Hidden Iran

by Ray Takeyh

  The compelling economic realities reinforce security arguments for a more normalized relationship with the United States. Rafsanjani once more acknowledged, “Iran has never banned economic, technological, and scientific relations with America.”6 Khatami has also weighed in, stipulating, “From our point of view there are no obstacles preventing economic cooperation with the U.S.”7 Iranian conservatives similarly endorsed such commercial relations. Muhammad Javad Larijani, an adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, emphasized, “We and the U.S. have many differences. But this does not mean that we cannot adopt a regular policy in view of our national interests.”8 Economic imperatives were finally leading Iran to subordinate its revolutionary zeal to pragmatic considerations, and deal with a state that it has long demonized.

  Hovering over this debate was Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and thus the ultimate arbiter of Iran’s policy deliberations. As the theocracy’s foremost ideologue, Khamenei shared the hard-liners’ revolutionary conviction and their confrontational impulses. However, as the head of state he also bore the responsibility for safeguarding Iran’s national interests and tempering ideology with the mandates of statecraft. The traditionally rigid and obstructionist Khamenei seemed to grasp the urgency of the times and the dangers that Iran’s previous path now entailed. Through Iran’s actions in the months following the September 11 attacks, he seemed to signal his willingness to explore a different relationship with the United States.

  The first test of Iran’s new policy came in Afghanistan. In October 2001, after fruitless negotiations with the Afghan leadership, the United States launched a military invasion designed to topple the Taliban and apprehend Osama bin Laden. For Iran, which had had bitter and acrimonious relations with the militant Sunni regime of the Taliban and its Wahhabi terrorist allies, this was an ideal opportunity. During much of the 1990s, as the international community remained indifferent to developments in Afghanistan, Iran actively assisted opposition groups such as the Northern Alliance and sought to draw attention to the peculiarities of the Taliban regime and its problematic guests. Once U.S. military operations commenced, subtle signs were soon sent to Washington. Foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi publicly declared, “We have some common points with the U.S. over Afghanistan.”9The head of the parliamentary commission overseeing the war, Hadi Salam, reinforced this message, stressing that dialogue with the United States was critical “due to the crisis prevailing in the region and safeguarding our national interests.”10

  Such Iranian gestures were soon given tangible expression. The underreported story of the first episode of America’s war on terrorism is that it could not have succeeded as easily as it did without Iranian support. The fact remains that by 2001 America’s links with the Northern Alliance were fragmentary, and its long years of neglect had led many Afghan opposition groups to be suspicious of the United States. Tehran’s mediation proved essential as Iran actively pressed the Northern Alliance and other opposition groups to cooperate with American forces. Iran also provided intelligence to the Northern Alliance, agreed to rescue American pilots in distress, and allowed some 165,000 tons of U.S. food aid to traverse its territory into Afghanistan. The speedy collapse of the Taliban acclaimed by the Bush administration had in fact enjoyed substantial Iranian assistance.

  The pattern of cooperation persisted after the military campaign ceased and Washington focused on reconstruction and stabilization of a war-torn Afghanistan. Iran was instrumental in crafting the interim Afghan government at the Bonn Conference in December 2001, pressing its ally and longtime leader of the Northern Alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, to relinquish his claims to power in favor of the American candidate, Hamid Karzai. At the January 2002 Tokyo Conference, Iran pledged $530 million for Afghan reconstruction. To be sure, Iran was concerned about the possibility of a permanent American military establishment next door and was hoping for a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces. Iran was also active in attempting to assert its influence, particularly in western Afghanistan. Although, in all such cases, Iran’s policy was motivated by critical national security considerations, rather than the export of an Islamic revolution. The paradox of the Afghan war was the extent that the American and Iranian interests actually coincided.

  On the surface, Tehran’s decision to assist the United States could be seen as a clever attempt to dislodge the Taliban government it had almost gone to war with in 1998. If the United States insisted on removing a regime hostile to Iran, why not be helpful? Such calculations certainly provided Iran with incentives to be cooperative. However, it does appear that Tehran’s objectives transcended the immediate issue of deposing the Taliban, since the theocracy genuinely hoped to reach out to the United States. Khatami eagerly noted that “Afghanistan provides the two regimes with a perfect opportunity to improve relations.”11 The exigencies of September 11 and Iran’s debilitating economic condition seemed to have finally shattered old taboos and engendered a new consensus within the theocracy behind a foreign policy of “New Thinking.” A powerful coalition of reformers and pragmatic conservatives now coalesced around the understanding that in the altered regional landscape, Iran must come to terms with the United States on issues of common concern.

  As we have seen in the last chapter, the period between 1997 and 1998 was the first occasion when U.S.–Iranian relations could have been reconciled. The second such time was the period between September 11, 2001, and January 29, 2002. Once President Bush addressed the joint session of Congress for his momentous State of the Union speech, the opportunity all but vanished. It is to American calculations during this period that we must now turn.

  NEW WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

  When the Bush administration first assumed power, it appeared to follow the cautious realism that had essentially characterized much of America’s post–World War II foreign policy. On the issue of Iran, the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, captured the tone of the administration by stressing in the pages of Foreign Affairs, “All in all changes in U.S. policy toward Iran would require changes in Iranian behavior.”12 Such a statement could have been uttered by officials of both Republican and Democratic administrations that had wrestled with the Iranian conundrum for a quarter of a century. Missile defense, preoccupation with a rising China, and transatlantic relations seemed to define the new administration’s international priorities. The fact that the reform movement in Iran had failed to usher in a democratic breakthrough diminished any incentive that Washington may have had in devising an imaginative policy toward Iran. The Islamic Republic had essentially receded from the scene, left to indulge its grievances and sense of self-importance.

  The September 11 tragedies fundamentally altered the Bush administration’s international perspective, as it sought to revise, if not discard, the traditional American reliance on diplomacy and deterrence to deal with threats. Curiously, President Bush now stated: “After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold water.”13 Traditional conservatives such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld perceived that the credibility of American power was contingent on its demonstration in the Middle East. By October 2002, the administration went so far as to enunciate a new national security doctrine that flamboyantly pledged the preemptive use of force as a tool of counterproliferation and regime change as a means of ensuring disarmament.14 Beyond such provocative assertions, it became increasingly clear that the character of the regime—as opposed to its actual conduct—would determine the degree of American antagonism. Rice best captured this sentiment in 2005:

  Our experience of this new world leads us to conclude that the fundamental character of regimes matters more today than the international distribution of power. Insisting otherwise is imprudent and impractical. The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. Attempting to draw neat, clean lines between our security interests and our dem
ocratic ideals does not reflect the reality of today’s world. Supporting the growth of democratic institutions in all nations is not some moralistic flight of fancy; it is the only realistic response to our present challenges.15

  Under this framework, despotic regimes would inevitably seek and use weapons of mass destruction, promote terrorism, menace their neighbors, and plot against American interests. In the Bush administration’s reformulation of traditional concepts of security, Iraq and Iran were threats not just because of their nuclear ambitions but because they oppressed their citizens. Such recalcitrant regimes could be neither contained nor deterred, leaving regime change as the only viable option.16

  The president’s missionary impulse was actively buttressed by a powerful cohort of neoconservatives who had assumed key posts in the administration. From their perch in the Pentagon and in the vice president’s office, the neoconservatives now found a president receptive to their postulations. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby all became household names as they invoked Wilsonian assertions as a means of stabilizing a turbulent Middle East.

  Neoconservatism was an intellectual movement of significance long before Iraq commanded international attention. Since their emergence in the 1970s, the neoconservatives had always disparaged the realists’ penchant for managing problems rather than solving them, especially when dealing with nonrepresentative regimes. As prime critics of the détente policy toward the Soviet Union, they created organizations with ominous-sounding names such as the Committee on the Present Danger and filled their magazines and journals with articles disparaging arms control treaties and U.S.–Soviet summitry. The demise of the Soviet Union led many neoconservatives to focus on the Middle East, particularly the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq with its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and its aggressive wars.

  In many ways, however, the neoconservatives’ critique of U.S. policy in the Middle East transcended Saddam, as they never perceived the region as a bastion of stability, even before September 11. As with their advocacy against the Soviet Union, they called for a muscular policy of imposing American values on a reluctant part of the world. Although Iraq would always remain central to their obsessions, Iran was never far behind. The Islamic Republic, which persistently denounced the United States as the “Great Satan,” humiliated America during a prolonged hostage crisis, and proved relentlessly hostile to Israel, was seen as an ideal candidate for the imposition of America’s will.

  For the neoconservatives, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a watershed event—it had not just displaced a reliable American ally, it had ushered in an ideology of radical Islam that was to challenge America’s power and threaten the security of America’s ally, Israel. William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, employed typically inflated rhetoric in claiming, “We are in a death struggle with Iran,” and called for “measures ranging from public diplomacy to covert operations.”17 James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, proclaimed the arrival of World War IV (the third evidently being the Cold War) and Iran as America’s central antagonist in that conflict. For Woolsey, Iran was a “fanatical theocratic totalitarian state ripe for the ash heap of history.”18

  In many ways, the neoconservative’s image of Iran was frozen in time as Ayatollah Khomeini and his anti-American fulminations continued to disturb and agitate them. The evolutionary changes that Iran had undergone, the transformation of its political system, and its international outlook were simply ignored or dismissed as clerical ploys. Moreover, Iran’s attempt to reach out to the United States in the aftermath of September 11 was disregarded to benefit the new strategy of displacing nonrepresentative regimes. Richard Perle, one of the leading neoconservative thinkers and an architect of the Iraq war, took the lead: “The U.S. should do everything to encourage the centrifugal forces in Iran that, with any luck, will drive that miserable government from office.”19 Even a distinguished scholar of the Middle East such as Bernard Lewis could not resist the ideological pull; he assured his audience that once the invasion of Iraq was complete, the Iranian people would beseech us, “Come this way.”20 In the neoconservative conception, Iran was a country ripe for a revolution, and limited American pressure could easily push it over the brink. History and reality would now be twisted to accommodate the distorted neoconservative predilections.

  Although much has been written about how the neoconservatives hijacked American foreign policy in the aftermath of September 11 in order to institute their intellectual speculations about the nexus between democracy and stability, the fact remains that their influence stemmed from the coincidence of their ideology with President Bush’s own instincts. Ultimately the president establishes both the rhetoric and the strategy of his administration’s foreign policy. A president with an inadequate understanding of the complexities of regional politics and a propensity to view events in stark black-and-white terms spearheaded a foreign policy that was often self-defeating. The precipitous American invasion of a dispossessed and essentially partitioned Iraqi state on the spurious grounds of searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction led many in the international community to question Bush’s judgment and whether American power can still be a force for good. Iran, with its many shades of gray, would prove an insurmountable challenge for Bush’s simplistic ideological paradigm.

  Every crisis requires a catalyst, and in the case of Iran that trigger was a shipment of arms to Palestinian groups resisting Israel. Although Iran’s hard-liners had grudgingly accepted an accommodation with the United States, the issue of Israel was still beyond the pale. By 2002, the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the Palestinian uprising once more seemed to validate the Iranian hard-liners’ strategy and provided them with allies in distress. Tehran’s inflammatory rhetoric was buttressed by the provision of arms to the Palestinian resistance, and it was the Israeli interception of one such ship, the Karine-A, in January 2002, that focused Washington’s attention on Iranian terrorism, as opposed to its constructive assistance in Afghanistan. The contradictions of Iranian foreign policy may have diminished, but they were still very much evident in the case of Israel. Tehran simply could not divest itself from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The clerical leaders failed to appreciate that Washington would not acknowledge their help so long as they strenuously sought to obstruct America’s attempts to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors. Cooperation on Afghanistan, high-level negotiations, and international conferences could not balance Iran’s opposition to the Jewish state.

  In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush effectively closed off the possibility of a new chapter in U.S.–Iranian relations, denouncing the Islamic Republic as a member of an axis of evil, along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. Bush described Iran as a “major sponsor of terrorism,” and once more condemned the “unelected few” who suppress a restive populace. The incendiary language entailed a palpable threat. The United States of America, Bush proclaimed, “would not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most dangerous weapons.” In the post–September 11 and post-Afghanistan atmosphere, this was not an idle threat. Iran was once more in America’s crosshairs.

  Soon the administration officials began echoing the president, essentially calling for a change of Iranian regime. Vice President Dick Cheney expressed his “disappointment” with Iran, invoking a litany of American objections, such as “Iran’s apparent commitment to destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and unstinting efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.”21 The new U.S. policy was spelled out in most detail by senior White House aide Zalmay Khalilzad in a speech: “Our policy is not about Khatami or Khamenei, reform or hard-line; it is about supporting those who want freedom, human rights, democracy, and economic and educational opportunity for themselves and their fellow countrymen and women.”22 The admi
nistration would no longer preoccupy itself with the intricacies of Iranian politics but would instead substitute simplistic slogans such as “support for freedom” for an actual policy. This was to be regime change on the cheap, as an administration reluctant to commit its own troops hoped that by simply advocating democracy it could somehow trigger a revolution in Iran.

  Iran’s response was predictably incendiary and uncompromising. Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed that the “drunkard shouts of American officials reveals the truth that the enemy is the enemy.”23 Even the mild-mannered President Khatami forcefully rejected Bush’s remarks as “war mongering and insulting toward the Iranian nation.”24 Bush’s strident rhetoric even alienated the Iranian masses who were to be the vanguard of progressive political change. The Iranians may have detested the corruption and inefficiency of the theocracy, but as a deeply nationalistic population they resented being defamed by an American politician and equated with the unsavory states of Iraq and North Korea. A nation that sees its rich culture as the epicenter of the world’s civilization would not easily forgive a petulant U.S. president. The issue that seemingly eluded the president and his speechwriters was that the Iranian nation could disdain both its rulers and the insulting Americans at the same time.