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Hezbollah is Iran’s tool in exporting revolution. But a lot of the power brokers in Tehran don’t want to risk their $70 billion a year in oil loot on a group of crazies in southern Lebanon. By Abbas Milani.
The crisis in Lebanon was a rude awakening for Iran’s populist, fiery, and forked-tongue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His dangerous messianic rhetoric crashed on the hard rocks of geopolitics and on the even harder reality that the rest of the Iranian regime is reluctant to support anything that seriously endangers their control of $70 billion a year in petro-loot. The fissures within the regime in Tehran appeared pronounced in the beginning of the Lebanon crisis. Once the crisis ended—and the regime was assured of Hezbollah’s survival—the tension gave way to the regime’s collective effort to score political points at the expense of the United States and Israel.
Abbas Milani is a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. In addition, Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. His expertise is U.S./Iran relations and Iranian cultural, political, and security issues.
Before coming to Hoover, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, in addition to being an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. Milani was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 30, 2006.
Available from the Hoover Press is A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism, edited by Adam Garfinkle. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.