The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  While Islamists believed they were at war with the Great Satan, the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations pretended not to notice. In the French proverb, the animal defends itself when attacked.3 The United States, however, often preferred to turn the other cheek or run for cover. After the murder of 241 Marines in their sleep in 1982, for instance, President Ronald Reagan withdrew the U.S. task force from Lebanon, despite the fact that it had been sent under a United nations Security Council mandate and at the invitation of the Lebanese government to protect the Palestinians.4 Even when a small group of Sunni ghazis (raiders in religious wars) attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in new York in 1993, killing seven people and injuring almost a thousand others, Washington refused to recognize the event for what it was: an act of war. In 1996, it was Shiite ghazis who attacked a U.S. target in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen American servicemen. Again the U.S. administration chose to sweep the incident under the carpet and even tried to appease Tehran with the offer of a “grand bargain” a few months later.5

  In Khartoum, Turabi had emphasized the importance for jihadi Islam of winning control over at least one major oil-exporting Muslim nation. The war to bring the Great Satan to its knees was bound to be long and would require the resources of the state. After all, Islam’s early conquests had been made possible by Muhammad’s success in controlling the only viable state in Arabia at the time, Mecca—the hub of international trade between the Indian subcontinent, Persia, and Byzantium. Osama bin Laden, a native of Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of crude oil, was assigned the task of capturing control of the kingdom for jihad. The jihadists from Tehran did not face such a problem. They already controlled the resources of a major, indeed potentially the most powerful, Muslim nation. And they were determined to use the resources of Iran in the service of a global campaign against the “enemies of Islam,” especially the United States.

  2

  The Haven of Jihad

  Since the 9/11 tragedy, much has been written about “neo-terrorism,” described as transnational and supposedly having no need of support from the classical structures of a state. nevertheless, terrorists are not ethereal beings operating beyond the confines of physical reality. They need populations from which to recruit, bases of operation, and safe havens. More importantly, they also need a point of reference, a source of inspiration, an ideological home.

  The Vatican may be the world’s tiniest state, but it is the beacon of light for hundreds of millions of Catholics. Constantinople, though reduced to the position of an infidel outpost on the edge of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, was nevertheless the “Second Rome” for vast numbers of Christians in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, until its fall in 1453. While the Soviet Union was not in direct contact with all Marxist-Leninist groups throughout the world (some of which hated it and fought against it), to hard-left groups everywhere it was living proof that socialism works, even if imperfectly. The ramshackle administration created by the Taliban in Afghanistan was not much of a state by any standards, yet it was enough to satisfy the needs of many jihadi groups between 1997 and 2001. As a state, Iraq under Saddam Hussein likewise provided most of the services that some Islamist terror groups required, minus ideological inspiration.

  With the fall of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, Islamist radicals lost two of the states they relied upon in their jihad. In a sense, they have also lost Sudan, the original host of the jihadi congress. The generals who dominate the regime in Khartoum have scripted out Hassan al-Turabi, who led the gathering in 1993, and replaced his policy of “permanent revolution” with that of “Islamism in one country”—a choice encouraged by Canadian and Chinese companies that have discovered substantial reserves of oil in Sudan. General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s “strongman,” sees Saudi Arabia as a model Islamist state, oil-rich and posing no challenge to the United States or its allies. Syria, also on the U.S. government’s list of “state sponsors of international terrorism,” could provide all the support that jihadi groups require, and it does so to some extent with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. It falls short on one crucial point, however: because the regime is secular and the country is dominated by a heterodox sect that most Muslims regard as heretical, Syria cannot supply the vital element of ideological inspiration. Moreover, it supports terrorist groups only when their activities serve its own interests as a state with limited regional ambitions. The Syrian regime does not, indeed cannot, permit itself the luxury of dreaming of world conquest. Syria is too small, too poor, and too unsure of itself to seek a fight in the premier league. All this leaves a gap that only the Islamic Republic in Iran could pretend to fill, at least in part.

  At the level of individuals and groups acting on their own, terrorism could be treated as a type of criminal activity. When sponsored by a state and used as a weapon in a low-intensity conflict and asymmetric war against other states, terrorism must be seen as a form of war and treated accordingly.

  One factor sets the Islamic Republic as a sponsor of international terrorism apart from other regimes on the State Department’s blacklist, such as Syria, Cuba, and north Korea. Those three regimes view politics through the classical concept of choosing between friend and enemy. They regard the United States as a hostile power to be resisted and fought, at least for the time being, but do not seek to destroy it or force its citizens to adopt their own values and way of life down to the last detail. By contrast, the Islamic Republic in Iran is a messianic power dedicated to spreading the “the only true faith” to every corner of the globe. It regards the United States not as a mere enemy, a political term, but as a foe, a word with religious overtones. With an enemy, one could negotiate a ceasefire, even a limited peace. With a foe, there can be neither peace nor ceasefire.1 The ultimate goal cannot be limited to exacting concessions—though this could be a tactical objective—or even defeating it in battle; the foe must be forced to transform itself into a friend, or else be extinguished. In Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, and other places where anti-Americanism is encouraged by the state, the slogan is “Down with America” or “Yankee Go Home.” In the Islamic Republic in Iran, the slogan is “Death to America!” Invented by Khomeini in 1979, the phrase has accumulated a religious charge beyond its original political purpose.2 Three decades later, the Islamic Republic has once again put that old slogan at the center of its global strategy.

  The present leadership in Tehran, a mixture of mullahs and soldiers, is persuaded that it has inherited the mantle of the Soviet Union as the principal challenger to a global system created by the West, portrayed as corrupt, hedonistic, cowardly, and vulgar. Muhammad Khatami, a mid-ranking mullah who acted as president of the Islamic Republic between 1997 and 2005, has described the Enlightenment as a tragedy in human history and the progenitor of colonial and imperial wars that have caused much grief to mankind. The regime’s aim, therefore, is to defeat the ideology of the Enlightenment by leading humanity back to a medieval way of life in which religion—in this case exclusively Islam in its Khomeinist version—provides the organizing principle of society. The Khomeinists believe it is their historic mission not only to “revive” Islam, which they claim expired soon after Muhammad’s death, but also to resume its campaign of global conquest.3

  At first glance, any suggestion that the Islamic Republic in Iran is in a position to challenge the world’s sole superpower might sound outlandish. After all, the United States’ defense budget is almost twice the entire Iranian gross domestic product. There are four times as many Americans as there are Iranians. Moreover, the United States has many powerful allies, whereas the Islamic Republic has none. But the outcome of low-intensity war such as the Islamic Republic has been waging against the United States is not determined by the same factors that apply in conventional warfare. To train a single U.S. Marine for action costs around $500,000, while the Islamic Republic invested less than $50,000 to kill 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. The Ira
nian-made projectiles that killed Americans and Iraqis in Iraq in 2008 cost less than five dollars to manufacture. Members of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia financed by Iran in Iraq, received ten dollars a month in wages, compared with $250 that the average soldier in the new Iraqi army receives from the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad. The entire operations of Hezballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza cost Tehran under $1 billion a year, compared with some $200 billion that the United States spends annually in Iraq.

  For the Khomeinist regime, terrorism is something of a cottage industry fed by small but judicious investment in groups and operations that can do maximum harm at minimum cost. In West Africa, using Shiite communities of Lebanese and Syrian origin that have been resident there for generations, the Islamic Republic has created a network of influence such as the United States has failed to build despite pouring in billions of dollars in aid. The Khomeinist project is to transform the “Islamic” aspect of the West African tribes and nations into hostility towards the West, especially the United States. Tehran has also built a network of influence in many Muslim countries with the shrewd expenditure of relatively small sums, backed by a passionate anti-American rhetoric. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, and even the Indian Muslim community, the Khomeinist revolution is marketed as the only force capable of challenging Western domination of the world.

  Another reason why traditional measurements of power are inadequate in assessing this situation is the domestic difficulties that any U.S. administration faces in using American power against an active adversary, as well as a misunderstanding of asymmetric warfare on the part of some American politicians. For example, in May 2008 the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, mocked those who he said were “obsessed with Ahmadinejad,” noting that the U.S. defense budget was a hundred times larger than that of the Islamic Republic. True, the United States could obliterate Iran in a total war; the crucial question is whether the American political system would allow any president to do so. Senator Obama forgot that a good part of the U.S. budget was spent on sophisticated and costly materiel that is irrelevant in a low-intensity asymmetric war. The Khomeinist strategy is based on the assumption that the United States, hampered by domestic political squabbles, would never be able to deploy a significant portion of its immense power against a foe like the Islamic Republic in a conventional war. Thus, Tehran perceives all those expensive fighter-bombers, aircraft carriers, laser-guided weapons, and other sophisticated gadgets—not to mention the immense nuclear arsenal—as little more than impressive figures in strategic charts. What matters is not the possession of power but the will to use it.

  In that regard, Iran’s leaders believe they have the edge over their American enemies. Ideologues in Tehran assume that Afghanistan and Iraq were the last wars that an American president could start, and that most U.S. opinion-makers would prefer a return to the pre-9/11 situation in which Americans were killed in small but steady numbers over a long period. These assumptions are based on a belief that the very concept of war, once glorified by Aristotle as the noblest of human pursuits, has been redefined as a tragic necessity at best, or a collective crime. For some segments of American opinion—indeed, of Western opinion in general—war is now in the same category as other best-forgotten secrets of the human family such as cannibalism, slavery, and incest. But in the Islamic Republic, war is presented, in the words of Khomeini, as “a blessing from Allah.”

  3

  The Focus of the Universe

  As an Islamic Republic over the past three decades, Iran has often behaved as a typical ideological power. nevertheless, Khomeinist behavior both at home and abroad cannot be divorced from the physical realities of Iran’s existence as a nation.

  History, geography, demography, and natural resources are key factors in determining what Iran does. In its present shape, Iran is one of the world’s twenty largest countries and the fifteenth most populous, with over 75 million inhabitants. Yet it ranks 44th in economic terms, reflecting a relative decline over the past three decades. Iranians like to assert that their country is located in one of the world’s most strategically complex regions, making it “the Focus of the Universe.” The Iranian land-mass is separated from Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent by just a single country in each case. Iran is the country with the third-largest number of neighbors, after Russia and China.1 Of the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers, two are immediate neighbors of Iran and three others are located in the vicinity.2

  Another factor that contributes to Iran’s geopolitical importance is energy. According to official estimates, Iran owns almost 12 percent of global reserves of crude oil and the second-largest reserves of natural gas. Since the early 1900s, when Iranian oil started to flow into world markets, Iran has consistently been one of the five biggest exporters of crude. It also has the longest coastline on the Persian Gulf, where its Arab neighbors account for a further 48 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Add to that Iran’s presence on the Caspian Sea, home to 10 percent of global oil reserves as well as vast amounts of natural gas, and Iran’s position as the major hub in global energy production becomes more apparent.

  As a regional power, Iran has been involved in all the conflicts that have shaped regional politics since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire eight decades later. In a sense, none of the region’s problems—from instability in Afghanistan and Iraq to the power struggle in Lebanon and the century-old Arab-Israeli conflict—could be resolved without input by Iran. In most cases, the Islamic Republic has pursued policies that have contributed to the sharpening of conflict in such places as Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine.

  Iran also has important ethnic, cultural, and historic ties to all its neighbors. In its present shape, Iran is the remnant of three successive empires of ancient history: the Achaemenid, the Arsacid, and the Sassanid, which included virtually all of present-day Iran’s neighboring lands. The historical, cultural, and linguistic sediments of these empires continue to affect the region’s politics. Iranic languages—including Persian, the national language of Iran—are spoken in one form or another throughout the Iranian periphery.3 In Tajikistan and Afghanistan, local forms of Persian (known respectively as Tajik and Dari) serve as official languages. Other Iranic languages are spoken in parts of Russia, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Iraq, and Turkey.4 In addition to Persian, a number of other languages of the Iranic family are used in various parts of the country. Four versions of Kurdish are spoken by some 4.5 million people in three provinces and Kurdish enclaves in Khorassan in the northeast. Baluchi is the native tongue of some 1.8 million people in the southeast. Gilaki, spoken by some 1.5 million people in the Caspian littoral, and Taleshi, the language of almost a million people, again on the Caspian, also belong to the Iranic family. non-Iranic languages used in Iran include Azari, a form of Turkish with a heavy admixture of Persian vocabulary, the native tongue of some 12 million Iranians; and two versions of the Turkmen language, spoken by 1.8 million Turkmen Iranians, mostly living in the northeast.5 Finally, there are some two million Iranians whose mother tongue is Arabic, another non-Iranic language.6 Despite this linguistic diversity, almost all Iranians apart from the Arab and Turkmen minorities, about 4 percent of the population, are from the same historic Iranian ethnic stock as shaped by thousands of years of interbreeding.

  At first glance, Islam too might seem a unifying factor; after all, some 98 percent of Iranians are born Muslims. But a majority of Iran’s non-Muslim minorities have at least as much of a claim to a historic link with the land as their Muslim compatriots. Iran’s Chaldeans and Assyrians, just over 150,000 souls, lived in northwestern Iran long before the first Iranian tribes appeared more than five thousand years ago. The Armenian minority, about 300,000, also has a history of thousands of years in the Iranian plateau. The same is true of Iranian Jews, now numbering under 50,000. In fact, Iran has been home to the oldest Je
wish community with an uninterrupted presence anywhere in the world. Unlike most other countries, where religious minorities are often urban professionals with no link to the land, Iran’s minorities cover the entire social and economic spectrum. Iran is perhaps the only country outside Israel that has Jewish peasants, and the only one outside Armenia where Armenians still work the land.

  Two other religious minorities, the Zoroastrians and the Baha’is, stand out because they represent two surviving made-in-Iran religions—the oldest and the newest. Zoroastrianism emerged as the principal religion of most Iranian peoples almost a thousand years before Christ. It offered the earliest version of monotheism as an organized religious doctrine and remained Iran’s national faith until the Arab invasion in the seventh century A.D. Today there are no more than 45,000 Zoroastrians in Iran, but the world’s estimated two million Zoroastrians continue to regard Iran as “holy land.” More importantly, perhaps, Zoroastrianism continues to provide the template of existence for most Iranians, despite their formal attachment to Islam. There is some truth in the claim—made in 1996 by the late Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Bin Baz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, among others—that Iranians never quite succeeded in abandoning Zoroaster for Muhammad.7 The Baha’i faith, based on the teachings of two Shiite clerics from Shiraz, is the newest Iranian religion, assuming its definitive form towards the end of the nineteenth century. Persecuted in Iran, especially since the establishment of the Khomeinist regime, it has re-emerged as a faith with a universal message and has attracted millions of adepts elsewhere, including the United States.