“Everywhere
you look, if there is trouble in the region,” Secretary of Defense James
Mattis told reporters on a
mid-April visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, “you find Iran.”
I must admit that when I stumbled across that quote it brought
up uncomfortable personal memories.
East Baghdad, January 25, 2007: my patrol had missed a turn and
so we swung onto the next grimy avenue instead. As platoon leader, I rode
shotgun in the second of our four vehicles, yakking away on the radio.
The ensuing explosion rocked the senses: the sound, the blinding dust, and the
smell — a mix of burnt metal and, well… I still can’t bring myself to describe
it.
Our lead HMMWV, a military utility vehicle, aimlessly swerved
right and came to rest beside a telephone pole. Only then did the screams
begin.
The “cost”
would be two wounded and two dead: my then-unborn son’s namesakes, Specialist
Michael Balsley and Sergeant Alexander Fuller. These were our first, but
not last, fatalities. Nothing was ever the same again. I’m reminded
of poet Dylan Thomas’s
line: “After the first death, there is no other.”
The local
militia had shredded our truck with an advanced type of improvised explosive
device that was then just hitting the streets of Baghdad — an explosively
formed projectile, or EFP. These would ultimately kill hundreds of
American troops. Those EFPs and the requisite training to use them
were provided to Iraqi
militias by the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s a detail I’m not likely to
forget.
Still,
there’s one major problem with bold, sweeping pronouncements (laced with one’s
own prejudices) of the sort Secretary of Defense Mattis recently offered on
Iran: they’re almost always wrong. It’s the essential flaw of “lumping” —
that is, of folding countless events or ideas into one grand theory. But,
boy, does it sound profound! The truth is that Iran is simply not behind
most of the turmoil in the Middle East, and until Washington’s policymakers
change their all-Iran-all-the-time mental model, they are doomed to
failure. One thing is guaranteed: they are going to misdiagnose the
patient and attack the wrong disease.
Ghost Riders of Baghda...Daniel
A. SjursenBest Price: $21.01Buy New $19.80
Ghost Riders of Baghda...Daniel
A. SjursenBest Price: $21.01Buy New $19.80
Look, I’m emotionally invested myself. After all, I fought
Iranian-trained militiamen, but a serious, workable national strategy shouldn’t
rely on such emotion. It demands a detached, rational calculus.
With that in mind, perhaps this is the moment — before the misdiagnosis sets in
further — to take a fresh look at the nature of America’s thorny relationship
with Iran and the Islamic Republic’s true place in the pantheon of American
problems in the Greater Middle East.
Let’s
start this way: How many Americans even realize that there are only three countries
in the world with which their country has no ongoing diplomatic relations at
all? Actually, the number was four until the Obama administration began
slowly normalizing bilateral
ties with one longtime member of the naughty list: Cuba. How many could
name the three remaining states on that roll of shame? The first and
easiest to guess is surely North Korea; the most obscure is Bhutan (the
“Switzerland of the Himalayas”). And, yes, of course, last but by no
means least is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Think of
all the scoundrels not on that list: Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; our Pakistani
“frenemy”; Vladimir Putin’s Russia; Equatorial Guinea with its craven, 40-year
dictator, accused of
cannibalism; and, until 2012, Bashar al-Assad’s grim Syrian regime.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. kept an embassy in the Soviet Union and it
similarly maintained formal relations with apartheid South Africa. As of
2014, the State Department officially dealt with nine-tenths of the globe’s
most abusive regimes, according to the Human Rights Risk Atlas.
So, is the secretary of defense correct? Is Iran really behind
all regional trouble in the Greater Middle East?
Hardly.
In fact, such an assertion — and the language of absolutes that goes with it —
is by definition problematic. In a Washington filled with
Iranophobes, the demonization of that country is already a commonplace of
everyday political chatter and it almost invariably rests on three inflated
assumptions about Iran’s menacing nature: that it is on an eternal quest to
develop and perhaps employ nuclear weapons (especially against Israel); that it
massively supports regional “terrorists” and their proxies; and that it
regularly exhibits an unquenchable desire to establish its regional hegemony by
force of arms. All three suppositions rest on another faulty assumption:
that Iran has a straightforwardly dictatorial system of fundamentalism led by
irrational “mad mullahs.”
Let’s consider each of these propositions.
The Iran
Exaggeration
Close your
eyes for a moment and imagine a Middle Eastern country — no, not Israel — but
one with a sizeable, protected Jewish community, a place where Islam is the
state religion but its president regularly tweets Rosh Hashanah
greetings for the Jewish New Year.
Sounds
like somebody’s wild fantasy, but it’s actually Iran. In fact, the
Islamic Republic sets aside one mandatory seat in its parliament for a
Jew, three for
Christians, and another for a Zoroastrian. It would be a mistake to
conclude from such token gestures that Iran is a paragon of tolerance.
But they do speak to the complexity of a diverse society full of paradox and
contradiction.
It
certainly is a land in which hardline fundamentalists chant “Death to America!”
It’s also a country with an increasingly young, educated populace
that holds remarkably positive views of Americans. In
fact, whatever you might imagine, Americans tend to have significantly
more negative views of Iran than vice
versa. Don’t be shocked, but Iranians hold more positive views of
the U.S. government than do the citizens of Washington’s allies like Egypt,
Jordan, and Turkey. In reality, there’s long been a worrying paradox in
the region: an inverse relationship between the amiability of a government’s
relationship with Washington and the favorability ratings of this country among
its people.
In other words, when it comes to Iran… well, it’s
complicated. The trouble is that Americans generally don’t do
nuance. We like our bad guys to be foreign and unmistakably vile, even if
such a preference for digestible simplicity makes for poor policy.
If you
want to grasp this point more fully, just think about Secretary of Defense
Mattis’s recent statement again. He assures us that Iran’s shadow hovers
over every regional crisis in the Middle East, which is
empirically false. Here, for instance, are just a few recent conflicts
that Iran is not behind or where its role has been exaggerated:
* The Arab Spring and the subsequent chaos in Tunisia, Libya,
and Egypt. Iran didn’t start or significantly influence the uprisings in
those countries.
* Turkey’s
decades-long war with separatist
Kurds in its southeast provinces. Again, not Iran.
* The
ongoing spread of al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria and on the Arabian Peninsula. Iran actually abhors
such groups, and certainly wasn’t behind their rise.
* Or, if
you want, take Yemen, since supposed Iranian meddling in the Middle East’s poorest state
happens to be one of the favorite drums Washington’s Iranophobic hawks like
to beat. And yet a
range of credible reports suggest that
the much-decried collusion between Iran and the Houthi rebels, who are the
focus of the Saudi war in that country, is highly exaggerated.
Look, Iran is a significant, if often thwarted and embattled,
regional power and a player, sometimes even a destabilizing one, in various
regional conflagrations. It supports proxies, funds partner states, and
sometimes intervenes in the region, even sending in its own military units
(think Syria). Then again, so does Saudi Arabia (Yemen and, in funding
terms, elsewhere), the United Arab Emirates (Yemen), Russia (Syria), and the
United States (more or less everywhere). So who’s destabilizing whom and
why almost invariably turns out to be a matter of perspective.
The State
Department and various other government agencies regularly label Iran the
world’s leading “state sponsor of terrorism” — and that couldn’t sound more
menacing or impressively official and authoritative. Yet to tag Iran as
#1 on any terror list is misleading indeed. The questions worth asking
are: Which terrorists? What constitutes terrorism? Do those
“terror” outfits truly threaten the U.S. homeland?
As a
start, in 2016, the State Department’s annual survey of worldwide
terrorism labeledISIS — not Iran, Hezbollah, or the Houthis — as
“the greatest [terror] threat globally.” How do we square that “greatest
sponsor” stamp with an Iran that has proven both thoroughly hostile to and
deeply invested in the
fight against ISIS and various al-Qaeda-linked groups in Iraq and Syria?
Iran does
support Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
However, lumping regionally focused nationalist organizations like Hezbollah
with genuine global jihadist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda (in its
proliferating forms) is deceptive, often purposely so. The Lebanon-based
Hezbollah, for example, is largely fixated on Israel, but has sometimes
even fought ISIS in
Lebanon and Syria. In other words, Hezbollah, though it had
previously attacked U.S. troops
in the region, isn’t sending its operatives to crash planes into American
buildings.
To think
of it another way, more foreign ISIS volunteers hail from Belgium or
the Maldives Islands than from Iran. In fact, most of the top sources of ISIS’s
foreign recruits (Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan) turn out to be
“friendly” American “partners.” From 1975 to 2015, Iranian-born
terrorists inflicted zero
deaths in attacks on U.S. soil. In contrast, citizens of key U.S. allies
— Saudis, Egyptians, and Lebanese — killed thousands on
9/11. In fact, since then, 85% of domestic
terrorists turned out to be American citizens or permanent residents.
Most were American-born. Of the 13 U.S. citizens involved in such fatal
terror attacks, none were Iranian-American.
As to the
charge that Iran is by nature an aggressive power, there can be little question
that the Islamic Republic aggressively pursues its regional interests.
That, however, by no means makes its moves automatically antagonistic to
Washington’s interests in the region. If anything, as a Pentagon assessment concluded
in 2014, its military strategy is ultimately defensive in nature and based on a
feeling of being threatened, which makes sense when you think about it.
After all, when it comes to American power — from the 1953 CIA-British coup that
overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister and installed the autocratic Shah to
Washington’s support for Iraqi
autocrat Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against Tehran (1980-1988) to
the present administration’s all-in support for the
autocratic Saudis in an anti-Iranian partnership, they have legitimate reasons to feel
threatened.
In
addition, unlikely as it may seem to most Americans, on certain issues like
a Taliban-free Afghanistan,
the U.S. and Iran actually have had converging, if complex, interests.
Additionally, though Iran once promoted Iraqi Shiite militias that attacked and
killed U.S. troops (including my soldiers, Mike Balsley and Alex Fuller),
today, both countries desire a relatively
stable, ISIS-free Iraq. None of this is easy to swallow (least of all by me),
but prudent strategy demands a dispassionate, rational assessment of inherently
emotional issues. Unfortunately, when it comes to Iran, that’s hardly an
American predilection at the moment.
The
Company We Keep
In 1957,
the U.S. supplied a key
regional leader with his first (“peaceful”) nuclear reactor, as well as the
necessary scientific training for those who would run it and some weapons-grade
uranium to power it. Then, in the 1970s, American experts began to fear that
their partner might be seeking to develop nuclear weapons on his own. A
few years later, revolutionaries overthrew him and inherited that
American-originated program. That leader was, of course, the man the Americans
had installed as ruler of Iran in 1953, Reza Shah Pahlavi.
It always
struck me as odd that Iran made the cut for the very exclusive membership in
George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”
After all, unlike those 15 Saudi hijackers
and perhaps even the
Saudi government, it had no connection to 9/11 and was “comprehensively helpful”
in the initial takedown of the Afghan Taliban and the arrest of fleeing
al-Qaeda fighters.
By contrast, consider just a few of Washington’s “partners” in
the region:
* Saudi
Arabia: this monarchy enforces a strict brand of conservative Wahhabi Islam not
so terribly different from the basic theology of ISIS. The Saudi
government publicly executes an average
of 73 people per year, including juveniles and the mentally ill.
Beheading is the favored technique. (Sound familiar?) Nor are all the
victims convicted murderers. According to a 2015 Amnesty
International report, “Non-lethal
crimes including adultery, robbery, apostasy, drug-related offenses, rape,
‘witchcraft,’ and ‘sorcery’ are punishable by death.” In
addition to its citizens carrying out the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia supported a branch
of al-Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra) in the Syrian conflict. Furthermore, its
ongoing U.S.-backed air
strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been killing numerous civilians and
may have helped to cause and further
intensify a disastrous famine. The U.S. response: a record-breaking $110
billion arms deal for the
Saudis.
* Egypt:
In the wake of a 2013 coup d’état led by General Abdel
Fatah al-Sisi against an elected government, that country’s military gunned down hundreds
of demonstrators. Since then, its strongman has used “mass,
arbitrary arrests,” tortured detainees, and conducted “extrajudicial
executions” — all in the interest of retaining power. The U.S. response:
$1.4 billion in (mostly military) foreign assistance in fiscal 2017.
To top it off, President Trump recently invited Sisi to the White
House, lauded the
dictator’s “fantastic job in a very difficult situation,” and is planning a future
visit to Egypt.
* Turkey:
this formal ally boasts NATO’s second largest military and hosts an important
U.S. airbase. Unfortunately, Turkey is increasingly unstable thanks to a
recent coup attempt, its ongoing war with Kurdish separatists, and an
escalating intervention in Syria’s civil war. Worse yet, after
relaunching an internal war against Kurdish rebels, its president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, has taken the country into distinctly autocratic terrain in the wake
of a narrow victory in a referendum that does
away with the office of prime minister and further centralizes executive power
in his hands. Turkey’s deteriorating human rights record includes the
pre-trial detention of more than 40,000 coup “suspects,” the summary dismissal
of 90,000 civil servants, the shuttering of hundreds of offices of
nongovernmental organizations and media outlets, and the imposition of a
24-hour curfew in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern part of the country.
The U.S. response: $3.8 million in direct (military) assistance in fiscal 2017, and promises
to continue arms sales which topped
$2.3 billion last year.
This
motley crew has one thing in common — they’re no angels.
“Rip It
Up”
Iran hawks
live on both sides of the political aisle. In 2015, for example, Hillary
Clinton told an audience at
Dartmouth College that Iran represents “an existential threat to Israel.”
Though she expressed tacit support for Obama’s then-pending nuclear deal — the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action, or JCPOA — she added that “even if
we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems… [Iran is] the world’s
chief sponsor of terrorism.”
When it
comes to real rancor toward Iran, however, you have to look to the right.
Senator John McCain, for instance, immediately cried foul about the
JCPOA, calling it a “bad deal” likely to “nuclearize” the Middle East.
More colloquially, as both a candidate and as president-elect, Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to “rip it
up,” while former governor and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee accused President
Obama of “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.”
Despite
the bellicose rhetoric, intelligence and congressional testimonyindicate that Iran
is complying with the JCPOA. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General
Martin Dempsey — not exactly a dove — believed that the deal reduced the risk of
Iran weaponizing its nuclear power. All the appeals from the president, various
pundits, neocons of every sort, and congressional hawks to withdraw from it
also neglect an obvious reality: the JCPOA is a multilateral deal and none of
our partners (Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany) will support
“tearing up” the agreement. Imagine the optics of a future American
unilateral abrogation of an agreement Iran is complying with: the onus will be
on Washington alone; its allies will continue to abide by the deal and, with
genuine justification, Iran’s leaders will be able to depict the Americans as
destabilizing “cowboys.”
Here’s the reality of the present situation: despite decades of
sanctions and the military containment of Iran, the U.S. has not significantly
affected its policies or stance in the region. Few in Washington display
the courage to ask the crucial question: Why continue? Why not a creative
new approach — the gradual normalization of relations?
Though you
wouldn’t know it, given the prominence of Iranophobes in Washington, the U.S.
has little to lose. Current policy is counterproductive in so many ways,
while Washington’s never-ending bellicosity and threats to “rip up” the nuclear
agreement only undercut Iran’s
moderates and the eminently sensible President Hassan Rouhani, who
recently won a smashing
electoral victory against a hardline, fundamentalist opponent in which a
stunning 73% of Iranian voters cast ballots. Why not make it more, not ever
less, difficult for Iran’s conservatives to vilify the U.S.?
Forty
Years of Failure
There’s an
uncomfortable truth that Washington needs to face: U.S. policy toward Iran
hasn’t achieved its goals despite almost four decades of effort since an
American-installed autocrat was overthrown there in 1979. Foreign policy
hawks — Democrats and Republicans alike — will undoubtedly fight that reality
tooth-and-nail, but as with the Cuban embargo, Iranian isolation has long
outworn any imagined usefulness. That ostracizing Iran remains
fashionable reflects domestic political calculus or phobic thinking, not cogent
strategy, and yet our new president just traveled to Saudi Arabia, a truly autocratic
country, and in the wake of an Iranian election that was by all accounts
resoundingly democratic, denounced that land as despotic and all but called
for regime change.
So here’s
a question that, believe it or not, is okay to ask and is not actually
tantamount to treason: What exactly does Iran want and fear? It wants
international legitimacy, security, and a reasonable degree of regional power
(not world domination). It fears continued isolation, any coalition of hostile
Sunni Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia (assisted by Israel), and U.S.-sponsored
attempts at regime change. If you think that makes the Iranians sound paranoid,
just check out the recent celebratory get-together in Saudi Arabia or remember
how, just before the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, Newsweek quoted a senior British official summing up the
situation in Washington this way: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
In sum, U.S. policy in the Middle East is confused,
contradictory, counterproductive, and dangerous. It could leave
Washington involved in a war with Iran. (And given our recent wars in the
region, imagine where that’s likely to land us.)
The U.S.
doesn’t require more enemies. Its hands are already full enough without
additional faux “existential” threats or,
as John Quincy Adams warned so long ago,
eternally going “abroad seeking monsters to destroy.”
Oddly enough, the Trump administration has a unique opportunity
to normalize relations with Iran. While President Obama’s modest
overtures toward that country were greeted with scathing partisan scorn,
President Trump might just be able to garner enough Republican support to do so
much more, were he ever to try. At the moment, he clearly possesses no
such plans, and yet, as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump can go
to Tehran!
My small bit of advice, however: don’t hold your breath…
Reprinted
with permission from TomDispatch.com.
Major Danny
Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a
U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served
tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a
memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth
of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons
near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
