by Ray Takeyh
Nor can one suggest that Iran is determined to fuel the insurgency as a means of compelling an American withdrawal, thus establishing its preeminence in the Gulf. Although the assertion of Iranian dominance in the Persian Gulf region is partly contingent on a withdrawal of the U.S. presence, to some extent pressures in the United States and Iraq are once again achieving Iran’s objectives. The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq is a contentious political topic in the United States, with a majority of the American people regretting the decision to intervene. In the meantime, as the political process unfolds and Iraqis make their own deals and arrangements, it is likely that many in Iraq would see an American occupation as provocative and nationalistically objectionable. A proud state that has long viewed itself as a vanguard nation and the seat of Islamic civilization cannot long tolerate the infamy of being the only occupied Arab country. Iran does not have to inflict damage on the United States to provoke its withdrawal from Iraq, because the natural trajectory of events makes a reduced American presence in the Gulf nearly inevitable.
Iran’s model of ensuring its influence in Iraq is also drawn from its experiences in Lebanon, another multiconfessional society with a Shiite population traditionally left out of the spoils of power. Iran’s strategy in Lebanon was to dispatch economic and financial assistance to win Shiite hearts and minds while making certain that its Shiite allies had sufficient military hardware for a potential clash with their rivals. As such, Iran’s presence was more subtle and indirect, and sought to avoid a confrontation with America. Not unlike its approach to Lebanon, Iran today is seeking to mobilize and organize the diverse Shiite forces in Iraq while not necessarily getting entangled in an altercation with the more powerful United States.
It is a truism of international relations that national interests and strategic imperatives define conflicts between nation-states. Too often the composition of domestic political order and ideological inclinations are cast aside for arguments rooted in power politics. The relations between Iran and Iraq contravene this established pattern of analysis. Both states have often clashed over their territorial demarcations, warily eyed the other’s regional ambitions, and toyed with supporting local actors more amenable to their desires. Yet it would be a misreading of history to suggest that Iran and Iraq are destined to be antagonists and that their relations will inevitably be marked by tension and conflict. Prior to the 1958 Iraq revolution, the conservative monarchical regimes that governed the two states forged intimate ties. The changing ideological nature of the two regimes in the succeeding years did much to exacerbate their difficulties. The Shah’s monarchy perceived revolutionary Iraq as a threat not because of its capabilities but because of its radical orientation. In a similar vein, Saddam’s secular state saw Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism as a challenge not because of the power of Iran’s decimated armed forces but because of the lure of its ideals. In this context, all the unresolved territorial issues and disagreements took the shape of more menacing threats. These were no longer disputes that states could resolve, or at least manage, but were seen as indications of an aggressive posture. In due course the ambitions of Saddam and Khomeini, the two states’ conflicting transnational aspirations, and their contending ideologies made a prolonged war inevitable.
As the Bush administration contemplated its invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedies, it is unlikely that it appreciated how its plans would enhance Iran’s stature and security. The Islamic Republic now stands as one of the principal beneficiaries of America’s regime-change policy. However, in assessing the ironies and paradoxes of the Middle East, one need not descend into a zero-sum game, whereby any measure that benefits Iran is necessarily viewed as endangering America’s interests. Much of the tension and instability that has afflicted the critical Persian Gulf region in the past three decades has stemmed from animosity between Iran and Iraq. The contested borders, proxy wars, and finally a devastating eight-year conflict between the two powers not only destabilized the Middle East but threatened the global economy, with its reliance on the region’s petroleum resources. The new Iraq emerging from the shadow of the American invasion will not just be a more humane society than the tyrannical Saddam Hussein regime, it will also be a more peaceful state willing to coexist easily with its Persian neighbor. And that development is not just good for Iran and Iraq, but also the United States.
8
ISRAEL AND
THE POLITICS OF
TERRORISM
On December 8, 2005, on one of his first visits abroad, President Ahmadinejad stunned much of the international community with this statement:
Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces, and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw him in jail. Although we don’t accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: Is the killing of innocent Jews by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe—like in Germany, Austria, or other countries—to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it.1
Ahmadinejad’s statement was quickly condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States. Iran’s reactionary president had managed to unite the leading international actors in denunciation of his beleaguered nation. Despite the disavowals of Iran’s diplomats, Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel statements have long been a mainstay of the theocratic regime’s discourse. A strident opposition to Israel frequently edging toward anti-Semitism has often been invoked from a wide variety of platforms and forums of the Islamic Republic.
As we have seen, during the last two decades Iran has gradually displaced ideological imperatives with national-interest calculations as a guide to its international policy, but this trajectory has not affected its approach to Israel, which still reflects the lingering influence of its revolutionary Islamic heritage. For a generation of Iranian clerics, Israel is an illegitimate entity, usurping sacred Islamic lands in the name of a pernicious ideology: Zionism. Israel is also castigated as an agent of American imperialism, suppressing regional states at the behest of its superpower benefactor. From Tehran’s perspective, opposition to the peace process serves two distinct goals. On the strategic front, any conduct that obstructs the extension of Israel’s influence in the Middle East and polarizes its domestic politics is advantageous to Iran, which fears that the integration of Israel into the region will diminish its own power. On the political front, through an active support for the Palestinian rejectionist groups and Hezbollah, Iran can strengthen its Islamic credentials and highlight its determination to combat “Zionist encroachment.” Unlike many other dimensions of its policy, Iran’s incendiary opposition to Israel has been sustained because it satisfies both its strategic designs and its ideological mandates.
It is Iran’s opposition to the State of Israel that has entangled it in the unsavory world of terrorism. The manner in which Iran expresses its opposition to Israel is to sustain a variety of terrorist organizations plotting against the Jewish state. The irony is that in the past decade, Iran’s terrorism portfolio has gradually contracted, as Tehran no longer supports violent groups in the Persian Gulf or assassinates Iranian dissidents abroad. However, so long as Iran provides subsidies to groups such as Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad it earns its place among the world’s most ardent supporters of terrorism.
As with much in the Islamic Republic, however, debates and dissents are ongoing about the character of Iran’s anti-Israeli policy. The hard-line elements who are devoted to the revolution’s dogma insist on an absolutist opposition, while the more pragmatic factions stress the costs and burdens that such an uncompromising posture has yielded. The theocratic regime is again struggling with the legacy of its founder, and seeking an uneasy balance between its Islamist
convictions and its national commitments.
THE MONARCHICAL PAST
Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s clerical politicians have persistently denounced Israel and question its legitimacy, if not its right to exist. All this may seem curious, because Iran has never fought a war with Israel and has no territorial disputes with the Jewish state. Indeed, throughout the monarchical years, Israel and Iran established constructive relations.
Although the birth of Israel was greeted by a series of Arab-Israeli wars, the predominantly Shiite and Persian state of Iran, with its own history of animosity toward the Sunni Arab powers, viewed the ascendance of a Jewish state as potentially beneficial. Not long after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Pahlavi dynasty cultivated close but informal ties with Jerusalem. A modernizing monarch with pro-American tendencies viewed such relations as natural, since Israel would be a potential repository of technology and a source of political support for a regime seeking better relations with Washington. Nonetheless, as the head of a Muslim nation, the Shah was mindful of his constituents’ sensibilities and was careful to conceal his ties with Israel. Despite subsequent clerical imputations, the Shah continually pressed Israel toward accommodation of the Palestinians, and Iran often voted with the Arab bloc at the United Nations and various other international organizations.
For its part, a beleaguered Israel seeking to consolidate its power welcomed relations with Iran. During the 1950s, the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion formulated his concept of the “outer ring,” which would guide successive generations of Israeli politicians hoping to escape their regional isolation.2 The concept holds that the best way to counteract Israel’s tense and problematic relations with the “inner ring”—the predominantly hostile Arab states surrounding Israel—was for Jerusalem to foster better relations with the non-Arab states (such as Iran and Turkey) at the periphery of the Middle East. This policy might not necessarily relieve the pressure facing Israel, but it would ease its isolation and establish a precedent of forging proper ties with Muslim nations. Under the banner of the outer ring, Israel and Iran developed important and mutually satisfactory relations on issues ranging from economic dealings to security cooperation. Despite all the changes that have occurred during the intervening five decades, and Israel’s peace treaties with the states of Jordan and Egypt, Ben-Gurion’s concept still has a hold on the imagination of some Israeli leaders. Indeed, one reason why Israeli officials continued their arm sales to Iran during the post-revolutionary period was in the hope of maintaining at least some contact with Iran’s military establishment.3
Despite a degree of popular indifference, the Shah’s relations with Israel triggered opposition from two critical sectors, the clerical establishment and the secular intelligentsia. Even before the establishment of the state of Israel, the mullahs had warily eyed the Zionist influx into the Holy Land. The notion of “infidel” transgressions against Islamic lands and the unique status of Jerusalem to the Muslims ensured that the clerical estate looked with apprehension and alarm at the developments in Palestine. As early as the 1940s, the esteemed Ayatollah Muhammad Khorasani established active ties with the emerging Palestinian leadership that was spearheading the resistance to the Zionist enterprise. Ayatollah Abdolqasem Kashani, who would later emerge as a critical player in the 1953 oil nationalization crisis, spent the late 1940s organizing protest marches against the Jewish state. It was in the face of such sustained clerical opposition that the Shah downgraded his ties with Israel in its early days. Indeed, Iran was one of the few states that voted against the 1947 United Nations resolution partitioning Palestine.
A similar antagonism toward Israel would characterize Khomeini’s evolving Islamist ideology. Under the pressures of the clerical hierarchy, Khomeini maintained a level of political silence until the late 1950s, when he finally established himself as one of the leaders of the clerical community. His political emergence was characterized by a determined opposition to Israel, which at times proved indistinguishable from antagonism to Jews in general. During the crisis of 1963, which constituted the first attempt by the religious associations and secular opposition to unify against the monarchy, Khomeini pressed the notion that the Shah was an agent of Zionism, attributing the monarchy’s quest to marginalize the clerical establishment to Jewish machinations. Khomeini insisted that all Iranians “felt repugnance” about Tehran’s ties with Israel.4 In his many speeches, he routinely implored his fellow clerics to remain defiant and often mentioned the danger of “Israel and its agents.”5
During his exile in Iraq, Khomeini continued to express his disdain for the Jewish state and the imaginary forces that sustained its power. In his book Islamic Government, which established the basis for theocratic rule, Khomeini indulged in his own bit of anti-Semitic rhetoric by claiming, “Since its inception, the Islamic movement has been afflicted by the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda.”6 The Jews were depicted as financial hoarders, distorters of the Koran, and imperialist agents. “We must protest and make people aware that the Jews and their foreign masters are opposed to the foundations of Islam,” he implored.7 As with President Ahmadinejad four decades later, Khomeini often failed to differentiate between Judaism and Zionism, and his denunciations of Jews resembled the crass anti-Semitism so prevalant in Arab literature and popular expressions.
Beyond his Islamist objections, as an adroit politician, Khomeini recognized that the younger generation of Iranians attuned to the sermons of the Third World had come to sympathize with the Palestinian cause. Indeed, the gradual transformation of the attitude of Iran’s intelligentsia paved the way for an alliance with the clergy that proved so formidable during the revolution. The Iranian intellectual class was initially fascinated with Israel as a small minority struggled and succeeded against great odds. Israel appeared a country on the move, easily reconciling its religious traditions with democratic norms. It was a modernizing state, establishing a vibrant industrial economy in a region littered with stagnating Arab autocracies. Iranian intellectuals began to make pilgrimages to Israel and wrote approvingly of a pioneering spirit of a minority populace that was defying the regional trends of reaction and backwardness.
As with much in the Middle East, Israel’s resounding defeat of the combined Arab armies in June 1967 changed many popular attitudes, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza proved particularly emotive to the secular opposition. Similarly, the national liberation struggles sweeping the Third World had a great impact on Iran’s intellectual class, and they began to depict the Israeli occupation as another European colonial enterprise. Iran’s famed intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad led the charge by insisting that the West had created Israel “so that the Arabs should forget the real troublemakers in their midst of Israeli troublemaking, the French and American capitalists.”8 Along these lines, Israel was now condemned as a “racist state,” a source of capitalist exploitation, and a colonial beachhead in a critical region of the developing world.
During the 1960s, as Iran’s younger generation began to agitate against an increasingly unaccountable monarchy, Israel, with its intimate ties to the Shah, proved a tantalizing target of denunciation. These charges were not entirely without merit; Israel had not only established collaborative ties with Iran’s armed forces but its intelligence services were instrumental in training the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK. At a time when Israel was receiving approximately 75 percent of its energy requirements from Iran, the nexus between the Jewish state and the repressive monarchy had become all too obvious.
As the revolution gathered strength, hostility to Israel proved an effective means of unifying the differing strands of opposition. The Shah’s dictatorial tendencies and Israel’s harsh occupation policies appeared connected in the imagination of Iran’s revolutionaries. However facile it may seem, many leading opposition figures began to paint a picture of the Shah and Israel as collaborators determined to suppress the har
d-pressed populations of Iran and Palestine. As such, antagonism to the monarchy and opposition to Israel’s occupation were no longer disparate struggles but part of the same seamless narrative.
The triumph of Khomeini and his clerical brethren was inevitably going to alter the dynamics of Iranian-Israeli relations. However, given the manifold problems that the Islamic Republic was confronting, the intensity of its animosity toward Israel came as a surprise to many observers. Contrary to many expectations, the force of revolutionary grievances and Khomeini’s long-honed suspicions ensured that Iran’s militancy would not be confined to mere rhetorical fulmination. The Shah’s subtle and cautious strategic relationship with Israel was now displaced by an Islamist paradigm that viewed Israel as a source of Muslim repression. The struggle against the Jewish state was seen as an affirmation of revolutionary identity and Islamist idealism. It would be difficult for the regime to retreat from a stance that it had elevated to a position of moral obligation.
THE REVOLUTION COMES TO POWER
Iran’s Islamic polity is a contradictory state that has perennially confounded both its allies and critics. Despite periodic lapses and conflicts with the international community, the trajectory of Iran’s foreign policy has been a gradual assertion of national interest imperatives over ideological preferences. Whenever national interest mandates collided with revolutionary pretensions, the Islamic Republic retreated, becoming careful, even judicious. Israel stands as an exception to this norm simply because the typical clash between interests and dogma did not take place. The reality is that the Islamic Republic’s ideologically strident position has often resulted in strategic benefit. Iran’s ardent embrace of the Palestinian cause allowed an isolated Shiite regime to project its influence to the heart of the Arab world and mobilize regional opinion behind its claims. All this is not to suggest that Iran did not pay a price for its conduct, as part of the reason for the imposition of U.S. sanctions and international censure has been Tehran’s dogmatic rejection of Israel. But to Iran’s rulers the price paid seemed justified, given the ideological and strategic advantages that Iran derived from its uncompromising posture.9