by Amir Taheri
These contracts come in four sectors. The first and the largest is energy. Iran’s aim is to replace as many of the U.S. companies as possible in the Latin American oil and gas industry. A joint Iranian-Venezuelan consortium hopes to dominate the natural gas sector in Bolivia while launching new exploration schemes for oil and gas in nicaragua, Ecuador, and Peru. The second sector is armaments. none of the Latin American countries has a credible weapons industry, and the Islamic Republic hopes to fill that gap. Iran has already sold $4.5 billion worth of military materiel to Venezuela and is training hundreds of Venezuelan military personnel. The third sector is security. Iranian and Venezuelan security services have already set up a coordination committee and developed a system of exchanging information. nicaragua was expected to join soon, along with Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Finally, Iran is investing in Latin American media. The first step in that direction came in April 2008 in the form of a $1 billion Iranian investment in developing a Spanish-language television network to compete with the major American satellite channels. As Ahmadinejad likes to tell his Latin American hosts: the Americans are going, the Iranians are coming! With crude oil prices at record-high levels, the Islamic Republic had piles of cash to throw around while the United States was heading for another bout of belt-tightening.
16
Sunrise Power against Sunset Power
For almost eight years during the presidency of Bill Clinton, one word summed up the policy of the United States towards Iran: “containment.” Having labeled Iran a “rogue nation” in 1994, Secretary of State Warren Christopher sat back waiting for things to sort themselves out. Four years later, however, it was clear that the Islamic Republic, far from being contained, was spreading its influence throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. It had also built solid relations with the European Union, which had become Iran’s number-one trading partner, while treating Russia and China as informal allies. The Iranian leadership had interpreted the Clintonian “containment” as an assurance that the United States would take no action to weaken their hold on power in Tehran. They felt they had a free hand to pursue their hegemonic designs wherever they found an opportunity. Even when an Iranian-sponsored hit squad blew up a U.S. military residence in Al Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen American servicemen, the Clinton administration decided to hush things up so as not to implicate the mullahs. The FBI presented the president with “ample evidence” of Iranian involvement. Clinton, however, ruled out any action against the Islamic Republic.1 By the end of his presidency, Clinton had gone even further in attempting to placate the mullahs. His second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, had lifted some of the sanctions imposed on Iran by three U.S. administrations and offered public apologies to the Islamic Republic.
Why did Clinton decide to give the Islamic Republic a free hand in pursuit of policies that were clearly designed to drive the United States out of the Middle East and use the region as the principal base of a global anti-American campaign? One reason may be that Clinton regarded the publicly stated intentions of the Khomeinist leadership as nothing but radical rhetoric. But is it not possible—incredible though it may sound—that he also sympathized with a regime that he regarded as revolutionary? The answer is yes, and it was provided by Clinton himself shortly after he had left office. Here is what Clinton said at a meeting on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.”2 (Emphasis added.) A few days later, Clinton said in a television interview with Charlie Rose:
Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami [in 1997]. [It is] the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.3 [Emphasis added.]
So, while millions of Iranians, especially the young, looked to the United States as a model of progress and democracy, a former American president designated the Islamic Republic as his ideological homeland. But who were “the guys” Clinton identified with? There was, of course, President Muhammad Khatami, who a week earlier, speaking at a conference of provincial governors, had called for the whole world to convert to Islam: “Human beings understand different affairs within the global framework that they live in,” he said. “But when we say that Islam belongs to all times and places, it is implied that the very essence of Islam is such that despite changes [in time and place] it is always valid.”4 There was also Khatami’s brother, Muhammad-Reza, the man who in 1979 led the “students” who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. And there was the Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, known to Iranians as “Judge Blood,” and Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Mohtashami-Pour, the man who created the Lebanese branch of Hezballah. Mohtashami-Pour is also the man who organized the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, claiming the lives of 271 people, most of them Americans. Clinton was identifying with “progressives” who had made Iran the world record-holder for executions, just behind the People’s Republic of China, and had organized the murder of hundreds of intellectuals, Christian priests, and Sunni Muslim clerics.
not surprisingly, the state-owned media in Tehran seized upon Clinton’s utterances to counter President George W. Bush’s claim that the Islamic Republic was a tyranny that oppresses the Iranians and threatens the stability of the region. Clinton’s declaration of love for the mullahs showed how ill informed even a U.S. president could be. Hadn’t anyone told Clinton when he was in the White House that elections in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the Supreme Guide and that no opposition figures are allowed to run? Did he not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that the mullahs use such terms as “progressive” and “liberal” as synonyms for “apostate,” a charge that could lead to a death sentence? More importantly, did he not know that while there was no democracy without elections, there could be elections without democracy? Clinton forgot that anti-Americanism and hatred of the West in general form the ideological backbone of Khomeinism. The former president endorsed another claim of the mullahs: that Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator, had invaded Iran on behalf of the United States. If true, this would mean that another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had engineered a war that claimed more than a million lives.
Bill Clinton’s feeling of “guilt” towards Iran is inspired by what one might call the “imperialism of compassion.” Those who suffer from this affliction believe that the so-called developing nations are nothing but objects of history, never subjects, and that history is made only by the major Western powers. If the people of the Indian subcontinent tore each other apart over religion and fought a series of wars that claimed millions of lives, it was all the fault of Britain. If the Arabs have produced despotic regimes that suffocate their societies, the blame rests with Western colonialism. If the Rwandans massacre each other, the fault lies with the West. The imperialism of compassion is as humiliating for the developing nations as classical imperialism was in its time, for it denies those nations a sense of responsibility, thus part of their humanity.
Seen from the Khomeinists’ point of view, the United States appears like the proverbial giant with feet of clay. Gripped by self-doubt and a sense of guilt, its leaders are incapable of using even a fraction of their nation’s power in defense of its interests. At the same time, many U.S. politicians simply cannot believe that others might not share their view of politics as the art of the possib
le in a realm of compromise. Most Americans admire a politician who can negotiate a compromise to avoid conflict. Making deals, fifty-fifty, is part of the American culture; thus the Civil War is viewed as a great national tragedy. The Khomeinist mindset is quite different. It regards compromise as degrading because the Only Truth—that is, Islam—can never bring itself down to the level of the “abrogated” faiths, meaning all other religions and creeds. Khomeini is admired because he refused all compromise. In 1978 he could have helped Iran avoid tragedy had he agreed to allow the formation of a transitional government and the holding of free elections. At any time between 1980 and 1988, he could have accepted any of the Un-brokered compromises to end the war with Iran, thus preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths. In 1988, he could have stopped a massacre of over four thousand political prisoners by accepting their “repentance.” But in every case, anxious to keep his image as a tough leader intact, he rejected compromise. Khomeini was an exaggerated version of the typical Iranian “strongman” who must not, indeed, cannot show weakness. In the nineteenth century, the Qajar king Fath Ali Shah might have avoided a humiliating defeat and loss of territory by Iran had he apologized to Russia for the seizure of its embassy and the murder of its ambassador in Tehran.5 In 1941, Reza Shah might have prevented the invasion of Iran and his own enforced abdication had he agreed to a compromise under which he would expel nazi agents and join the Allies against the Axis. In 1953, Mossadeq might have saved himself and the nation a great deal of hardship had he accepted any of the generous compromise deals worked out by his American friends. In every case, however, the leader was prepared to sacrifice the best interests of the nation at the altar of his hubris. The generation that was swept to power with Ahmadinejad is even less prone to compromise, if only because it regards “martyrdom” as the noblest of goals.
By contrast, the American “enemy” loves life to the point that he is prepared to accept almost any humiliation and indignity to prolong it. Soon after his election as president, Ahmadinejad told a press conference that he knew “all about Americans” and boasted, “I know how their minds work.” At the time, Ahmadinejad’s principal “expert” on U.S. affairs was one Dr. Hassan Abbasi, a professor of strategy at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps University and nicknamed “the Kissinger of Islam.” He also lectured to informal gatherings of “Volunteers for Martyrdom.” His main theme is that the United States lacks the stamina for a long conflict and that it is bound to “run away” from the Middle East, allowing the Islamic Republic to reshape it as the “core of an Islamic superpower.”
To hear Dr. Abbasi tell it, the entire recent history of the United States could be narrated with the help of the image of “the last helicopter.” It was this image that impressed the Bay of Pigs fiasco on the pages of history under John F. Kennedy. The same image in Saigon concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan, the helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezballah suicide attack. Under the first President George Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with General norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not understand why they had been allowed to live so they could crush their domestic foes and fight America another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering sixteen American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.
According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an “aberration,” a leader out of sync with his nation’s character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an “American Middle East.” Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the United States from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.
Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations, with the Middle East as the main battlefield, and with Iran leading the Muslim world against the “Crusader-Zionist camp” led by America. In 2005, Ahmadinejad announced one of the most ambitious government mission statements in decades, declaring that the ultimate goal of Iran’s foreign policy was nothing less than “a government for the whole world” under the leadership of the Mahdi, the Absent Imam of the Shiites—code for the export of radical Islam. The only power capable of challenging this vision, the United States, was in its “last throes.” Bush may have led America into “a brief moment of triumph,” but the United States is a “sunset” (ofuli) power, while the Islamic Republic is a “sunrise” (tolu’ee) power. Once Bush is gone, a future president will admit defeat and order a retreat, as all of Bush’s predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter. Geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, Ahmadinejad’s tract unequivocally stated, is “the incontestable right of the Iranian nation.”
Tehran leaders believe that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam enabled China to establish itself as the rising power in Asia. They hope that a U.S. defeat in Iraq will give the Islamic Republic a similar opportunity to become what Rafsanjani calls “the regional superpower.” The Khomeinists also believe that an American defeat in Iraq will destabilize all Arab regimes, leaving the Islamic Republic as the only power around which a new status quo could be built in the region. “Here is our opportunity to teach the Americans a lesson,” Rafsanjani said in 2004. But what would constitute a U.S. defeat in Iraq? As far as Tehran is concerned, all that is needed is television images of American soldiers boarding those familiar helicopters and leaving behind their Iraqi allies before they are in a position to defend themselves.
History, however, is never written in advance. It is possible that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way Americans see the world and their place in it. Running away from Cuba, Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan, and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there—that the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the United States itself. But the enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago are dedicated to the destruction of the United States as the world knows it today.
17
Crazy Eddie and Martyr Hussein
In May 2008, the Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Hussein Obama announced his plan to seek a summit with the president of the Islamic Republic, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in “direct talks with no preconditions.” For months, Obama rallies included small groups carrying placards saying “no War on Iran,” whereas “no nukes for Iran” would have made more sense.
The attempt to fabricate another “cause” with which to bash America was backed by the claim that the mullahs were behaving badly with their nuclear ambitions because George W. Bush refused to talk to them. By way of contrast, Obama referred to John Kennedy’s “leadership” in his Vienna summit with nikita Khrushchev and during the Cuban missile crisis, an incident that has entered American folklore as an example of “brilliant diplomacy.” But few bother to examine the small print. The crisis, as you may recall, started when the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, something they were committed not to do in a number of accords with the United States. Kennedy reacted by threatening to quarantine Cuba until the missiles were removed. The Soviets ended up “flinching” and agreed to take the missiles away. In exchange, they got two things: First, the United States pledged never to perpetrate or assist in hostile action against Castro—in effect offering life insurance to his regime. Second, the United States removed the Jupiter missiles installed in Turkey as part of NATO’s defenses. Instead of being punished, Castro and his Soviet masters were doubly rewarded for undoing what they shouldn’t have done in the first place. And Castro was free to do mischief, not only in Latin America but also in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf, often on behalf of Moscow, right up
to the fall of the USSR. Applied to Iran, the “Kennedy model” would provide the Khomeinists, facing mounting discontent at home, with a guarantee of safety from external pressure, allowing them to suppress their domestic opponents and intensify mischief-making abroad.
The second model for engaging Iran is Jimmy Carter’s policy towards the mullahs. Carter has called for a “diplomatic solution,” and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, published an op-ed blaming the Bush administration for the crisis. He wrote: “Artificial deadlines, pro-pounded most often by those who do not wish the U.S. to negotiate in earnest, are counterproductive. name-calling and saber rattling, as well as a refusal to even consider the other side’s security concerns, can be useful tactics only if the goal is to derail the negotiating process.”
Let’s forget that the “artificial deadlines” for Iran to cease its uranium enrichment have been set by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Un Security Council, and that most of the “name-calling and saber rattling” has come from Tehran. But let us recall one fact that Brzezinski does not mention: that the Carter administration did “engage” with the mullahs without artificial deadlines, saber rattling, or name-calling. The results for the United States were disastrous. Brzezinski’s op-ed was titled “Been There, Done That,” meant as a sneering nod to events that led to the liberation of Iraq. A more apt title, however, is “Been There, Done That, Learned nothing”—a nod to Brzezinski’s failure to learn the lessons of Iran even three decades later.