Fear of Enemies Isn’t Paranoia; U.S. Policy Invites Disaster : After suffering centuries of invasion, Iranians may consider nuclear development both prudent and mandatory.

Robert McNamara’s book on the Vietnam War is more than history. The acknowledgment of the former secretary of defense that American policy-makers overestimated the ultimate goals of the enemy and misunderstood their adversaries is as applicable to the Clinton Administration as the former Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This time, the subject of dangerous American misperceptions is Iran.

The mistakes of the Vietnam era damaged the social contract between the United States government and the American people, but the wounds to the nation were more spiritual than material. But the miscalculations on Iran threaten the well-spring of Western industrial might: the Persian Gulf. And this time, the enemy exaggerated by American perception is not a peasant army. It is a strategically located nation apparently reaching for nuclear capabilities in what the Islamic republic sees as the survival of Iran.

Before policy-makers move past the point of no return, the hawks demanding U.S. containment of Iran need to understand that three powerful, emotional forces are shaping--and hardening--Iran’s position: fear of invasion, pride of nation and the conviction that foreign-driven conspiracies are always operating against them.

The fear of invasion is not paranoia; it is rooted in historical experience. The Iranians, living at the juncture of West and East, have suffered more than most under the heel of the invader: the ancient Romans and Greeks, the Arabs in the 7th Century, the Mongols in the 13th, after which it took 600 years for Iran just to recover its previous population level. In the 19th Century, Russia and Britain intruded, carving up the nation into spheres of influence that debilitated its politics and economics. In the 20th Century, what had become modern Iran was invaded in all but name by the West, and by what is now seen as the especially corrupting influence of the United States. Yet through it all, the Iranians held to their distinct sense of nationalism.

The Iranians’ passionate pride of nation resides in the uniqueness of their culture, which is a combination of elements from ancient Persia and Shia Islam. Linguistically, ethnically and religiously different, the Iranians do not fit with the regions or countries adjacent to their borders--the Arab Middle East, Asia or Turkey. As a result, a powerful sense of who they are has caused the Iranians to fiercely lay claim to their place on the globe. Century after century, after each invasion, they staged a cultural renaissance that reaffirmed their identity as a unique people. This sense of nation, as much as religion, fed the revolution of 1979 that gave birth to the Islamic Republic.

Tangled within the Iranians’ pride of nation and fear of invasion is an obsession with conspiracy. Because Iranian society has always been hierarchic, in which the strong traditionally feed on the weak, nothing happens in Iran that Iranians do not somehow perceive as conspiracy. The irony is that their own propensity for intrigue feeds into the conspiracies assigned to foreigners. Britain and Russia conspired to dismantle the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911. The CIA masterminded the countercoup that restored Shaw Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to his throne after he fled a nationalist coup in 1953.

That same CIA, along with Israel’s Mossad, trained much of SAVAK, the Shah’s disreputable security force that kept the political opposition in line. Now, in Iranian eyes, the United States is conspiring to destroy the Islamic Republic.

The United States considers its “containment” policy toward Iran to be a legitimate means of addressing its legitimate concerns. To Iranians, this policy is war by economic and political quarantine, having as its ultimate purpose the subjugation of the Iranian people and destruction of their nation. Here is the parallel with Vietnam: The United States is in danger of creating a monster from an adversary.

Isolation to force Iran to alter its behavior in the murky area of terrorism and to renounce nuclear armament indicates an unrealistic assessment of the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. Because Iran is a separate culture, religiously heretical to Islam’s predominant Sunni adherents, the Islamic Republic cannot lead a unified movement of militant Islam against the West even if it wanted to.

And while the United States sees Iran’s nuclear program as offensive, the Iranians see it as a defensive response to profound fears of invasion, a testament to their will to survive and a result of their conviction that forces stronger than themselves are conspiring against them. That the United States continues to pursue the diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran even against the collective will of its European allies only exacerbates these emotions and perceptions.

Thus, as the mistakes of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led America into a wrenching land war in Asia, the mistakes of the Clinton Administration are shaping another disaster for American foreign policy. This time, the theater of calamity won’t be as easily limited.