Battlegrounds
Page 33
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DESPITE THE United States’ repeated hopes for moderate leaders and reformist government, Iran’s internal political dynamics make real reform highly unlikely. Modest efforts over the years to liberalize the press, boost the economy, and reduce extrajudicial killings have typically been stifled by a coalition of conservatives and Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Despite their veneer of piety, the conservative mullahs who dominate the Guardian Council and exert influence across the government maintain their power through moral and financial corruption. Much of this is done through the use of bonyads, religious foundations that provide cover for extensive patronage networks from which the ayatollahs and government officials profit. Bonyads control businesses, receive government contracts, launder money, operate without any external audits, and pay no taxes. The Supreme Leader appoints the heads of the bonyads. Many are children of influential mullahs. The regime’s largest bonyad, Astan Quds Razavi, controls more than one hundred businesses in diverse fields ranging from car manufacturing to agriculture to oil and gas to financial services.
Corruption extends beyond the clerical order into the security services and Revolutionary Guard. The IRGC profits from smuggling contraband and trafficking drugs. Corrupt networks also stifle political reforms to maintain their control of the government and the economy. For example, the constitutionally mandated Guardian Council, a body of clerics and lawyers, rigged the Majlis parliamentary elections in 2004 and marginalized reformers to ensure that the populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defeated former president Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential election.44 The most notorious theft of an election was the presidential election in 2009. Most often, the Guardian Council simply excluded reformist candidates from elections as it did in February 2020 when it denied over seven thousand potential Majlis candidates the opportunity to run for office.45
Paradoxically, the West’s conciliatory policies have often reinforced the revolutionaries’ efforts to stifle reform. For example, in 2004 and 2005, European Union negotiators overlooked the election irregularities that led to conservative victories in the Majlis and Ahmadinejad’s election. Avoiding confrontation, they thought, might lead to cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, Ahmadinejad ushered in a period of aggression abroad while the revolutionaries continued to consolidate power internally.
Aggressive actions abroad derive from and depend on the revolutionaries’ strong grip on power domestically. High oil revenues allowed Ahmadinejad to empower and enrich the IRGC expeditionary organization responsible for carrying out terrorist operations abroad, the Quds Force. To show their gratitude, the increasingly powerful combination of the IRGC and the MOIS stole the 2009 election when Ahmadinejad faced a popular reform candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi’s Green Movement threatened to morph into a Green Revolution to overturn the corrupt clerical order. When people took to the streets in the largest protests since 1979, the IRGC and the Basij, a paramilitary organization mobilized for security, brutally suppressed them.46
The JCPOA has proved a windfall for Supreme Leader Khamenei, the bonyads, and the IRGC, allowing them to extend their patronage networks and intensify proxy wars in the region. Integrating Iran into the global economy was, in theory, supposed to strengthen the private sector, loosen the government’s grip on the commercial sector, empower moderates, and, over time, produce a less hostile Iranian government. But rather than opening up the Iranian market and liberalizing the country, the sanctions relief strengthened the revolutionaries, especially the bonyads and the IRGC. Like the bonyads, the IRGC is central to Iran’s economic system. It gained a high degree of economic influence during the Iran-Iraq War and controls 20 to 40 percent of the Iranian economy. In the first eighteen months after the JCPOA payment of $1.7 billion, at least 90 of the 110 commercial agreements and approximately $80 billion in outside investment went to state-controlled companies.47
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THE BELIEF that sanctions relief would change not only the behavior but also the very nature of the regime was based on the narcissistic assumption that U.S. actions were the principal source of Iranian attitudes and behaviors. The Iranian political structure was not well understood or was ignored. Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator for the Iran Nuclear Deal, suggested that “to make a meaningful deal, we need to see our adversaries not as eternal enemies or as dispensable ones, but as virtual partners.”48 The counterproductive Iran policy was the result of self-delusion, a lack of Iran expertise, and the associated misunderstanding of history and underappreciation for the emotions and ideology of Iranian leaders.
A superficial understanding of history is often more misleading than complete ignorance. The Obama administration accepted the founding myth of the Iranian Revolution—that the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and consolidated the rule of the Shah was externally planned and executed. For the Iranian revolutionaries, the coup myth reinforced their meta-narrative of victimization at the hands of Western colonialists. For the Obama administration, the story reinforced its tendency to see the United States as the key determinant of Iran’s actions. Never mind that the Shah had the legal right to dismiss his prime minister and that Mosaddeq’s rejection of that dismissal was in fact unconstitutional and illegal. Although the prime minister, lionized by the revolutionaries in Iran and New Left historians in the United States, was indeed an honorable patriot, the Mosaddeq myth overlooked its protagonist’s obstinance and how his inflexibility crippled the Iranian economy, opening the door for radicals on both sides of the political spectrum. Never mind that the monarchy and the Shah were still popular and that Mosaddeq was a monarchist. Although British and U.S. intelligence agencies did conspire against Mosaddeq, a trove of documents released in 2017 demonstrated that their efforts would have failed without the support of domestic actors. In the end, the Shah’s coalition proved stronger than Mosaddeq’s narrow coalition of unhappy intellectuals and leftist politicians.49
But the simplistic history of the coup appealed to those sympathetic to the New Left’s interpretation of history, in which the modern ills of the world are attributed mainly to capitalist imperialism and an overly powerful United States. The standard interpretation of the coup in U.S. universities is, in part, a late by-product of opposition to the Vietnam War.
The flawed interpretation of the Mosaddeq coup contributed to a predisposition toward atonement for America’s alleged sins as the first step toward improved relations. In 2019, the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas National Security Review, for example, released an issue examining why the Eisenhower administration chose to overthrow the Mosaddeq government, taking as a foregone conclusion that it had actually done so. Or consider the February 2019 headline on NPR’s website that read, “How the CIA Overthrew Iran’s Democracy in 4 Days.” In 2009, during the Cairo speech on American relations with the Muslim world, President Obama noted that, “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”50 Although he went on to remind his audience that Iran had also committed its share of misdeeds against Americans, the oblique reference to the Mosaddeq coup was meant as an admission of guilt that might lead to better relations. Regardless of the reality in 1953, it is important to recognize the Mosaddeq myth as both a cause and a symptom of the deep resentment, sense of victimhood, and thirst for vengeance that drive and rationalize the Iranian revolutionaries’ most egregious acts.51 The United States, however, should not abet an abuse of history by a clerical order whose forebears were far more responsible for Mosaddeq’s demise than the CIA.
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THE ASSUMPTION that the Islamic Republic, once welcomed into the international community, would evolve into a force for stability in the Middle East grew out of the narcissistic tendency to view outside actions as more important than internal dynamics in determining the regime’s behavior. Although the Iranian government was not hostile because of historical wrongs tha
t sanctions relief could right, some actually welcomed Iranian regional hegemony as a potential source of peace and stability in the region reminiscent of the Persian empires of the sixth century BC through the nineteenth century AD. But this was an ahistorical fantasy.
Officials in the Obama administration focused on selling the deal rather than subjecting it to scrutiny. As a setup for the sales pitch, Ben Rhodes stated that those who were against the JCPOA were for the Iraq War. “Wrong then, wrong now became our mantra,” he recalled. The sales point not only was a red herring, but also demonstrated how opposition to the Iraq War dominated other policy initiatives of that administration whether relevant or not. The red herring of the Iraq War led to a false dilemma, an informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be in an “either/or” situation when, in fact, there is at least one additional option. Rhodes was proud of posing the false dilemma between either supporting the JCPOA or going to war with Iran. President Obama liked it, too, describing it as their “best argument” for the agreement.52 In this instance, the option omitted was to continue to pressure the regime with sanctions at a time when it was feeling the pressure. Long before the JCPOA, Iranian leaders, nervous about their corrupt regime’s ability to forestall opposition to their autocratic rule, began to talk about the “China model,” in which economic growth, jump-started by sanctions relief, would placate the unhappy Iranian population.53 Sanctions relief under the JCPOA gave the regime an injection of cash to arrest economic deterioration and devaluation. But by strengthening a repressive regime and the IRGC, the deal weakened rather than strengthened reformers. Even worse, the conciliatory atmosphere employed to pursue a flawed nuclear agreement and American assurances of the Iranian leadership’s trustworthiness actually disempowered the Iranian people as actors and potential forces for moderation. Rhodes gave instructions to make sure that the agreement was portrayed only as addressing the nuclear issue because “we don’t want to let the critics muddy the nuclear issue with the other issues.”54 By “other issues,” he meant the regime’s tyrannical repression of its own population, its support for terrorists, and the perpetuation of violence in the Middle East.
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LATER, THOSE determined to preserve the JCPOA argued that pulling out was shortsighted. The JCPOA itself, however, was also shortsighted because it divorced Iran’s nuclear program from not only the regime’s behavior, but also its very nature. It produced a bad political outcome disguised as successful diplomacy by giving up on core American values, by siding with a repressive regime against its own people and the peoples of the region. However, the assumptions and illusions that underpinned the JCPOA were not unique to that agreement or the Obama administration. Across six administrations, goodwill never begot goodwill with Iran. Conciliation has never brought moderation or a shift in the regime’s permanent hostility to the United States, Israel, Europe, and the Arab monarchies. While the JCPOA was presented as a major turn in American policy, in fact it was consistent with a long history of errors and illusions. Rectifying failed policies of the past required a better understanding of the Iranian regime and, in particular, how ideology and emotions drive and constrain its behavior.
Chapter 10
Forcing a Choice
Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.
—KHOMEINI
IT WAS harder than it should have been to implement the Iran policy announced in President Trump’s October 2017 speech. Any policy shift is difficult across all departments and agencies of the U.S. government, especially when the change in direction is significant, as with Iran. And some of the friction in implementation was due to lingering sympathy for a conciliatory policy. I believed we had to force Iran to choose between either acting as a responsible nation and enjoying the corresponding benefits of such behavior or suffering sanctions and isolation as it continued to wage its destabilizing proxy wars. But some continued to prioritize avoiding confrontation with Iran over forcing that choice, clinging to the forlorn belief that one day Iranian leaders would, as President Obama had hoped, unclench their fists.1
During the summer and fall of 2019, about a year after the United States withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, and as Iranian oil exports and the value of its currency hit historic lows, Iran attacked Saudi, Emirati, Japanese, and Norwegian oil tankers; conducted drone strikes on Saudi Arabian oil facilities; and shot down a U.S. drone.2 Those actions should have confirmed to the United States that until there is an evolution in the nature of the regime, Iranian leaders will not abandon their proxy wars. Iranian aggression might also have disabused U.S. allies still supporting the JCPOA of the premise that the West can, through engagement and economic enticements, convince the regime to forgo aggression. What became known as the Gulf Crisis of 2019 reinforced the notion that the ideology of the revolution drives Iran’s external actions. Iran’s revolutionaries do not want to be conciliated, and Iran believes it can continue to have it both ways: use extra-state violence to achieve its objectives and still be treated internationally like a responsible nation. It was probably encouraged in this by the international reaction to its hostile acts, which assigned blame more to the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal than to the decisions made by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the Guardian Council, or IRGC commanders. “America made Iran do it” was the subtext behind too much news analysis.
But the regime’s “Great Satan,” “Death to Israel,” and “Death to America” language is not mere bluster. Hostility toward the United States, Israel, and the West is foundational to Iran’s revolutionary ideology, but has historical roots that well predate the revolution. Iran’s leaders deeply resent colonial and foreign powers who are seen as the cause of the Persian empire’s collapse and their country’s loss of sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to its strategic geography and oil reserves, Iran was an arena of competition in the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for power and influence across Central Asia. But Iran was also an active player in that game. In the 1930s, for example, authoritarian ruler Reza Shah sought to consolidate his power and cultivated relationships with fascists in Germany, Italy, and Turkey. Early Axis victories in World War II seemed to create an opportunity to expel the British he resented for profiting inequitably from Iran’s oil wealth, but he bet on the wrong side. After the Soviets invaded from the north and the British from the south, Reza Shah abdicated to his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who would go on to rule Iran for thirty-seven years. Iran declared war on the Axis in 1943.3 The Cold War contest between the Soviet Union and the West introduced the new Shah to an updated version of the Great Game, with the United States replacing Britain as the primary external influence on Iran’s politics and economy. Resentment toward America and Britain for undermining sovereignty, especially during the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953, remains a principal emotional determinant of Iranian foreign and military policy nearly seventy years later.
In the years leading up to 1979, opponents of the Shah, such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, gained popularity for expressing anti-American sentiment. After being exiled from Iran in 1964 and expelled from Iraq in 1978, Khomeini moved to France, where he took full advantage of freedoms he would later suppress in Iran to spew anti-American and anti-Western propaganda. In his cottage in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, surrounded by telephones and cassette tape recorders, he conducted more than 450 interviews, portraying the Shah as a puppet of the United States. When the Ayatollah returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, the crowds that greeted him chanted anti-Western and anti-Israel slogans. The 444-day-long hostage crisis also gave Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries the opportunity to use anti-Americanism to consolidate their grip on power. It is a technique the regime uses to this day.4 In November 2019, when protests erupted around Iran in response to a government announcement rationing petrol and raising gas prices by up to 300 percent,5 the IRGC called a rally to direct pop
ular discontent away from the regime and toward the United States. The commander of the IRGC, speaking in front of a crowd, blamed the United States for the recent protests, stating, “We are in a great world war and at this moment you are defeating the arrogant powers. The war that was started recently in our streets was an international plot.”6
While understanding what drives and constrains Iranian leaders is critical to U.S. policy, so is an appreciation for the broad range of beliefs and perspectives held by the Iranian people themselves. In 1998, when proposing a “dialogue between civilizations,” Iranian president Mohammad Khatami observed that one should “know the civilization with which you want to maintain a dialogue.”7 He was making a case for strategic empathy. The Iranian people’s attitudes toward the United States and the West are neither uniform nor immutable, which is why a long period of friendship between the American and the Iranian people preceded the revolution. Across public and private sectors, discussions with Iranian counterparts can foster understanding of the positive as well as the negative aspects of Iran’s and America’s intertwined history. One might share the story of Howard Baskerville, a young American who taught English, history, and geometry in Tabriz and went on to become a martyr of the 1905–1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution. Quoted as stating that “the only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference,” Baskerville died in command of 150 young constitutionalists while trying to break a siege of tsarist forces and bring food to the people of Tabriz.8 We should recognize the Iranian people’s diversity of viewpoints and take advantage of communities that possess an affinity for American and Western literature, film, music, and the performing arts. Many of Iran’s communities possess cultural and religious identities incompatible with the Marxist and Islamist fundamentalist ideology of the regime.9