Iran's Deadly Ambition (5 page)

Nearly in tandem, the Islamic Republic suffered a major ideological crisis. Less than a year after the end of hostilities with Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini unexpectedly died of a heart attack, throwing his regime into partisan chaos. The resulting political tug-of-war led to the rise of a consensus candidate, the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also led many in the West to conclude that Iran’s revolutionary fervor had run its course, or that it soon would.
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For much of the following decade, Western analysis was colored by this vision of a post-revolutionary Iran, one in which practical concerns and economic priorities trumped revolutionary zeal.
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The message from Tehran, however, could not have been more different. In the aftermath of Khomeini’s passing, Iranian officials took pains to emphasize that the core tenets of Khomeini’s revolution—chief among them the ideal of “exporting the revolution”—remained in effect.
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This priority, however, would be achieved more subtly than it had been in the past. Whereas the heady early days of the Islamic Republic saw the Iranian regime become a locus of global insurgent activities, following the Iran-Iraq War the Iranian regime gravitated toward a new way of war, one characterized by the use of proxies, an economy of violence, and an exceedingly long view of global competition.
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This remains the strategy pursued by Iran’s leaders today.

MISREADING IRAN

Amazingly, most of this context is lost in contemporary political discourse over Iran. Precious few analysts of Iranian politics have bothered to read the formative texts that helped shape the behavior of the Islamic Republic. Fewer still are familiar with the history and strategic culture that continues to animate the Iranian state. As a result, the Beltway policy community is consistently caught off guard by the Iranian regime’s foreign adventurism and bankrolling of global terror, as well as by the scope of its international ambitions.

To be fair, not all branches of the U.S. government have been taken by surprise. In its inaugural report to Congress on Iran’s military capabilities, released publicly in the spring of 2010, the Pentagon noted that Iran simultaneously is seeking to ensure “the survival of the regime” and to “become the strongest and most influential country in the Middle East and to influence world affairs.” The Pentagon also pointed out that the Iranian leadership’s long-term “ideological goal is to be able to export its theocratic form of government, its version
of Shia Islam, and stand up for the ‘oppressed’ according to their religious interpretations of the law.”
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The Pentagon’s subsequent 2012 report on the subject said much the same thing. “Iran continues to seek to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity,” it noted. “Iran also desires to expand economic and security agreements with other nations, particularly members of the Nonaligned Movement in Latin America and Africa.”
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Yet, as U.S. policy moved steadily toward engagement with Iran’s ayatollahs, this assessment was progressively watered down. Thus, in keeping with the Obama administration’s change in policy focus, the 2014 edition of the Pentagon’s report on Iran’s military capabilities was minimalist in nature and said nothing at all about the Islamic Republic’s ideological objectives.
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In that regard, it represents a more or less faithful reflection of the dominant view held by administration officials and supporters—these days, Iran is concerned above all simply with “regime survival.”
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Iranian leaders, however, are thinking considerably bigger. That was the message Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sought to convey to officials in his government as recently as September 2014. In a meeting with members of the Assembly of Experts, the Islamic Republic’s premier religious supervisory body, Khamenei asserted that the existing international system is “in the process of change” and a “new order is being formed.” These changes, he made clear, are a mortal blow to the West and a boon to Iran. “The power of the West on their two foundations—values and thoughts and the political and military—have become shaky” and can be subverted, Khamenei insisted.
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Iran, in other words, is still revolutionary after all these years. And today, very much in line with Khomeini’s famous
1980 dictum that his regime must “strive to export our revolution throughout the world,”
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the Islamic Republic is pursuing a truly global agenda, one that is built around three primary fronts.

The first, and most immediate, is sectarian in nature. The Iranian regime views itself as the vanguard of the so-called Shia Crescent in the Middle East and the ideological champion of the interests of the beleaguered Shia minority in the Sunni-dominated Muslim world.
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This outlook informs Iran’s ongoing sponsorship of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, its primary—and most important—terrorist proxy, as well as its backing of assorted Shiite insurgent groups in neighboring Iraq and Shia insurgents in Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere.

The second front is pan-Islamist. Iran’s leaders believe fervently that their regime is the natural ideological leader of the Islamic world and the rightful inheritor of the mantle of the Prophet Mohammed.
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This conviction underlies Iran’s long-standing strategic rivalry with Saudi Arabia, Sunni Islam’s most important player—a contest Iran’s leaders see as one not only for strategic position, but also for ideological primacy. It is also what animates Iran’s repeated efforts over the past decade to goad the countries of the Middle East into a security condominium of its own fashioning, thereby becoming the region’s geopolitical center of gravity.

Finally, the Iranian regime has embraced the language of third-world populism, using it in its efforts to enlist countries in Latin America and Africa in a shared revisionist agenda on the global stage. The crux of this message was encapsulated in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September 2012 address before the United Nations General Assembly, in which the Iranian president called for the formation of a “new world order” as a substitute for the current domination of the “bullying” West.
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It is a call that has resonated in many corners of the third world.

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger once famously remarked that Iran faces a choice of being “a nation or a cause.”
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Today, Iran’s leaders believe that their regime can be both. Even as they engage in a dialogue with the West over their nuclear program, they are acting out that conviction.

CHAPTER

II

Subverting the Arab Spring

W
hen a 26-year-old fruit peddler in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest government corruption and a lack of economic opportunity, it ignited a regional firestorm. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation touched off escalating protests against the long-serving Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, first in Sidi Bouzid, and subsequently throughout the entire country. Within less than a month, Ben Ali stepped down and fled the country in the face of widespread and sustained opposition to his rule.

Egypt was next. Beginning in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak, Cairo’s immutable authoritarian sphinx for more than three decades, also found himself in the public crosshairs. Millions of disgruntled Egyptians took to the streets, congregating in the capital’s Tahrir Square to call for release from the political stagnation and economic malaise that had come to characterize Mubarak’s rule. In an effort to cling to power, the Egyptian president proffered a number of compromises and power-sharing arrangements. But by then, the crowd was seeking more fundamental change, and Mubarak was forced to resign.

Tunisia and Egypt may be the most dramatic examples of the widespread regional antiestablishment sentiment that became known as the Arab Spring, but they were hardly the only ones. Country after country experienced shockwaves from the political earthquake.

Iran was no different. Publicly, officials in Tehran took an exceedingly optimistic view of the antiregime sentiment sweeping the region. High-ranking Iranian officials repeatedly depicted the regional ferment as an outgrowth of Ayatollah Khomeini’s successful 1979 revolution and the start of an “Islamic awakening” in which the Islamic Republic would inevitably play a leading role.
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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even ordered the creation of a special “secretariat” headed by former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati to help bring Islamic movements to the political fore throughout the region.
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Privately, however, officials in Tehran were all too aware that they could become the next casualty of the Arab Spring. The controversial June 2009 reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency had brought millions of protesters into the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities—a groundswell of popular outrage that coalesced into the so-called Green Movement. Months of unrest aimed at the ruling clerical regime followed, presenting the Islamic Republic with its most fundamental political challenge since its 1979 revolution. Although the Iranian government successfully beat back this “green wave,” mostly through the use of widespread brutality and repression, officials in Tehran were all too aware that discontent continued to simmer beneath the surface of Iranian society. They therefore worried that popular revolts taking place in Tunis, Cairo, and elsewhere could easily translate into renewed disorder at home. As a result, they determined that, in keeping with the old axiom
that “the best defense is a good offense,” the surest way to prevent a “Persian Spring” was to harness, co-opt, and exploit these same stirrings abroad.

COURTING CAIRO . . . AND SUBVERTING AL-SISI

Egypt presented Iran with its first opportunity to influence the politics of the Arab Spring. During the three decades before Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011, Tehran and Cairo were regional rivals and ideological adversaries. The animus dated back to the early 1980s and stemmed from Iran’s opposition to Egypt’s initiative, codified at Camp David, to normalize relations with the state of Israel. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was subsequently assassinated by a gang of militant army officers, the Islamic Republic openly took the side of the extremists, going so far as to name a street in Tehran after the lead gunman, Khalid Islambouli.
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The resulting hostility between the two countries was both deep and enduring. Diplomatic relations, suspended after Sadat’s assassination, remained frozen for the following thirty years, as myriad issues—from Iran’s sponsorship of the Hamas terrorist group to its nuclear ambitions—created tensions between Tehran and Cairo. But Mubarak’s departure and the subsequent rise of a new, Islamist government in Egypt afforded Iran a new strategic opportunity.

Speculation about contacts between Shia Iran and Sunni Islamists, chief among them Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, had been swirling around for years, encouraged by Iran’s cooperation with Hamas and its tactical contacts with al-Qaeda.
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The rise of the Brotherhood to political prominence in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster brought these connections to the fore. In February 2011, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met Kamal al-Halbavi, a senior member of Egypt’s Brotherhood, in Tehran, in what was widely seen as
an Iranian effort to position itself at the vanguard of the Arab Spring.
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Thereafter, Tehran became a vocal supporter of the Brotherhood’s political agenda and ascent to power in Cairo.

Even before the Brotherhood seized power in 2012, Tehran had already improved its position vis-à-vis the Egyptian state. In mid-February 2011, Iran requested, and Egypt’s caretaker government granted, permission for two warships to transit the Suez Canal, which was the first time in more than three decades an Iranian warship passed through those waters.
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In the weeks that followed, the new government in Cairo also agreed to reestablish long-frozen diplomatic ties.
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Some Egyptians even went so far as to flirt with the idea of accepting Iran’s long-standing offer of nuclear cooperation, something the Egyptian government under Mubarak had categorically rejected.
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These changes transformed Egypt from a hedge against Iran’s regional ambitions into an enabler of them.

The subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Cairo further deepened this budding alignment. Iranian leaders took pains to praise the “Islamic awakening” that had taken place in Egypt and made concrete political steps to normalize the long-unsettled relationship between Tehran and Cairo.
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Iran’s ayatollahs found a willing partner in Cairo. In the run-up to his election as president, Mohammed Morsi allegedly conducted an interview with Iran’s FARS News Agency, in which he waxed optimistic about the possibility of reactivating bilateral ties. “We must restore normal relations with Iran based on shared interests, and expand areas of political coordination and economic cooperation because this will create a balance of pressure in the region,” Morsi is said to have told the news channel.
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Morsi subsequently denied the interview, perhaps to appease his domestic Sunni constituency. But he said much the same thing in more muted
tones in September of that year at the annual summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, coincidentally held in Tehran, when he declared that he was handing over the movement’s presidency “to our brothers, the Iranians.”
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(These contacts would come back to haunt Morsi; in February 2014, Egyptian authorities charged the ousted president with espionage and treason, accusing him of conspiring with “foreign powers”—Iran chief among them.
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