Bravado, posturing and gnashing of teeth have long characterized US-Iranian relations. For almost thirty years, and in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution which brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his small coterie of disciples to power there has been a string of events that have gone to ensure the bad-blood and rancor between these erstwhile allies has continued unabated. Prior to the revolution, Iranians resented the US for the CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup d’etat of 1953 which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq and later US support for the dictatorship of the Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi.
Since the revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, US support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s alleged involvement in the 1983 Beirut US Embassy and barracks bombings, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Iran Air Flight 655, have ensued and only gone to sour relations and entrench mutual hostility further. The US-led invasion of Iraq moreover, has opened up a whole other dimension to what many have likened to an ongoing war of attrition, replete with all the necessary accoutrements: mutual vilification and unrelenting of rhetoric.
The title of William O. Beeman’s recent book The Great Satan Vs the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other is more than apposite given the episodic tirades emanating from both Washington and Tehran, each with its own sense of righteous indignation, railing against the evils committed by the other. There was a period of relative calm, however. With the election of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, a modus vivendi however distant and obscure became a distinct possibility. Perhaps fearing Iran would be next on the Bush Administration’s hit-list after an unparalleled display of military strength, which eviscerated Saddam Hussein’s crumbling regime in a matter of weeks, Khatami’s government made the offer of a ‘grand bargain’ in which everything was on the table; from Iran’s nuclear program, to recognition of Israel and the cessation of support, financial and otherwise to Lebanese and Palestinian militants.
Whether the offer was the result of benevolence or fear is really beside the point – what it does show is that the Iranian government is ultimately rational in an instrumental sense, and foremost interested in procuring its survival. This instrumentalist behavior has remained in evidence even since the election of the markedly more hard-line president in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been castigated on more than one occasion by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei who ultimately holds all the cards and the keys to every door.
The Jacobin period of the Islamic Revolution has subsided, even if it continues to rear its ugly head on occasion, and some time ago entered its Thermadorian phase where far more worldly interests act as the prime motivators governing the regime’s behavior. The regime’s old-guard is far more akin to the Soviet Politburo whose political machinations were strictly motivated by Realpolitik and often underwritten by jaded cynicism and whose foremost objectives were self-preservation and regional self-aggrandizement. The Islamic Republic corresponds well to such a paradigm and can hardly be called an exception in this regard. The infamous chant of ‘Death to America’ is but a stale nod to official ideology and rings hollow amongst the vast majority of Iranians, especially those born in the baby boom post-1979, and whom can be counted amongst the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. Ahamadinejad’s inflammatory and arguably anti-Semitic rhetoric has of course fanned the flames of controversy and in its shortsightedness acted as a boon for those elements in Washington, most notably Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office whose activities are about as obscure and elusive as Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, where only the vestiges of a menacing grimace remain. They know full-well that an enemy who bares his teeth can be exploited to brilliant effect and whose bearded visage can ably perform the role of ‘imminent threat’ personified, striking fear into the heart of the American and European publics.
While the reformists were at the helm the conventional wisdom held that the Iranian president was merely a figurehead, and thus the creature of subterranean forces at work within the Islamic Republic. The election in August 2005 of a little-known firebrand in the form of Ahmadinejad claiming to represent Iran’s disenfranchised and destitute underclass with all of the appropriate demagogic trimmings has led to the Iranian president’s transformation by these selfsame politicians and pundits into a Hitlerian incarnation with a raging desire to inaugurate WWIII.[i]
While Khatami was cast as a pathetic stooge incapable of making any impact upon the dogmatic values of the Islamic Republic, Ahamadi-Nejad, we are told, has his finger on the button and is itching to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return by means of nuclear Armageddon. The Orientalist and neoconservative ally, Bernard Lewis, in an article written for the Wall Street Journal, even cooked up the bizarre theory that Ahmadinejad would launch Iran’s nuclear weapons on August 22 2006 so as to coincide with the prophet Mohammad’s ascension from the Dome of the Rock! The tactic employed here is very simple and extremely effective. By imposing on your enemy the category of the ‘irrational’ as opposed to the ‘rational’, negotiation and diplomacy necessarily emerge as futile and thereby precluded a priori.
If a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is unable to deter the Iranian government the only available option is preemption by means of military force. The result is Bush’s refrain ‘that no option is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with Iran, even if that means a ‘tactical’ nuclear strike. We are admonished further that force is the only language ‘these kinds of people’ understand.
Lewis and dilettantes such as the British novelist Martin Amis and neoconservatives such as Michael Leeden and David Frum in their efforts to snuff out the path of diplomacy have endeavored to cast Iran beyond the pale of rational debate. Not surprisingly, it was Frum who was responsible for the subsumption of Iran, Iraq and North Korea under the banner of ‘an axis of evil’ in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address.
The reality is slightly more nuanced however. Not only has there been no hard-evidence that Iran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program [i], there is the additional caveat that even if the regime were in possession of a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian president, who unlike the US president, isn’t commander-in-chief of the armed forces and so cannot launch any kind of military attack without the Supreme Leader’s authorization.
Another point that is often purposely overlooked is that Ahmadinejad is ultimately elected and thus not a permanent fixture of the Iranian political scene. Whatever the limitations and gaping flaws of Iran’s few democratic processes, the Iranian president can be removed electorally. Ahmadinejad was himself an underdog and few if any foresaw his electoral victory. Those who abstained from the last Iranian presidential elections out of disillusionment at the failure of Khatami’s government to change the status quo in 2009 may well kick Ahmadinejad out of power and back into the obscurity from whence he came. Even his core-constituency to whom he had promised to uproot corruption and alleviate poverty have been left out in the cold and rightly resent the current president for promises he hasn’t kept.
The release in December 2007 of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in which all sixteen US intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Iran had ceased its efforts to build a nuclear weapon back in 2003, came to the relief of many and it was subsequently argued by a slew of commentators that the NIE would provide Iran with some much needed breathing room; putting a damper on any plans for an imminent US strike against Iran.
Unlike Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a treaty which guarantees ‘the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination’.[ii] Iran, however, has refused to halt its nuclear enrichment program and as a consequence elicited three rounds of sanctions. The most recent set embodied in UNSC Resolution 1803 extends beyond Iran’s nuclear program, and calls for vigilance regarding Iranian financial institutions.
The impact of existing sanctions is already being felt in Iran, making it ever more difficult for Ahmadinejad to hitch his wagon to the nationalist star. Every time it is invoked its emotive force is assuaged and it is likely if things continue in this manner Iranians will elect a more pragmatic leader in the 2009 presidential elections, even though they are fully within their rights as delineated in the NPT to domestically enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran’s abysmal human rights record and suffocation of personal freedoms guarantees, moreover that the manipulation of nationalist sentiment will only have a limited shelf life. If the Bush Administration is preparing the ground for regime change in Tehran as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has argued, it seems to be running in tandem with the ongoing commitment to isolate Iran economically and politically by means of UN sanctions.
Professor Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, like Hersh affirms the possibility of a US strike against Iranian nuclear targets and Revolutionary Guard bases at the end of Bush’s second term. An attack, he says, ‘continues to remain very much alive – particularly in this US election year when the possibility of an ‘October surprise’ is always there…the Republican president might do something to prolong the state of war and make it easier for Senator McCain to have an upper hand in the November election’.[iii]
A disinformation campaign has been waged in the face of the American public’s skepticism as to the merits of an attack against Iran,[iv] in order to reframe the US’s ‘issues’ with the Islamic Republic from one of counter-proliferation to counter-terrorism.[v] After the Bush Administration’s clear manipulation of intelligence in pursuit of a political agenda in the run up the US-led invasion of Iraq, the American public and world at large are no longer willing to take US intelligence claims at face value.
To this end, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been placed on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and been accused of instigating sectarian violence in Iraq and supplying ‘explosively formed perpetrators’ (EFP) responsible for killing Coalition soldiers. To what degree they are involved however, remains nebulous, especially since it is in the Islamic Republic’s interests to have an empowered Shia majority heading the present Iraqi government.
This was most recently highlighted by Ahmadinejad’s two-day state visit to Iraq earlier this month during which Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maleki greeted the Iranian president with brimming smiles and much pomp. Iran has a vested interest in seeing the present Iraqi government succeed and is unlikely to throw in their lot with the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose view of Iran is itself shot through with skepticism and secondary to the causes of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, which he skillfully manages to blend with a radical brand of Shi’ism. Middle East expert and editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Alain Gresh, has further written that US commandos have been active in Iran since 2004 and that the US has substantially increased aid to Kurdish, Arab, Azeri and Baluchi minorities in an bid to destabilize the country.
Although Iran is not by any definition a ‘new state,’ and possesses a fairly cohesive national identity, consolidated in the course of Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic’s rule, given the right combination and concatenation of causes and effects, its territorial integrity is far from impervious to the exploitation of age-old ethnic and tribal loyalties, which have been systematically suppressed since the rise to power of Reza Pahlavi Shah in the 1920s. The vertiginous balancing act of forestalling Iraq’s total disintegration is a telling example of where such tactics can lead. US secret assistance, flirtation and unabashed support to groups such as the Baluchi Jund al-Islam, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party in conjunction with a wide-ranging aerial strike could make for a dangerous cocktail with potentially devastating consequences for the Iranian people; consequences that would almost certainly spread to Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, engulfing the region as a whole with catastrophic results.[vi]
NOTES
[i] The Politics of Non-Proliferation, Mohammad Kamaali, Iranian.com, 7/3/2008.
[ii] Article IV, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, International Atomic Energy Agency, INFCIRC/140, 22 April 1970
[iii] Correspondence with the author, 6/3/2008
[iv] For a thorough account of this disinformation campaign see, Iran: A Chronology of Disinformation, Gary Leupp, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, February 17/18, 2007
[v] Shifting Targets, Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, October 8, 2007
[vi] The Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party’s sister organization, the Kurdish Workers’ Party are both listed by the State Department as terrorist organizations.
©Eskandar Sadeghi
