The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  The shah regarded the United States as a fickle power whose policies could change in accordance with changes of mood in its domestic politics. Except for the eight years of the nixon and Ford administrations, the shah’s relations with the United States were never easy. He suspected President John F. Kennedy of wanting to topple him and install a military regime in Tehran as he had done in Saigon. These suspicious were fanned by the red-carpet reception that Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, had given to Lieutenant General Teymur Bakhtiar, head of the shah’s secret service (SAVAK), during a visit to Washington. An earlier alleged plot, involving Brigadier General Valiallah Qarani, had also been traced to Washington. The shah regarded Robert Kennedy’s encouragement of anti-regime Iranian student leaders abroad as a sign of hostile intent by Washington.

  The shah believed that the period of American ascendancy would be short, perhaps no more than a few decades.20 He was baffled by the American system in which “just anybody could become president, anybody like Ford or Carter,” while “a great statesman like Richard nixon” would be “utterly destroyed on trivial grounds.”21 His dream, therefore, was to make Iran powerful enough not to need U.S. support against the Soviets and their radical Arab allies. That meant establishing Iran as the regional “superpower,” capable of defending the vital sea-lanes of the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Those ambitions ran counter to the global Soviet strategy and thus turned the shah into the bête noire of Communists and their fellow travelers and “useful idiots.” Rather than offer a critique of the shah’s strategy with reference to Iran’s interests as a nation-state, his enemies preferred to present him as an “American puppet,” thus drawing support from all those throughout the world, including the United States itself, who had succumbed to the irrational seduction of anti-Americanism.

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  A Universal Ideology

  That the mullahs who succeeded the shah in 1979 should inherit his big-power ambitions is no surprise. Those ambitions reflect the reality of Iran as a potentially strong nation-state in a region of weak and at times unstable newly created states. There are, however, fundamental differences between the shah’s vision of Iran as a regional power and the Khomeinist regime’s vision of the Islamic Revolution as a messianic movement destined to conquer the world. Under the shah, Iran acted as a nation-state. Under the Khomeinists, it acts as a revolution. This dichotomy creates a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation with profound effects on Iranian foreign policy. The ambitions of a nation-state can always be accommodated within an international system based on interaction among nation-states. The ambitions of a revolution, especially one claiming a universal mission, are not so easily accommodated, if only because the first objective of every revolution is to change the status quo and cancel the rules of the game. In a speech on January 5, 2005, Ahmadinejad explained the difference this way: “We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It’s a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don’t shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world.”1

  The shah wanted to use American power to counterbalance the Soviet Union, thus enabling Iran to build itself as a regional power. Even then, the shah regarded the USSR as an adversary rather than an enemy, and thus amenable to compromise. He did not want to force the USSR to change its ideology or political model. All he wanted was to prevent the USSR from imposing its ideology and political model on Iran. Today there is no USSR, and the Islamic Republic hopes to take its place. All Islamic Republic leaders, from Khomeini to Ahmadinejad, have taken for granted that the principal obstacle to their dream of “exporting” their revolution to the whole world is American power.

  Like Communists before them, Khomeinists regard the United States as “the enemy.” The issue is not how to neutralize it but how to defeat it and force it to adopt the Khomeinist version of Islam. The shah’s policy was aimed at avoiding war through diplomacy and trade. The Khomeinists, on the other hand, have war written in their political DNA. Here is how Rafsanjani, often regarded in the West as a moderate, puts it: “The weaker the U.S. becomes, the stronger [our regime in] Iran. We have some scores with America that must be settled one day. And that day may not be far off.”2 Referring to “American difficulties in Iraq,” he said the United States had become “vulnerable” and had been “proved to be an empty drum.” Recalling how China used the United States’ defeat in Vietnam to build its own position as the principal power in Asia, Rafsanjani predicted that an American defeat in Iraq would enable the Islamic Republic to emerge in a leadership role in the Middle East.

  Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, head of the powerful Council of the Guardians of the Constitution, has put the case even more bluntly: “When all is said and done, we are an anti-American regime. America is our enemy, and we are the enemies of America. . . . Just like [our] revolution destroyed the monarchy here, it will definitely destroy the arrogant hegemony of America, Israel, and their allies.”3 America is at once powerful and fragile, so its destruction and “disappearance” is both a realistic and a legitimate aim: “America seems so big, but in fact is like a paper tiger—even the slightest tremor could easily make it crumble and disappear.”4

  The Islamic Republic is probably the only place where a special course in “Anti-American studies” is offered at several universities and staff training academies. Works by anti-American authors abroad, including writers in the United States, are instantly translated and published. Throughout the developing world, the embassies of the Islamic Republic and the special offices of the Supreme Guide channel funds to anti-American newspapers, magazines, and private radio stations. In 1988, a doctoral program in anti-Americanism was launched at Tehran University’s Department of Political Science under Professor Homayun Elahi. Since that year, a committee headed by Khamenehi, then president of the Islamic Republic, and including a number of black American defectors, has worked on a project for creating a “black republic” in one of the southern states of the United States, with Mississippi regarded as the favorite.5 The Islamic Republic has organized at least half a dozen international conferences with such titles as “A World Without America” and “America Is Heading for a Fall.” In 2001, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture organized a competition for poets who imagined the “destruction of the Great Satan.” Iranian children from the age of six are taught to shout “Death to America” as if it were part of their religious incantations. City walls throughout Iran are covered with anti-American graffiti, often showing the United States as a monster dragon being slain by an Islamic version of Saint George. The star-spangled flag is painted in front of many doorways to make sure it is constantly trampled underfoot. november 4, the anniversary of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran, is called “Death to America Day” and celebrated as a major feast with official messages from the Supreme Guide, the president of the Islamic Republic, and other dignitaries.

  Anti-Americanism is also the guiding principle of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. Between 1979 and 1991, it inspired what amounted to an undeclared alliance between the Islamic Republic and the USSR. Iran was the only Muslim country to allow the Soviet-installed regime in Afghanistan to maintain an embassy in Tehran. The Iranian border with Afghanistan was sealed, preventing the Afghan mujahedin from attacking the Red Army from that direction. Although the mujahedin were fighting in the name of Islam, the Islamic Republic was more anxious to preserve its anti-American alliance with the Soviet Union. Anti-Americanism also meant that the Islamic Republic was the only Muslim country to maintain a firm alliance with Yugoslavia even while the dominant Serbs were massacring Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Yugoslavia was the only European country to play host to Khamenehi as president in 1989. And the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic (later prosecuted as a war criminal) was the only European head of state to forge a personal friendship with the ayatollah.

  That a
nti-Americanism, rather than Islam or even its Shiite version, is the guiding principle of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy is made clear in a number of other cases. As the USSR was crumbling in 1989, Rafsanjani, as speaker of the Islamic Majlis, the ersatz parliament, paid a state visit to the Soviet Union, where he told Soviet Muslims to remain loyal to the Communist regime, which he claimed was “a supporter of Islam on the global stage.” In a speech in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, he quoted the Prophet as saying that “love of country is part of faith” and called on Muslims not to break away from the USSR. “The world-devouring Great Satan is plotting to destroy the Soviet Union and dominate the whole of mankind,” he said. “Muslims should not fall into the [American] trap. . . . What is [needed now] is solidarity among those who do not wish impiety to dominate.”6 Needless to say, the Azeris found the Iranian visitor’s exhortations distasteful, to say the least, coming so soon after Gorbachev had organized an invasion of Baku by land, sea, and air, to crush a popular anti-Soviet uprising. The message was especially painful to Azeris, most of whom are Shiites, because it came from a Shiite mullah.

  Two years later, as president of the Islamic Republic, the same Rafsanjani threw his weight behind Christian Armenia in a war against Shiite Azerbaijan, now an independent republic, over an enclave named High Qarabagh (nagorno Karabakh) in Transcaucasus. Over half a million Azeri Shiites were driven out of their homes, many becoming refugees in Iran. And yet Tehran continued to back landlocked Armenia by helping it break an embargo imposed by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The reason was that while Azerbaijan had allied itself with the United States and Turkey, Armenia had retained its traditional alliance with Russia. Determined to punish Azerbaijan for “the sin of pro-Americanism,” Tehran tried to incite the Sunni minority in Talesh, on the Caspian Sea, to revolt against the government in Baku. Ayaz Mutallibov, the pro-Russian leader of the Sunni Taleshis, became the darling of the mullahs against the Shiite and pro-American Abulfazl Ilchibey. In another former Soviet republic, Tajikistan in Central Asia, Tehran persuaded the Islamist opposition to make a deal with pro-Russian neo-Communists to exclude pro-West democratic forces from power. In Pakistan, Tehran has ordered its clients in the Jaafari Movement (Tehrik Jaafari), an Iranian-financed Shiite party, to forget its blood feud with the pro-Taliban Sunni parties and join them in a coalition to defeat pro-American candidates in two successive general elections in the past decade.

  Sometimes, anti-Americanism is justified with the claim that the United States has prevented Muslims from liberating Jerusalem and destroying Israel. Here is how Rafsanjani puts it: “We give support to the mujahedin in Palestine. Hamas is zealous with regard to Sunni Islam, but because of their jihad and resistance, we supply them with aid.”7 In other words, although Hamas is a militant anti-Shiite group linked to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, it deserves support from Iran because of their mutual hostility to Israel and the United States. One need not be Muslim at all to attract support from the Islamic Republic. Communist north Korea, the most militantly antireligious regime today, is the closest ally of the Khomeinist regime in Tehran. What the two have in common is anti-Americanism. The same was true of the “strategic partnership” that the Islamic Republic had forged with Romania under nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist dictatorship. In December 1989, Ceausescu paid his very last visit abroad to Iran just days before he was executed upon his return home. In a joint communiqué issued in Tehran, the Islamic Republic and Romania vowed to “combat imperialism on all fronts.”

  That the Khomeinist regime perceives international relations as a form of war is made clear in Katami’s words: “What could we do in order to enter the world scene? We need a force that the enemy [the United States] does not possess, a force superior to technology and to arms. What we need as a balancing force is the newly born, fully alert, and ready-to-sacrifice Islamic force. If the Islamic Republic is supported by such a force . . . then its movement will be taken seriously.”8

  In 1979, Khomeini had vowed to fight the Great Satan in every corner of the globe. Over the years, this has meant efforts by the Islamic Republic to forge alliances with all those who have pursued an anti-American agenda. In the 1980s, while the Reagan administration helped the Contras in nicaragua, Tehran supplied the Sandinistas with oil, money, and arms. When the United States tried to isolate Cuba and, after the fall of the USSR and Castro’s loss of Soviet aid, force it towards reform, the Islamic Republic retaliated by making up a good part of the lost Soviet aid to Cuba. When the United States helped successive Colombian governments fight the narco-Marxists of the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Khomeinist regime responded by funneling funds to the FARC. When the United States supported moderate Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, and Algeria, the Islamic Republic replied by financing and arming terrorist organizations in every one of those countries.

  Latin America, described by Ahmadinejad as “the backyard of the Great Satan,” has been the target of special attention by Tehran for decades. The first Latin American regime with which the Islamic Republic forged an alliance was Cuba under Fidel Castro. Over the past eighteen years, Iran has injected billions of dollars into Cuba’s ailing economy, helping the Castro regime absorb the shock of the loss of Soviet patronage in 1991. Then, in 1993, Khamenehi set up an office to promote “convergence” among various Islamic sects, but the principal mission of the new organ, under Ayatollah Muhammad-Ali Taskhiri, was to establish contact with Shiite communities throughout the world, especially in West Africa and South America, where millions of ethnic Lebanese and Syrians have lived for decades. Soon, branches of Hezballah appeared in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Everywhere, these branches were instructed to cooperate with other anti-American forces, including the Bolivarists and Marxists, to accentuate the leftward trend of Latin American politics.

  In the late 1990s, Tehran found a true Latin American ally in the person of Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. He has helped Iran create a radical axis within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), with Libya and Algeria as occasional allies. With assistance from Chavez, Ahmadinejad is trying to win the leadership of the so-called non-Aligned Movement, a grouping of over 150 Third World nations, some of them anti-American since the days of the Cold War. As Ahmadinejad sees it, the United States is trying to throw a lasso around the Islamic Republic with the help of allies in the Middle East, Transcaucasus, and Central Asia. Therefore, the Islamic Republic should throw a “counter-lasso” through alliances in South America, where Ahmadinejad is supporting a chain of anti-American regimes with the help of his “brother” Chavez.

  Since the late 1980s, Hezballah has been building a base in Paraguay by recruiting within the Shiite community of Syrian-Lebanese origin, which represents an estimated 15 percent of the population. This base played a key role in ensuring the election of Fernando Lugo, a former Catholic bishop, as president of Paraguay in 2008, especially through a massive fundraising campaign supported by Iran and Venezuela. Lugo is known for his involvement in radical leftist political activities in the name of “liberation theology.” In the 1990s he had visited Iran to pay homage at the tomb of Khomeini, a man he has praised as “a forerunner of the modern global revolutionary movement.” Ahmadinejad was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Lugo on his election as president, describing him as “a man of God.” Clearly, Ahmadinejad hoped that Paraguay would now add another link to the “counter-lasso.”

  Both Ahmadinejad and Chavez have every reason to be pleased with their strategy. The United States is clearly in retreat in its own backyard. The Monroe Doctrine, designed to deny European powers a dominant role on the American continent, does not apply to Iran, which is determined to carve out its zone of influence in Latin America. At the start of the new century, Brazil already had a moderate leftist regime under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Since then, Bolivia has elected a leftist firebrand in the person of President Evo Morales. Chile, Argent
ina, and Uruguay have opted for moderate leftist governments, while Ecuador has taken a sharp turn to the left. Ecuador’s new president, Rafael Correa, suspended talks for a free trade agreement with the United States and threatened not to renew the lease for the American air base at Manta in 2009. Joining the so-called “Progressist Front” of Latin American countries with leftist regimes, Ecuador has also returned to OPEC, increasing the influence of Iran and Venezuela. The Sandinistas, slightly less leftist but a lot older, have gained power again in nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega, who highlighted his alliance with Ahmadinejad by making Iran the first country outside Latin America that he visited after returning to the presidency. One of the biggest Iranian missions abroad is active in Managua. Even in Peru, the return of Alan Garcia as president has revived the corpse of the anti-American left. In the summer of 2008, the only piece of the puzzle still tilting to the right was Colombia under President Alvaro Uribe.

  Seen from Tehran, all this is confirmation of Ahmadinejad’s working hypothesis that the global tide is turning against the United States and that the idea of clipping the wings of the American Great Satan is no longer merely a revolutionary fantasy. Under Ahmadinejad, Tehran has signed contracts with Caracas worth $40 billion, a huge sum considering the modest size of the Venezuelan economy. Contracts worth a further $30 billion have been negotiated with Bolivia, nicaragua, and Ecuador. Iran’s business relations with Cuba, Brazil, and Peru are also booming. Relations with Argentina have remained problematic largely because of arrest warrants issued by a court in Buenos Aires for a number of senior Iranian officials in connection with the bombing of a Jewish cultural center over a decade ago. But even there, the Islamic Republic is appearing with offers of lucrative contracts designed to rescue Latin American economies from their decade-long stagnation.