep moving in order maintain cohesion on the domestic front. There has to be a constant battle with a foreign enemy -- whether it be an enemy of the religion or the nation makes no difference -- because this is a necessary safety valve to allow the regime to perpetuate. Now the situation in Iran has reached a bottleneck. All the indications are that if the regime fails to wriggle out of this one it will plunge the country into storms the regime itself may not have the strength to weather.
