by Amir Taheri
Before Ahmadinejad wiped Israel off the map, moreover, he would have to deal with the third “other” in the Khomeinist demonology: the American Great Satan, which, although weakened by its internal squabbles and surrounded by squeamish allies, remains the world’s sole superpower. Between Ahmadinejad and the light of day stands the shadow of a heavily armed foe that has all but encircled the Islamic Republic and, its tergiversations notwithstanding, remains capable of doing quite a bit of mischief.
13
The Great Satan
In April 2008, Tehran hosted a conference designed to bring the many different Islamic sects closer together in the name of taqrib (religious convergence). Over one hundred individuals from all over the world addressed the gathering, among them Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. none of these speakers, however, addressed the officially declared purpose of the exercise—the quest for theological common ground among Islam’s many different sects, especially Sunnis and Shiites. The only issue on which all speakers were in harmony was the depiction of the United States as the “arch-enemy of Islam.”
This was not surprising, as anti-Americanism had been a key theme of Khomeinism since the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in november 1979. At that time, the ayatollah had circulated his notorious dictum “America Cannot Do a Damn Thing!” This meant that the United States, while still powerful, would not be able to stand against the rising tide of the global Islamic revolution. In other words, there was a draw between Islam and America. The spring conference in Tehran introduced a new analysis, encapsulated in the slogan inscribed on the lectern from which speakers addressed the congregants: “America Is Going to Fall!”1
Khomeini had always regarded the United States as the latest incarnation of “impiety and perfidy.” He dubbed it “the Great Satan,” claiming that it embodied an ancient force for evil throughout history. In an audience he granted to the leaders of the “students” who had taken the American diplomats hostage in Tehran, the ayatollah spoke of “the very long history that we have with these people,” meaning the Americans. “This matter does not belong to today or yesterday,” he said. “It is two thousand years that the United States has colonized us.”2
Some of Khomeini’s confidants, including his son Ahmad, have suggested that the ayatollah developed his rabid anti-Americanism after the success of the revolution, when elements from the left along with the Soviet embassy in Tehran started to spread rumors that the United States was planning to stage a coup against the new revolutionary regime. The Soviet-controlled Tudeh (Masses) Party hammered on the theme that the core issue of the revolution was “the contradiction between the people and imperialism led by America.”
Some of Khomeini’s closest associates had also converted to chic French-style anti-Americanism and blamed the United States for all the ills not only of Iran but of the Third World as a whole. Mehdi Bahar, a critic of the shah, had set the tone in the early 1970s by publishing a book under the title Heir to Colonialism, blaming the United States for the continuation, in “substantial parts of the world today, of the misery and despotism caused by the European imperial powers.” For his part, Banisadr claimed that the United States, as “the principal force of imperialism,” was trying to weaken Muslims’ religious beliefs in the name of national cultures. “The very notion of culture is an Imperialist notion designed to loosen the people’s [bonds] with faith,” he wrote. “It was colonialism that propagated the idea of art and culture as domains separate from faith. . . . Any activity, whether economic or cultural, if not motivated by and wholly in the service of faith is satanic activity.”3 Years later, Khomeini himself expressed a similar fear—that the United States was trying to persuade Muslim nations to adopt its own model of the separation of church and state. He wrote: “A religion that places the material and spiritual resources of Islamic and non-Islamic countries at the disposal of superpowers; that exhorts the people to believe that religion is separate from politics—that religion is the opiate of the masses. However, such a religion is no longer the true religion, but it is a religion which our people call American Islam.”4
But in 1979, there seemed to be no reason for Khomeini to fear the United States. President Carter had helped the revolution by exerting pressure on the shah to appoint a caretaker government and go into exile. Being a born-again Christian, Carter regarded Khomeini as a man of faith and thus, despite differences in religion, a kindred soul. Documents seized at the U.S. embassy in Tehran show that the administration was in contact with key figures of the revolution inside Iran and did nothing to temper their growing radicalism. William Sullivan, Carter’s ambassador to Tehran, believed that the shah was meeting his “comeuppance” and fully deserved it.5 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, dreamed of turning Iran into the principal link of a chain of Islamic nations around the USSR.
On the whole, the American intelligentsia was also sympathetic to the revolution. Few Americans would shed tears over a monarchy, especially one vilified by their media for more than a decade. Also, the word “revolution” resonates well with many Americans who associate it with their own war of independence. At times, American sympathy for Khomeinism was expressed in almost lyrical tones. An article in the New York Times said: “Many consider this revolution as the most beautiful moment in Islamic history.” It went on to predict that Khomeinism would become “a model for humane government,” something that “we, too, need.” Khomeinism was neither fanatical nor anti-American, the writer declared. On the contrary, all indications were that “it would transform Iran into a law-based and fully democratic society.”6 All this at a time that Khomeinist militants were throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to cover themselves, while self-appointed Islamic judges did overtime work in revolutionary tribunals issuing death fatwas and putting their enemies in front of firing squads.
In 1979, soon after the mullahs seized power, Carter sent Khomeini a warm congratulatory letter. His man at the Un, a certain Andrew Young, praised Khomeini as “a twentieth-century saint.” Carter also tapped his closest legal advisor, Lloyd Cutler, as ambassador to the Khomeinist regime. A more dramatic show of U.S. support for the mullahs came when Brzezinski flew to Algiers to meet Khomeini’s prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan. It was love at first sight—to the point that Carter approved the resumption of military supplies to Iran, even as the mullahs were executing Iranians by the thousands, including many whose only “crime” was friendship with the United States. The Carter administration’s behavior convinced the mullahs that the United States was a “paper tiger” and that it was time for the Islamic Revolution to highlight its hatred of America. “The Carter administration’s weakness was a direct encouragement to [anti-American] hard-liners,” wrote Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, one of the hostage-takers at the U.S. embassy, years later.7
Khomeini was not the first ruler of Iran to face the problem of dealing with the Americans. The United States had appeared as a major player on the Iranian scene during the Second World War when it organized a massive transfer of food and weapons to the Soviet Union through Iran. The Americans had arrived in Iran after Soviet and British troops had invaded the country, chased away its monarch, and forced it to abandon its neutrality and join the Allies against the Axis. At the end of the war, the British withdrew their troops in accordance with an agreement signed with the Iranian government in 1941. The Soviets, however, refused to withdraw and used the Red Army to set up two breakaway “republics” in the Iranian provinces of Kurdistan and Azerbaijan. This was not the first time that the Soviet Union tried to annex a chunk of Iranian territory. Between 1917 and 1921, it had helped its local allies create a secessionist regime in the Iranian coastal province of Gilan on the Caspian Sea under the name of Azadistan (Land of the Free). At the time, the Iranian Cossack Brigade—led by Reza Khan, who was to become shah in 1925—had succeeded in defeating the secessionists while the Red Army, too busy with the Russian civil war, had been unable to come to the rescue. But in 1945 it was obvious th
at the much-weakened Iranian army was in no position to drive the Red Army, then at the peak of its glory after crushing Hitler, out of the occupied territories.
Iran’s traditional mistrust of the British, and the evident weakness of the British Empire at the end of World War II, meant that the Iranians could not count on Britain to help end Soviet occupation. In any case, most Iranians were convinced that Britain was only interested in Iran’s oil and might seize the opportunity to revive old treaties with the tsars under which they had tried to divide Iran into British and Russian zones, effectively ending the country’s existence as a sovereign nation. For centuries, Iranian policymakers had used a symbolic color scheme to label the various threats they thought Iran faced because of its peculiar geopolitical position. Green was the color of the Arab threat that had dominated the scene from the third decade of the seventh century A.D. to the middle of the ninth century. It had been replaced by yellow, the color of the Turkic-Mongol-Tatar threat from Central Asia that lasted for almost a thousand years and on several occasions brought Iran to the verge of extinction as a nation-state. In the nineteenth century a new threat had appeared, the threat of European imperialism, with Britain and Russia as its most powerful representatives. It was designated by the color blue. The two European empires used a mixture of war and chicanery to deprive Iran of large parts of its national territory. Russia ended up annexing the whole of Iran’s possessions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The British annexed more than half of Baluchistan to their Indian Empire and solidified Afghanistan’s secession from Iran through the Treaty of Paris in 1856. They also seized a number of Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a new threat was added: the threat of Communism, designated by the color red.8
For six decades after that, the “red threat” remained the principal source of concern for Iranian policymakers. Since the time of Peter the Great, most Russian tsars had dreamed of expanding their empire to the south to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The Bolsheviks had revived that ambition in the name of global revolution; the Communist International leader Zinoviev spoke of “setting the East ablaze,” starting with the moribund Persian state. With the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Iran’s traditional enemy joined the expansionist appetite inherited from the tsars with an ideological agenda that seduced a good part of the Iranian intelligentsia. The tragedy for Iran was that its reformist, pro-West intellectual elite was divided for the first time between left and right. Before Bolshevism, almost all Iranian reformers agreed on a democratic model of society inspired by Western Europe. They had achieved their first success by leading the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which created the first constitutional monarchy, with an elected parliament, in a Muslim country. After 1917, however, the Iranian reformist elite was never able to reunite and was thus forced to ally itself either with the autocratic ruling cliques or with reactionary clerics. In the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the entire Iranian left put itself under Khomeini’s command, while the reformist right that had allied itself to the shah was neutralized once he left the country. With the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, the “red threat” disappeared and Iran’s modernizing elites were able to unite once again. But it was too late, as the Islamic fascists already controlled the country.
In 1945, with the “red threat” very much alive, Iranian leaders faced the prospect of another truncation of their country. While Stalin was busy annexing the northwestern portion of Iran, the British were reviving old schemes for setting up Khuzestan, the southwest province where 90 percent of Iran’s oil is located, as a separate emirate. They were also arming their usual tribal clients, especially the Bakhtiaris close to the oil region, to prevent the central government from sending troops there.
The only power capable of helping Iran stand up to the old Russian enemy in 1945 was the United States of America. The trouble was that the Americans were not interested in Iran. With the war over, they had withdrawn their forces and cut down their diplomatic presence to a minimum. They were not even prepared to name an ambassador to Tehran. The Cold War had not yet warmed up as a central theme of American foreign policy, and President Harry S. Truman still trusted Uncle Joe. Two factors helped secure American support for Iran. The first was strong Iranian lobbying in Washington, combined with an imaginative and resolute campaign at the United nations in new York. The high culture and dexterity of Iranian diplomats impressed the Americans. More importantly, Stalin’s expansionist ambitions were exposed through his campaign to seize control of Greece through the local branch of the Communist International. The Truman administration realized that it had to draw a line in the sand. At the time, it was in a strong position to do so partly because the United States still enjoyed a monopoly of nuclear weapons. Also helpful was the fact that the Iranian leadership elite, habitually divided into rival factions aligned to rival foreign powers, for once were united in preserving the nation’s territorial integrity. By november 1946, more than eighteen months after the end of World War II, Stalin’s forces were finally out of Iranian territory, allowing the two “People’s Republics” they had created in Tabriz and Mahabad to collapse without much of a fight. Iran was saved from yet another dismemberment that might have led to its balkanization. The experience persuaded the Iranian elite that only a strategic alliance with the United States could help Iran preserve its independence and territorial integrity against its expansionist Soviet neighbor. Some Iranian politicians and intellectuals even began to dream of playing the American card against the British, who continued to exploit Iran’s oil wealth in the most glaringly unfair manner possible. In november 1947, the newspaper Iran Ma (“Our Iran”) called for a thorough revision of the nation’s foreign policy in a direction that would lead to “an abiding alliance with the democratic world under the leadership of its savior, the United States of America.”
Despite their success in helping Iran push Stalin out, the Americans remained uninterested in an “abiding alliance” with a poor and underdeveloped Islamic country thousands of miles away. They were prepared to offer aid, and did so through Truman’s Point Four program. They helped Iran eradicate malaria and a host of other endemic diseases, cutting down infant mortality by half in less than a decade. They organized the first Iranian units to fight locusts, whose annual attacks through the neighboring Arabian deserts claimed a quarter of the crops. By the early 1950s, the Point Four aid package was almost as large as the Iranian government’s annual budget. The program included the building of roads, clinics, schools, and grain silos. Food was distributed through CARE, helping alleviate the sufferings of Iranians in areas still facing near-famine because of dislocations caused by the war. Point Four employed hundreds of Iranians, many of whom went through special courses in economics, administration, and management. From the late 1950s, Point Four alumni provided a good part of the Iranian management elite, both private and public, and helped strengthen the belief that the United States, a disinterested and generous ally, was a vital factor in helping Iran define its space between the Soviet Union and Britain. The Americans, however, would not be wooed. They were particularly reluctant to forge a military link with Iran, refusing persistent demands from Tehran to train some Iranian army officers in the United States.
Two key players in Tehran’s politics at the time were especially keen to involve the United States in Iranian affairs: Ahmad Qavam and Muhammad Mossadeq. They were cousins who belonged to the Qajar clan, whose chiefs had ruled Iran as shahs from the end of the eighteenth century until 1925. Qavam had served in senior positions on a number of occasions since the 1930s. He had been prime minister in the 1945-46 crisis over Soviet attempts to annex northwestern Iran, and by all accounts his imaginative leadership, including a set of tough negotiations with Stalin, had helped Iran regain its lost territories. Mossadeq, on the other hand, had promoted himself as a perpetual parliamentary critic of whatever policy happened to be in place. He had opposed the building of the trans-Ira
nian railway and the package of reforms introduced by Reza Shah in the 1920s. Because he liked to call himself “Doctor” on the strength of a law degree he had obtained in Switzerland, his detractors called him “Dr. no.” Though divided by politics and personal ambitions, the cousins were united in the belief that only the United States could offer Iran effective protection against its old imperialist enemies. To attract the attention of the Truman administration, Qavam created a group called the Democratic Party of Iran, borrowing heavily from the program of its American model.
For his part, Mossadeq decided to focus on a single issue: the nationalization of Iranian oil. He had seen Mexico nationalize its oil with the tacit understanding of the Truman administration. The major U.S. oil companies had also concluded an agreement with the Saudis that gave the Arab kingdom a far better deal than was offered to Iran by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later to be renamed British Petroleum, a company owned by the British government. Mossadeq knew that the United States was the only major industrial power not to have a government-owned oil company. Thus, he concluded, what mattered to the U.S. government was not ownership and control of the oilfields, but making sure that oil continued to flow to world markets. One other factor persuaded Mossadeq that the time had come for Iran to gain control of its principal source of natural wealth: The British Labour government, having just launched a comprehensive program of nationalization at home, could not oppose a similar move by Iran.