The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1 - The World’s Number-One Power

  Chapter 2 - The Haven of Jihad

  Chapter 3 - The Focus of the Universe

  Chapter 4 - The Triple Oxymoron

  Chapter 5 - Democracy as Enemy

  Chapter 6 - Iran and Anti-Iran

  Chapter 7 - Unwelcome Faith

  Chapter 8 - A Strange Beast

  Chapter 9 - The Feeble Ones

  Chapter 10 - The Prophet and Women

  Chapter 11 - The Eternal Conspirator

  Chapter 12 - Esther and the King

  Chapter 13 - The Great Satan

  Chapter 14 - Five Days in August

  Chapter 15 - A Universal Ideology

  Chapter 16 - Sunrise Power against Sunset Power

  Chapter 17 - Crazy Eddie and Martyr Hussein

  Chapter 18 - West Stricken, Arab Stricken

  Chapter 19 - State or Revolution

  Chapter 20 - Six Centers of Power

  Chapter 21 - Six Rival Centers of Power

  Chapter 22 - Power Points in a No-Man’s Land

  Chapter 23 - The “Nail” of the Imam

  Chapter 24 - We Can!

  Chapter 25 - A Case of National Schizophrenia

  Chapter 26 - Pre-emptive War or Pre-emptive Surrender?

  Chapter 27 - Conditions for Regime Change

  Chapter 28 - Repression and Resistance

  Chapter 29 - The Ethnic Time Bomb

  Chapter 30 - A Heaving Volcano

  Afterword to the Paperback Edition

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Praise for The Persian Night

  “The Persian Night is an extraordinary document filled with original ideas and interesting commentary. Yet another tour de force by the most knowledgeable analyst of Middle East politics.”

  —Dr. Herbert London

  President, Hudson Institute

  “Written in sorrow rather than anger, The Persian Night clearly and calmly describes Iran’s descent into unreality. It is a masterwork of information and argument.”

  —David Pryce-Jones

  National Review

  “In the overdue and necessary departure from diplomatic clichés, Amir Taheri’s many-layered exposition of the origins, goals and nature of a messianic regime that he convincingly dismisses as ‘neither Islamic, nor republican, and . . . certainly not Iranian’ is an indispensable guide.”

  —Rosemary Righter

  Times Online

  “A brilliant journalist, Taheri, who has published ten other books on Islam, Iran and the Middle East, shows with his eleventh book that he is also a master of strategy and one of the most original thinkers about international politics today.”

  —Elaph Online

  “For all its seriousness as a political study, The Persian Night is an enjoyable book written in a witty and easily accessible style. . . . This year, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Khomeinist seizure of power in Tehran, has inspired dozens of books on Iran and its recent experience. Taheri’s book is by far one of the best both in scope and in style. A must read for all those interested in Iran, the Middle East, Islam and international politics.”

  —Tim Connell

  Asharq Alawsat

  “Taheri’s Persian Night presents the true nature of the regime in Tehran, its motives, objectives and beliefs.”

  —James S. Robbins

  New York Post

  “Amir Taheri’s new book reshapes the debate on the Iranian problem.”

  —Andrea Keane

  Iran va Jahan

  “Mr. Taheri explores in detail the historical, cultural, social and political roots of the Islamic Republic and the threat that he claims it poses to the West. . . . He raises important questions over how to accommodate a regime that openly expresses its wish to see the end of Israel and remove all Western influence from the region.”

  —The Economist

  “Amir Taheri explains powerfully in The Persian Night that there is no real solution to the problem the regime presents except its collapse.”

  —Commentary

  “A fascinating book.”

  —Hugh Hewitt

  Look at our times: A handful of impostor-clerics,

  Having learned a couple of suras for deceit,

  Having no notion of reason and science;

  Unaware of what man is about;

  Desperate like asses in search of fodder.

  All they care about is eating and fornicating.

  They fear not God, have no shame of men,

  They have cast aside notions of honor.

  They seek nothing but loot and plunder,

  Alien they are to the rules of faith.

  O, Unique Prophet of God!

  For the sake of your ummah,

  for the sake of Allah,

  Rise from your garden tomb in Medina,

  Behold who is ruling your followers.

  O, Muslims! The time has come,

  To send the Koran back to Heaven.

  For, although its name is still with us,

  Its content has come to naught.

  Sanai Ghaznavi

  Preface

  In Persian mythology, the fall of Jamshid, the shah of the Pishdadi dynasty, heralded the longest night in the history of the world. During that fateful night, a priest-king of Arab origin named Azidhak (Zahhak) ruled Iran on behalf of Angarmainu, the symbol of the devil for ancient Persians. Many Iranians see the Khomeinist revolution of 1979 and the regime it produced as a real-time recurrence of the legend, but hope that this new “longest night” will prove shorter.

  This essay will examine the inner history of the Khomeinist movement and trace its ideological and cultural roots. Is it a natural offshoot of Islam—which itself was an alien faith imposed on Iranians by the sword fourteen centuries ago—or a strange beast in Islamic dress?

  In recent years, especially since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, the Islamic Republic has positioned itself as the leader of a global jihad against the so-called “infidel” camp led by the United States. The low-intensity war that Khomeinism launched against the United States in 1979 has been propelled into a new phase that could lead to full-scale military confrontation. This essay shows how Khomeinism is genetically programmed for war, but also considers how it can best be resisted and ultimately defeated, so that Iran may close the chapter of revolution and return to the global mainstream as a nation-state.

  1

  The World’s Number-One Power

  Shaking his clenched fist defiantly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Islamic Republic in Iran looked as if he had a historic message to deliver during one of his trademark provincial tours in April 2008. “Today,” he said, “everyone knows that the Islamic Republic is the number-one power in the world. We are standing up to the American Great Satan and we are not alone.” His audience of grim-faced men with ferocious beards and women covered in forbidding hijabs roared in approval.

  A few weeks earlier, in February, Ahmadinejad had inaugurated an international conference titled “The World Without America!,” attended by dozens of anti-American radicals from all over the world. Two months later, in an address marking the nineteenth anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ahmadinejad blamed the United States for “the ills of mankind,” notably the creation of Israel, and predicted the imminent demise of both. “You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has sixty years of
plundering, aggression and crimes in its file, has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene,” he said. “As for the satanic power [the United States], the countdown to the destruction of its empire of power and wealth has begun.”

  Ahmadinejad and his foreign minister, Manuchehr Mottaki, routinely define their policy as one intended to create “a world without America.” The aim of the Khomeinist regime is to dictate the policies of the United States and of all other nations. As the many versions of anti-Americanism go, this is certainly an innovative one.

  To be sure, Ahmadinejad did not invent the militant anti-Americanism that he adopted as the key theme of his presidency. nor was the claim that the United States was at war against Islam something new to Ahmadinejad’s audiences; he was harping on a theme they had known for almost three decades. The Islamic Republic had been at war against the “Great Satan” since november 4, 1979, when a group of “students” stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two of its diplomats hostage for 444 days. President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called it “an act of war.” The Carter administration, however, did not adopt that analysis, but tried, in a strange fit of denial, to portray the event as merely a diplomatic incident.

  Carter saw Khomeini as a religious man rather than the founding father of Islamist terrorism. In a letter to Khomeini, he wrote as “one man of God to another.” Carter’s advisors mostly shared his illusions. His ambassador to the United nations, Andrew Young, hailed Khomeini as a “twentieth-century saint.” The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, saw Khomeini as a “Gandhi-like figure.” They were deaf to the cries of “Death to America!” that reverberated in Tehran, and they ignored daily calls by Khomeini to wage war against the United States. With a few honorable exceptions, American policymakers have perpetuated that denial to this day.

  now in its third decade, this is a strange war. It has no easily recognizable fronts, nor is it fought with regular armies in set battles that military experts could analyze. It is not a cold war either, for the two sides on occasion have heated things up. In 1982 and 1983, suicide-commandos recruited, trained, and armed by Tehran had attacked the U.S. embassy and a U.S. Marines’ dormitory in Beirut, killing almost 300 people, including 241 American soldiers. In April 1987, a U.S. naval task force in the Persian Gulf engaged the Islamic Republic’s navy and sank its principal ships in a twelve-hour battle. Tehran has pursued a low-intensity war against the United States and its allies in more than a dozen countries, from Argentina to Pakistan, killing or kidnapping scores of Americans and citizens of countries allied to the United States.

  In 2006, American authorities started to point the finger at Tehran as the source of funding and arms for a wide range of insurgent groups fighting the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. In 2007, the United States formally held Tehran responsible for the death of at least 157 American soldiers in Iraq. In 2008, General David Petraeus, the U.S. central commander in Iraq, left no doubt that the Islamic Republic was now at war against the United States in the Iraqi theater; it had become clear in March and April that Iran’s special units, known as the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, were involved in attempts by Shiite militias to control several Iraqi cities, notably Basra.1 The U.S. media presented General Qassem Suleymani, commander of the Quds Force, as “the most powerful man in Iraq today.” He was the man orchestrating the Islamic Republic’s efforts to prepare for seizing control of Iraq if and when, under a new president, the United States decided to cut and run. In a report to the Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stated that Tehran had contacts with al-Qaeda and that helping the Taliban in Afghanistan was “the official policy” of the Islamic Republic.

  The phrase “We are at war with the United States” had been established as a mantra of the Islamic Republic even before the mullahs led by Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini took power in Tehran in February 1979, and every president of the Islamic Republic has repeated it as a principle of the Khomeinist revolution. Khomeini saw the United States and the Soviet Union as modern versions of the Byzantine and Persian empires of the seventh century A.D., when Prophet Muhammad launched his message of Islam.

  Muhammad wrote to Emperor Heraclius of Byzantium; to negus, the monarch of Abyssinia; and to Persia’s King of Kings, Khosrow Parviz, inviting them to submit to Islam. The Prophet’s offer was simple: Convert to Islam and secure a place in paradise—or cling to your beliefs and face the sword of Islam. The Persian king ordered his security services to find the “insolent letter writer” and bring him to the court in Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Empire at the time. According to Islamic folklore, Muhammad escaped capture only because Khosrow Parviz was murdered by his son and designated heir Qobad, a sure sign that Allah was angered by the impudence of the Persian monarch. Within a decade the Persian Empire had disintegrated, with most of its territory falling to the armies of Islam. The Byzantine emperor and the Abyssinian monarch, on the other hand, replied to Muhammad in brief but polite terms. According to Islamic folklore, this is why Byzantium managed to prolong its life by several centuries, while Abyssinia escaped Muslim conquest altogether.

  The tradition of writing letters calling on non-Muslims to convert expanded under Ali Ibn Abi-Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law and the fourth caliph. Muhammad Ibn Hassan, the last of the twelve imams of Shiism, known as the “Hidden Imam” (whose return Ahmadinejad regards as imminent), also used letters to communicate with the outside world, though he addressed most of his epistles to Muslims in general and his partisans in particular. But as tradition demanded, he was unwilling to settle for anything less than the full and unconditional conversion of all humanity to his version of the faith.

  Khomeini saw himself as a second Muhammad, given the mission by Allah to revive a moribund Islam. Some of his devotees granted him an even more exalted status. The poet Mehrdad Avesta praised Khomeini as a “celestial being” representing all the prophets that God has ever sent to mankind, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. According to the poet, angels, having observed Khomeini’s ability to shed blood, bowed and prayed to him. Inspired by the “Example of the Prophet” (Sirat al-Nabi), Khomeini invited the “emperors” of the United States and the Soviet Union to submit or face the rage of “the only true faith.” In 1987, he actually wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev inviting him to convert to Islam. The Soviet leader politely declined.

  Two decades later, Ahmadinejad wrote to the U.S. president, George W Bush, and to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, reprising the invitation to submit to Islam. His letter contained a crucial message: The regime in Iran is the enemy of the international system and is determined to weaken and destroy it. Western commentators had dismissed Khomeini’s letter to Gorbachev as another sign of the ayatollah’s senility. They also mocked Ahmadinejad’s epistolary exercise as the product of a fifty-year-old teenager’s folie de grandeur. That, however, was a misreading of an Islamist’s mind. Ahmadinejad believes that the Hidden Imam is about to return and that the Islamic Republic is obliged to provoke a “clash of civilizations” in order to hasten that event. He also believes, as he asserts in his letter, that the liberal-democratic model of market-based capitalist societies has failed and is being rejected even in its Western homeland.

  When the Soviet empire collapsed in 1991, two years after Khomeini’s death, his successors viewed this as a sign that Allah was delivering on his promise of making Muslims the masters of the world. Exaggerating the importance of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, where U.S.-backed Islamic warriors (mujahedin) seemed on the verge of winning against the Communist regime in Kabul, the mullahs saw these events as a victory by Islam over the infidels. “The next target,” promised Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, one of Khomeini’s closest associates, “is the American Great Satan.”

  The Iranian mullahs, in fact, had played no role in hastening the fall of the USSR. The Islamic Republic had maintained full diplomatic relations with the Soviet-bac
ked regime in Kabul and prevented the Afghan mujahedin from using Iranian territory as an operational base or safe haven. The Sunni Muslim groups that had actually fought the Soviets in Afghanistan—with support from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—mocked Shiite Iran’s victory claim and saw the fall of the Soviet Union as a triumph for their own brand of Islam. They, too, regarded the United States as the next target for destruction, as they spelled out at the Popular Arab Islamic Conference held in Khartoum in 1993.2

  The gathering at the Sudanese capital, presided over by Hassan al-Turabi—the “sheikh” of Sunni radicalism to his friends and the “Pope of Islamist terror” to his enemies—marked a major point in the history of Islam’s ambitions for global conquest. For the first time it brought together Sunni and Shiite leaders in a common strategy to take on, humble, and ultimately defeat the leading “empire of the infidel,” the United States of America. The unity shown in Khartoum was a contrast with the disunity that Muslim powers had shown throughout the Crusades, when rival Sunni and Shiite rulers had at times allied themselves with the Crusaders against other Muslim rulers. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Islamists of all persuasions saw their brand of Islam as the alternative to the global democratic-capitalist system represented and defended by the United States.