Read Iran's Deadly Ambition Online
Authors: Ilan Berman
For years, this disconnect has drawn the attention of policy makers and experts on both sides of the Atlantic, who have urged Europe to live up to its commitments under the Helsinki Final Act and scale back its collective ties to Iran. They argue that Iran’s growing strategic capabilities represent a shared security threat, that Helsinki members have a commitment to the importance of universal human rights, and that Cold War experience suggests that pressuring the Iranian regime on its human rights practices could be an effective way of shaping Iranian behavior.
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For the most part, their arguments have fallen on deaf ears. In practice (if not in rhetoric), European nations consistently prioritize economics before human rights in their approach to Iran. As a result, they have failed to take the Islamic Republic to task over its domestic abuses. The bankruptcy of this policy was in full view in 2007, when the Iranian regime carried out a series of public executions while a European parliamentary delegation visited the country.
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The timing
was a very public repudiation of Europe’s half-hearted demands for domestic moderation on the part of the Iranian leadership. Tellingly, while that turn of events chilled contacts for a time, it did not lead to a lasting rupture between Tehran and Brussels.
Recent negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers emphasize that disconnect. In December 2013, even as human rights abuses within the Islamic Republic continued to worsen, the European Parliament authorized a ten-person delegation to Iran to promote political ties. This time, they did so without preconditions—a clear signal that the European Union was more willing than ever to put its concerns over Iran’s internal behavior on the back burner.
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All of which only confirmed to Iran’s leaders that their domestic deformities are, effectively, a cost-free affair. So, too, it seems, is Iran’s ongoing support and financing of extremism throughout the eurozone.
TERROR ON THE OLD CONTINENT
Years from now, 2012 is likely to go down in the annals of history as the year of Iranian terror. In an annual report of global terrorist trends released in the spring of 2013, the U.S. State Department noted that 2012 had seen a “resurgence of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism.”
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During the period in question, the Islamic Republic “was implicated in planned attacks in India, Thailand, Georgia, and Kenya.”
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Yet the most devastating and effective attack carried out during that time by Iranian-linked militants took place in another theater altogether.
That theater was Eastern Europe. In July 2012, a pre-positioned bomb detonated on a passenger bus full of Israeli tourists in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort town of Burgas. The blast killed six people, five Israelis and the driver of the bus, and injured thirty-two others.
In the days following the attack, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu linked the Burgas bombing decisively to Hezbollah and its chief sponsor, Iran, calling it part of a “global Iranian terror onslaught” targeting his country’s interests and citizens worldwide.
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That verdict was confirmed seven months later, when the Bulgarian government published its official report. “We have established that the two [suspects in the bombing identified by authorities] were members of the militant wing of Hezbollah,” Bulgarian interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov confirmed in February 2013, upon the release of his government’s formal findings. “There is data showing the financing and connection between Hezbollah and the two suspects.”
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Hezbollah’s presence in Europe was not new, of course. The organization had engaged in a spate of terrorist activity on the continent since the early 1980s, including a plane hijacking in 1984; bombings in Spain, Denmark, and France the following year; and a rash of bombings in Paris between 1985 and 1986.
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Over time, however, the militia shifted its focus back to the Middle East, and Europe became used primarily as a launching pad for operations elsewhere.
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This shift coincided with two developments. The first was a pronounced reversal of political fortune in Tehran brought about by the costly eight-year Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989—events that conspired to take the wind out of Iran’s political sails, at least for a time. The second was the start of the so-called Oslo Process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which activated the Palestinian territories as a local theater for Iranian and Hezbollah resistance against the Jewish state.
European officials, once preoccupied with preventing Hezbollah- and Iranian-sponsored terror, breathed a sigh of relief. As Hezbollah shifted to using the continent as a theater for recruitment, fund-raising, and logistical support, officials
throughout the eurozone adopted what later became an established laissez-faire attitude. As one European expert described the thinking that eventually dominated Europe’s approach toward the terrorist group, “As long as they aren’t involved in politics and aren’t operating openly, they are tolerated.”
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Germany emerged as a particular focus in this regard. In the summer of 2002, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution went public with news that Hezbollah was seeking real estate in Berlin to establish a headquarters and “training center for its supporters in the country, then estimated at about 800.”
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The organization’s activity expanded significantly thereafter, and by the mid-2000s, German sources estimated that it controlled as many as five Islamic centers in the North Rhine–Westphalia region alone, supported by Iranian funds funneled through the Islamic Republic’s German embassy, as well as a nationwide network of as many as 1,000 operatives.
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This status quo was altered by Iran, Hezbollah’s chief enabler, whose growing activism transformed Europe from a base of operations back into a target. The 2012 Burgas bombing in Bulgaria was in many ways a reversion to type.
In the aftermath of the bombing, European governments belatedly moved against the group. In July 2013, the European Union formally voted to put Hezbollah’s military wing on its terrorism blacklist.
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But the measure was a half-hearted one, taken largely in response to pressure from the United States and Israel. As experts noted at the time, it drew an artificial distinction among the militia’s constituent parts, incorrectly identifying Hezbollah’s military wing as a separate entity rather than part of a larger whole. That, however, was simply not the case, as even the group’s officials themselves admitted. “Hezbollah is a single large organization, we have no wings that are separate from one another,” its spokesman, Ibrahim Mussawi, told
Der Spiegel
in the summer of 2013.
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As a result, the organization as a whole was able to insulate itself from European pressure.
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Although Europe’s formal ban on Hezbollah’s military wing remains in place, the continent has been loathe to do more against the group, fearing that it might adversely affect Lebanon’s fragile economy and political system, of which Hezbollah has become an integral part.
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Against Hezbollah’s chief enabler and sponsor, Iran, Europe has done even less. To date, no comprehensive European legislation has taken significant aim at Iran’s ongoing role as a leading sponsor of international terrorism.
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And because it has not, Europe remains an inviting arena for the destabilizing activities of Iran and its agents.
RUSSIA’S LOSS, IRAN’S GAIN?
In the spring of 2014, European nations suddenly woke up to an uncomfortable reality. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula that March, and its ongoing covert assistance to Ukrainian separatists raised the specter of a new cold war between Moscow and the West. It was also a wake-up call regarding Europe’s precarious energy position.
Europe is deeply—perhaps fatally—dependent on Russian energy. In 2013, the countries of the European Union cumulatively imported 166.3 billion euros (nearly $200 billion) of energy from Russia.
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As of mid-2014, three Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) relied on Russia for 100 percent of their natural gas consumption. Several other countries, including Greece, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, are in a similar boat, dependent on the Russian Federation for three-quarters or more of their natural gas imports. In all, more than half of the European Union’s eighteen countries import 50 percent or more of their natural gas from Moscow.
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At least four other non-E.U. countries in Europe are also Russian clients: Macedonia, Belarus, Serbia, and Montenegro.
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Add to that the personal connections between some of Europe’s most prominent politicians and Russia—for example, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who sat for years on the board of the Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom—and it’s easy to see why some observers liken Russia to “Europe’s gas station.”
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For years, experts sounded warnings about Europe’s unhealthy energy dependency on Russia and the outsized political influence wielded by the Kremlin in European politics as a result.
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But it was not until the most recent crisis in Ukraine that the dangers of Europe’s reliance became apparent. As a result, there is new momentum among European states to reduce their reliance on an increasingly aggressive, expansionist Kremlin.
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Moscow’s loss could end up being Tehran’s gain. Savvy Iranian officials have seized the moment, and they emphatically claim that Iran is ready to replace Russia as Europe’s natural gas supplier.
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In May 2014, Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zangeneh, confirmed that the Islamic Republic was prepared to provide “large volumes” of gas to Europe “via pipeline or in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG).”
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Other official statements make clear that Iran’s leaders are eager to exploit the opportunity presented by European-Russian tensions to improve their economic and energy position.
But can they do it? According to industry experts, Tehran faces numerous challenges to becoming Europe’s energy supplier. For one thing, Iran’s energy infrastructure—long neglected as a result of Western sanctions—requires major upgrades in order to make it capable of sustained energy exports of the type needed by European nations. Such a face-lift would require massive foreign investment, since government projections of needed expenditures are in the neighborhood of $300 billion over the next several years.
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For another, Tehran is expanding its political ties to Moscow, with a number
of new accords inked over the past year. This deepening cooperation is likely to make the Iranian government loathe to work at cross-purposes with the Kremlin.
Nevertheless, Iran’s interest is telling. Officials in Tehran understand that if they can provide at least some of the roughly 160 billion cubic meters of gas Europe currently obtains from Russia, it would be a massive shot in the arm for the still rickety Iranian economy. It would be an even bigger boon to the Iranian regime’s international standing, making Europe a key stakeholder in ending Iran’s global isolation.
Europe appears inclined to become just that. Its leaders are eager to return to the good old days of the 1990s, when—under the auspices of their “critical dialogue” with Tehran—they managed to forge deep economic and political bonds with the Islamic Republic. As Danish Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard put it in a September 2014 interview with the
Tehran Times
, “All the EU countries feel the same way . . . that Iran could be a very important ally.”
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That is precisely what the Iranian government is banking on.
I
t was an odd choice for a maiden foreign-policy outing. On September 12, 2013, less than a month after being sworn in as Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani embarked upon his first trip abroad. His destination wasn’t Beijing, which had steadily risen in importance over the preceding year as a trading partner for a sanctions-stricken Islamic Republic. Nor was it Europe, where the Iranian regime still enjoyed a well-spring of commercial support, despite mounting economic pressure levied on Tehran by the European Union. Rather, the focus of Rouhani’s attention was the tiny Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, which was playing host to the annual meeting of the most important security alliance to emerge since the end of the Cold War: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Established in June 2001, the SCO is an expansion of the Shanghai Five, a regional group begun in 1996 with the purpose of strengthening the common security of its member states: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. By contrast, both the membership and the mission of the SCO are substantially broader than those of its root group. Ostensibly, the goal of the new bloc, which now also encompasses
Uzbekistan as a full member and Mongolia, Pakistan, India, and Iran as observer nations, is to expand regional economic, cultural, and counterterrorism cooperation.
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Iran’s involvement underscores the bloc’s unstated purpose: the diminution of American influence in the post-Soviet space. It is an objective that Tehran shares with Beijing and Moscow, the SCO’s principal strategic players.
Iran has been a part of the bloc since 2005, and its role has been both active and vocal. At the SCO’s June 2006 summit, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a guest of honor, delivering a public address that called upon the group to play a greater role against “the threats of domineering powers”—a thinly veiled reference to the United States.
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The speech was a clear indication of how Iran truly saw the SCO: as an energy-rich geopolitical alliance stretching from the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Hormuz. This led some Western experts to warn that an SCO incorporating Iran would be essentially “an OPEC with bombs.”
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