Hidden Iran

by Ray Takeyh

  The starting point for any negotiations should be recognition that Iran will wield enormous influence over the future of Iraq, and the challenge for Washington is to work with Tehran to channel that influence in a constructive direction. As it seeks to craft a common agenda based on common interests, Washington ought to learn from the successful model it used to bring order to Afghanistan after displacing the Taliban. There, the United States established an international network that brought in all the regional powers with a stake in that country’s reconstruction. Through such a framework for Iraq, the United States and Iran can engage in productive negotiations and succeed in harmonizing their policies. Iran, for instance, can backstop U.S. efforts at economic reconstruction through its ties to the Iraqi merchant community, particularly in the south, and its own official aid to Baghdad. Moreover, the United States may have boots on the ground, but America’s coercive potential would benefit from being buttressed by Iran’s “soft power.” Iran’s seminaries, clerics, businessmen, and politicians hold powerful sway over elites in Baghdad as well as elsewhere in Iraq. Tehran is in the best position to temper the Shiite community’s secessionist tendencies and rein in recalcitrant actors such as Moqtada al-Sadr. So long as the United States views Iran as a competitor and its influence as fundamentally pernicious, it will be impossible to arrive at such an arrangement. Conversely, should Washington and Tehran join forces rather than compete for power, the two parties can go a long way toward preventing the fragmentation of Iraq and the destabilization of the critical Gulf region.

  By far the most entrenched of Iran’s positions is its opposition to the peace process, an opposition that is often expressed through terrorism. Iran’s antagonism toward Israel is rooted in its revolutionary heritage and buttressed by the strategic benefits that such a policy has garnered. Tehran for a long time perceived the advantages that it gains from such a posture as worth the price in terms of U.S. sanctions and criticism. To change Iran’s policy, Washington must alter that calculus. Should Iran enter a constructive relationship with the United States, then, for the first time, its bellicosity toward Israel will lead to a potential loss of tangible benefits. Indeed, the history of the Islamic Republic denotes that the theocratic regime is prepared to dispense with terrorism once offered sufficient incentives.

  A cursory look at Iran’s international relations reveals that its militancy is not constant; its pragmatic curtailment of terrorism in the Persian Gulf and Europe demonstrates that diplomatic pressure and economic incentives can encourage moderation from the Islamic Republic. The lessons of the experiences of the European and Gulf states are indeed instructive. Long-standing practices of the Islamic Republic were the assassination of dissidents living in Europe and support for opposition forces in the Gulf sheikdoms. These reached their apex in 1992, when Iranian agents assassinated Kurdish leaders in the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin. The 1997 conviction of Iranian officials in a Berlin court led the European Union to promptly withdraw its envoys from Tehran, and Germany imposed trade restrictions on Iran. Given the value of European commercial trade and diplomatic ties, Iran abandoned the practice of targeting exiles abroad, and closed one of the darker chapters in its terrorism portfolio. Similarly, a precondition for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states normalizing relations with Iran was its cessation of support for opposition groups within those countries. Once more, given the strategic and economic value of resumed relations, Iran ceased its interference in the internal affairs of the Gulf states. Both episodes reveal Iran’s susceptibility to targeted diplomatic pressure and economic incentives: states possessing such levers are in a position to influence Iran’s behavior.

  As the United States and Iran attempt to resolve their differences on the issues of nuclear arms and Iraq, a certain negotiating momentum is bound to move Iran away from its opposition to the peace process and its reliance on terrorism. The essence of this diplomacy is to focus on areas of possible agreement, with the two powers gradually transcending their animosities and entering a new stage of relations. Once Washington and Tehran reach that plateau, then it may be possible to arrive at an understanding on the thorny issue of terrorism. Although it is far-fetched to suggest that Iran can be a valuable player in the war on terrorism, a more comprehensive diplomacy can still go a long way toward ensuring that it does not remain the benefactor of such a wide range of terrorist organizations.

  The essence of this new approach is an appreciation that for the foreseeable future the Islamic Republic will remain a problem to be managed. This approach is neither one of containment nor an alliance but a policy of selective partnership on an evolving range of issues. By integrating Iran into the global economy and the regional security dialogue, the United States can foster links that allow cooperation on issues of common concern. America has a stake in the outcome of Iran’s internal struggles, but merely asserting its doctrine of containment and periodically calling for regime change is unlikely to bring about a democratic transition. Conversely, by assimilating Iran into the prevailing order, Washington can do much to undermine the hard-liners who require American belligerence and international isolation to consolidate their power. In the long run, a subtle policy of selective engagement would not only create incentives for Iran to play a responsible role in the region, but also slowly compel its leadership to transcend the ideological traps that have alienated it from large sections of its population.

  In the post–September 11 era, the United States will face not a single global challenge but a series of local contenders for power. Iran is such a contender: a medium-sized power seeking to influence the political trends in its region. The best manner of dealing with such a state is through employment of the full range of diplomatic, political, and economic tools. The United States would be wise to abandon the rhetoric of the early Reagan years and the policies of the Cold War era. In the end, America’s determination to stabilize the Middle East requires a more imaginative approach for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: GETTING IRAN WRONG

  1. www.whitehouse.gov.

  2. Islamic Republic News Agency (hereafter IRNA), February 1, 2006.

  3. Hamid Algar, The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan Press, 1980).

  1. KHOMEINI’S LEGACY

  1. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: The Life of the Ayatollah (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 199–223; Daniel Brumberg, Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 98–120; Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 409–85.

  2. For Khomeini’s important work, see Ruhollah Khomeini, Hukumat-e Islami (Tehran: 1980); Islam and Revolution: The Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan Press, 1981); Kashf al-Asrar (Tehran: 1942); Nashq-e Rowhaniyyat dar Islam (Qom: 1962).

  3. A. Davani, Ayatollah Borujerdi (Tehran: 1993); M. Falsafi, Khaterat va mubarazat-e Hojjat al-Islam Falsafi (Tehran: 1997), 99–120; M. Rezavi, Hashemi va enqelab (Tehran: 1997), 94–100; Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 48–69.

  4. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 91–117; Hamid Dabashi, “Shiite Islam: The Theology of Discontent,” Contemporary Sociology (March 1986); David Menshari, “Shiite Leadership in the Shadow of Conflicting Ideologies,” Iranian Studies (1980); James Bill, “Power and Religion in Contemporary Iran,” Middle East Journal (Winter 1982).

  5. M. Rajabi, Zendegi-ye Siyasi-ye Imam Khomeini (Tehran: 1991), 220–25.

  6. Jalal al-Din Madani, Tarikh-e Siyasi-ye Mo’asser-e Iran (Qom: 1982), vol. 1.

  7. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sahifeh-ye Nur (Teh
ran: 1982), 198.

  8. Alexander Knysh, “Ifran Revisited: Khomeini and the Legacy of Islamic Mystical Philosophy,” Middle East Journal (Fall 1992); Hamid Algar, “Religious Forces in Twentieth Century Iran,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, ed. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly, Charles Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 750–52.

  9. Michael Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 61–104; Said Arjomand, “Shiite Islam and the Revolution in Iran,” Government and Opposition (July 1982); see also “The Ulama’s Traditional Opposition to Parliamentarianism, 1907–1909,” Middle Eastern Studies (April 1981).

  10. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Lexington, Ky.: Mazda Publishers, 1982); Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 52–65; Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96–127; Sepehr Zabih, The Left in Contemporary Iran: Ideology, Organization and the Soviet Connection (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 113–57; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Iran’s Turn to Islam: From Modernism to a Moral Order,” Middle East Journal (Spring 1987); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 3–47; Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mujahedin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 81–105.

  11. Moin, Khomeini: The Life of the Ayatollah, 66.

  12. Ali Shariati, Islamshenasi, collected works, nos. 16–18 (Tehran: 1981); see also Shariati’s Jahat giri-ye tabaqati-ye Islam (Tehran: 1980) and Khudsazi-ye Enqelabi (Tehran: 1977). For important works on Shariati, see Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Hamid Dabashi, “Ali Shariati’s Islam: Revolutionary Uses of Faith in Post-Traditional Society,” Islamic Quarterly 27 (1983); Mansoor Moaddel, Class, Politics and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 130–54.

  13. Ruhollah Khomeini, Velayat-e Faqih (Tehran: 1978), 28.

  14. Khomeini, Sahifeh-ye Nur (Tehran: 1982), 517.

  15. Ibid., 120.

  16. Khomeini, Hamid Algar, trans., Islam and Revolution, 180–81.

  17. For the 1963 crisis, see Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between the Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 473–95; Hamid Algar, “Imam Khomeini, 1902–1962,” in Islam, Politics and Social Movements, ed. Edmund Burk and Ira Lapidus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 263–88; see also Algar, “The Oppositional Role of the Ulama in Twentieth Century Iran,” in Scholars, Saints and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500, ed. Nikki R. Keddie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 231–55; Ehsan Tabari, “The Role of Clergy in Modern Iranian Politics,” in Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi’ism from Quietism to Revolution, ed. Nikki R. Keddie (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 47–72.

  18. Moin, Khomeini: The Life of Ayatollah, 122–26.

  19. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sukhanraniha-ye Imam Khomeini dar Shish Mahe-ye Avval (Tehran: 1980).

  20. Rouhollah Ramazani, “Khumayni’s Islam in Iran’s Foreign Policy,” in Islam in Foreign Policy, ed. Adeed Dawisha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 9–32.

  21. Ruhollah Khomeini, Kashf-e Asrar (Tehran: 1943), 45.

  22. Ibid., 67.

  23. Keyhan, March 21, 1980.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Keyhan, March 24, 1980.

  26. Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 52–71; Abrahamian, Iran between the Two Revolutions.

  27. Asghar Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic, trans. John O’Kane (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 22–33; The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan Press, 1980).

  28. Ettela’at, May 24, 1979.

  29. For new studies on the hostage crisis, see David Harris, The Crisis: The President, the Prophet and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam (New York: Little, Brown, 2004); David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), 141–81. For Iran’s perspective, see Massoumeh Ebtekar, Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 Embassy Capture (Burnaby, B.C: Talenbooks, 2000).

  30. Keyhan, December 5, 1979.

  31. Tehran Domestic Broadcast Services, November 5, 1979.

  32. Ettela’at, November 8, 1979.

  33. Ali Hussein Montazeri, Khaterat (Los Angeles: 2000), 201–9; Ali Khamenei, Didgaha (Qom: 1983), 143–69.

  34. New York Times, November 21, 1981; “An Interview with Muhammad Musavi-Khoeniha,” www.emrouz.com, October 31, 2005.

  35. Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khutbaha-ye Jum’eh (Tehran: 1982), 167.

  36. Tehran Persian Broadcast, September 22, 1980.

  37. Quoted in Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 146.

  38. Quoted in Daniel Brumberg, Reinventing Khomeini, 115.

  2. CONSERVATIVES, PRAGMATISTS, AND REFORMERS

  1. For a particularly incisive view of Khamenei, see Christopher de Bellaigue, “The Loneliness of the Supreme Leader,” New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003; Dilip Hiro, The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 85–113.

  2. For a detailed study of this relationship, see Saskia Gieling, “The Marja’iyaya in Iran and the Nomination of Khamenei in December 1994,” Middle Eastern Studies (October 1997); Mehrad Haghayeghi, “Politics and Ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Middle Eastern Studies (January 1993), 36–40.

  3. For an incisive study on the emergence of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, see Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr, “The Conservative Consolidation in Iran,” Survival (Summer 2005).

  4. For a profile of Ahmadinejad, see Christopher de Bellaigue, “New Man in Iran,” New York Review of Books, August 11, 2005.

  5. International Crisis Group, “Iran: What Does Ahmadi-Nejad’s Victory Mean?” (August 2005).

  6. BBC Monitoring Service, April 21, 2001.

  7. IRNA, September 2, 2002.

  8. BBC Monitoring Service, October 25, 2002.

  9. Associated Press, June 21, 2001.

  10. Khotut (1994), 316.

  11. Sobh (February–March, 1996).

  12. For valuable studies on this period, see Bahman Baktiari, Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran: The Institutionalization of Factional Politics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Ali Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy: Politics of Managing Change (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000), 52–110; Anoushiravan Ehteshami, After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic (London: Routledge, 1995); David Menashri, Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society, and Power (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 13–78; Assef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movement in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Mansoor Moaddel, Class and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 199–255.

  13. Hamshahri, February 27, 1996.

  14. Iran News, February 9, 1993.

  15. Middle East Economic Digest, June 14, 1991.

  16. Ettela’at, November 6, 1991.

  17. For good overviews of Iran’s democratic struggles, see Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr, “Iran’s Democracy Debate,” Middle East Policy (Summer 2004); Richard Bulliet, “Twenty Years of Islamic Politics,” Middle East Journal (Spring 1999).

  18. IRNA, April 21, 1997.

  19. IRNA, July 21, 2005.

  20. Mehran Kamrava, “The Civil Society Discourse in Iran,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (November 2001); Farhang Rajaee, “A Thermidor of ‘Islamic Yuppies’? Conflict and Com
promise in Iran’s Politics,” Middle East Journal (Spring 1999).

  21. Daniel Brumberg, “Is Iran Democratizing?” Journal of Democracy (October 2000); see also his “Dissonant Politics in Iran and Indonesia,” Political Science Quarterly (Fall 2001).

  22. Robin Wright, The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran (New York: Random House, 2001), 40.

  23. Abdol-Karim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 88–131.

  24. Abdol-Karim Soroush, Modara va Modiriat (Tehran: 1997), 350–65.

  25. See Mohsen Kadivar, Nazari-ye-ha-ye dowlat dar fiqh-e Shi’eh (Tehran: 1999) and Hokumat-e Valiye (Tehran: 2000).

  26. Daily Star, July 4, 2003; see also Geneive Abdo, “Rethinking the Islamic Republic: A Conversation with Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri,” Middle East Journal (Winter 2001).

  27. Nowruz, July 10, 2002.

  28. Olivier Roy, “The Crisis of Religious Legitimacy in Iran,” Middle East Journal (Spring 1999).

  29. Salam, March 17, 1992.

  30. Salam, February 8, 1996.

  31. For incisive journalistic accounts of this period, see Wright, The Last Great Revolution, 188–289; Elaine Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (New York: Free Press, 2000); Geneive Abdo and Jonathan Lyons, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-first-Century Iran (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 131–258.

  32. Shireen Hunter, “Is Iranian Perestroika Possible without Fundamental Change?” Washington Quarterly (Autumn 1998); Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr, “Iran’s Democracy Debate,” Middle East Policy (Summer 2004).

  33. Resalat, February 8, 1998.

  34. Jame’eh, June 3, 1998.

  35. Agence France-Presse (hereafter AFP), June 4, 2003.