By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
Another problem this
one lingering in the memory of Iranians today, can be traced back to before and
after the Treaty of Turkmenchai in 1828, and the realization
that Persia had suffered an imperial fall from grace.
Thus, the arrival of
one Russian embassy caused considerable agitation in Tehran, and radical ulema
urged the declaration of a jihad against Russia. An unprepared Iran went to war
against Russia in 1826, and further excused any need for the British to come to
her assistance because she was effectively the belligerent. Any remaining
doubts about the loss of Iran's great power status in 1813 were now
devastatingly confirmed. In addition to the loss of further territories in the
Caucasus, Iran was faced with a 20-million-ruble indemnity, a huge sum for the
time, the imposition of commercial treaties that signified the start of the
system of capitulations, a reiteration of the terms of Golestan
with respect to the succession, and an agreement, loosely interpreted by the
Russians, that all prisoners of war, whenever taken, would be repatriated. This
included people who had settled and married in Iran and had no wish to return.
The new Russian ambassador, Griboedov, in his zeal
and barely disguised conceit to gather as many prisoners of war as he could
find, inflamed the rage of the people of Tehran, who (not for the last time)
assaulted the embassy, slaughtering all occupants but one. Tehran quickly sent
an embassy to St. Petersburg to apologize but found the new Tsar, Nicholas,
more ambivalent than expected, blaming the entire fiasco on the arrogance of
his ambassador. Nonetheless, this was not a propitious start to Iran's
integration into the European diplomatic and legal system.
Consequently, a
recent tendency is to talk of the fragmentation of Iran into its constituent
ethnicities. No serious internal challenge will be contemplated while the very
idea of Iran is considered under threat. Many in the West are too easily
impressed by the Islamic rhetoric that periodically emanates from the Islamic
Republic.
As a complex
political system, decisions on Iran cannot be entirely delegated to
politicians with no particular competence in the field. The important task is
to address the structural and cultural problems within the bureaucracies, to
streamline the process of decision making, to ensure that voices are heard, and
most importantly to re-professionalize the bureaucracies themselves. Perhaps a
valuable lesson can be learned in the way in which various military
organizations, always at the sharp end of a diplomatic encounter, have sought
to adapt themselves to the vagaries of modern realities. They regularly
challenge the tendency towards consensus and mediocrity that bureaucracies
impose, and seek to streamline and coordinate their ability to react swiftly
and coherently.
However, it was
clearly the hostage crisis and the Iran-Contra affaire,
that had a major impact on US perceptions of Iran.
Mark Bowden in his
recent book Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with
Militant Islam described that when the Reagan administration took office eager
to make amends for the perceived ineptitude of the Carter administration.
Republican contempt was reciprocated by outgoing Democrats, who viewed with
suspicion the convenient timing of the end of the hostage crisis. Rumors
abounded that the Republican administration had concluded a secret deal with
the Iranians to prevent the early release of the hostages. These allegations,
characterized as the October Surprise, were subsequently published, with
interesting consequences for President George H. W Bush's reelection campaign
in 1992 and renewed attempts to broker a deal with Iran. Allegations of
interference in the negotiations by the Republican Party, and Bush in
particular, are incorrect. However, according to Bowden, senior Iranian sources
argue that Republican supporters provided an estimated $20 million to key
agents in the Islamic Republic to lobby for the delayed release of the
hostages. The Iranian leadership had engaged in considerable debate as to when
to release the hostages.
The record shows that
the two sides who had publicly stated their mutual dislike appeared happy to
engage in highly sensitive negotiations on an issue of critical political and
military importance. In light of the illegal means by which the Reagan
administration pursued this policy, and the awkward decision to tie it to a
desire to supply the Nicaraguan Contras and the release of hostages in Lebanon,
the entire venture has been clouded by guilt and laden with a heavy veneer of
cynicism. This has averted attention away from the significance of the
developments for US-Iran relations and the genuine attempt to foster a
relationship and renew ties.
No particular reason
exists to doubt Reagan's subsequent justification that he had sought to
reestablish ties with a strategic country, especially considering that many of
the people involved were familiar with Iran and had served in the country
before the revolution. The intent, as far as Iran was concerned, was
nonetheless subsumed under the tide of a woefully misconstructed
and poorly thought-out method that not only drew attention to the existence of
a shadow government, a revelation that would have made the Watergate
conspirators proud, but also made the Reagan administration, and the US
government in general, appear hypocritical to its European allies. For example
the Thatcher government was kept in the dark but principally because it
contradicted the stated (and highly voluble) policy against negotiations with
terrorists. (The various Lebanese militias and Hizbollah
in particular were defined as terrorists by the US government.)
The Iranians became
convinced that for all the rhetoric, the United States was the ultimate realist
in international relations, for whom commercial and geopolitical interests took
priority. Moreover, they drew valuable parallels between their own support for Hizbollah and US support for the Contras. For the US
political elite, the lessons included the curious conclusion that Iran had no
moderates worth negotiating with, that the system as a whole was rotten, and
that the people were duplicitous. Yet the individual considered responsible for
leaking the secret talks was executed by the Iranian authorities, and no
Iranian official was responsible for the decision to fund the Nicaraguan
Contras, the development of the particular networks with Iranian expatriates
(which were less than satisfactory), or the conviction of the American
officials involved.
The pressures that
mounted on the Reagan presidency, and the potential impact on his legacy,
ensured that Iran became a taboo subject. Whenever possible, a suitable
political distance was maintained. It was convenient to blame Iran when reality
contradicted policy or an embarrassment loomed. Political disagreements could
be set aside because blaming Iran was now a bipartisan affair to which all
Americans could subscribe, Republican or Democrat, politician or bystander.
Iran had transcended regular politics and become a myth, part of political
folklore. This was quite an achievement-even Vietnam had not generated such a
uniformity of dislike. This development was perhaps best exemplified by the
next event that was to reinforce prejudice and mutual suspicion, albeit this
time on the Iranian side.
The flight path of an
Iran Air airbus from Shiraz to Dubai was well known, it was not descending but
ascending, and it had not responded to the various warnings simply because of
its inability to receive communications on a military wavelength. The pilot of
the Iran Air airbus was therefore blissfully unaware that he was being warned
by the USS Vincennes or that his plane was being viewed as a threat. On the contrary,
other US ships had warned him-on the civilian wavelength-to alter his course to
avoid an area of confrontation below his standard flight path. Having done all
this, his plane was nonetheless struck by a surface-to-air missile, resulting
in the loss of two hundred ninety lives.
The precise details
of the Iran Air flight path and the pilot's communications with the ground
remain unknown because the black box was never recovered. The suspicion is that
it was picked up by the USS Vincennes, which having entered Iranian waters were
the ship closest to the debris. And for Iranians President Reagan's decision to
award the Captain with a medal for distinguished service this was in addition
to the standard service medal the crew received, was a bizarre and offensive
gesture. Even if the US government later offered compensation-commensurate,
with the standard of living-while refusing to accept responsibility.
The one immediate
effect of the tragic shooting down of the airbus was that Ayatollah Khomeini
decided to accept the Iran/Iraq cease-fire resolution urged upon him by the
United Nations, thereby bringing the eight-year war to an ignominious
conclusion, a consequence that has led some US hawks to conclude that force
works. Iran had not achieved her stated war aims, and many wondered aloud the
point of the slaughter; estimates of the number of casualties ranged from five
hundred thousand to one million.
But, the Iranians had
learned to adapt and fight on their own terms, using ingenuity like for example
the engineering attempt to drain marshes by constructing extensive canal
networks, and compensating for the lack of spare parts by developing a
logistical capacity of their own. Far from starving Iran of military resources,
the embargo had encouraged the development of an indigenous arms industry. The
war taught Iranians the necessity of self sufficiency
and confirmed the ideology of the revolution, which regarded the West, and in
this case foreign suppliers, as inherently untrustworthy. Where details, like
the decision to take the war to Iraq in 1982, were the subject of considerable
discussion, on the whole, Iranians, as well as the state, had a sense of relief
and accomplishment. Ordinary Iranians, who had surprised observers with their
stoic determination, emerged from the experience of war with an acute sense of
political realism, especially with respect to their own government. Thus, when
Khomeini died in 1989, the outpouring of grief that accompanied his funeral
convinced even the skeptics that the political system known as the Islamic
Republic enjoyed a firm foundation.
But broadly speaking,
already three groups coexisted at this time: the secular nationalists, who
provided the initial leadership within Iran; the religious nationalists under
the leadership of Khomeini, who brought with them the traditional masses; and
the Left (both religious and secular), with a varied leadership but identified
with the Mojahedeen-e Khalq
Organization, who brought with them the urban middle and lower classes. The
secular groups and the Left tended to have Western-style educations; the
religious nationalists were more familiar with traditional educations provided
by the Shia seminaries. In this respect, these groups represented different
traditions, and in the ensuing radicalization of the revolution after the
overthrow of the Shah, those with a Western-style education were tarnished as
insufficiently authentic, to the point where ultimately only the ulema claimed
to be culturally unblemished. First, however, the secular nationalists were
culled, following the seizure of the US embassy, after which the fight for
control fell to the Left and the religious nationalists. This contest continued
through the beginning of the war, taking on an increasingly brutal form as
assassinations became the balance of power in the various parties, which partly
reflected the reality that Khomeini could not be replaced, while also
indicating Rafsanjani's own political determination to shape the fledgling
Islamic Republic in his own image. Rafsanjani was a mullah, but he was also a
shrewd politician and a merchant, with little time for Islamic austerity. For
all his rhetorical training, Rafsanjani was to increasingly represent his
mercantile over his clerical roots, and he sought to stabilize the Islamic
Republic upon the pillar of mercantile capital.
In fact the world
into which Iran's revolutionaries now reemerged was different from that of the
1970s. The Cold War was coming to an end and the US had a new Republican
president, George H. W Bush. Bush was a traditional conservative with realist
sympathies, although he suffered from one Achilles' heel as far as Iran was
concerned: his alleged involvement in secret negotiations with the
Revolutionary government in the run-up to the 1980 presidential elections.
There was little concrete evidence, but the allegation existed and it could be
damaging.
Nonetheless, Bush was
in a strong position to take a definitive and statesmanlike stand on the
question of Iran. He was reaping the benefits of the end of the Cold War and
announcing the dawn of a new world order, whose first expression was the
successful expulsion of Iraq forces from Kuwait during the first Persian Gulf
War of 1991. It was a perfect time to assess and rethink America's
international challenges. Moreover, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait had
made it clear that the real threat to Persian Gulf stability, complete with the
spectre of weapons of mass destruction, was Iraq, not
Iran. Iranians relished their vindication as the United Nations declared Iraq
the aggressor, a symbolic yet highly important gesture. In a frantic bid to
secure Iranian support in the forthcoming struggle, Saddam Hussein returned
what vestiges of Iranian territory he had still clung onto. Iran's foreign
minister was dispatched on a swift tour of the Gulf States to capitalize on
this sudden stroke of good fortune, while the Minister of Oil gleefully
announced that the price of oil had risen significantly. As if this were not
enough, the Iraqi Air Force flew their planes into Iran for safekeeping, a
responsibility Iran accepted as part of a long overdue reparations package.
More optimistic
Foreign Ministry officials argued that finally the West and the United States
would realize that Iran truly was an "island of stability" and that a
new relationship could be forged. The fact that the Soviet Union was no longer
a significant threat (and would soon no longer exist) was inconsequential
because Iran remained an important state that could anchor and stabilize the
emergent republics of central Asia and Trans-Caucasia. This made considerable
sense, as it had in the decade before the revolution, and Americans would have
been making the same case had the Shah been in power. Unfortunately, some
Iranians did not appreciate that the status quo before the revolution, although
rational, was not realistic. The first indication that this was so was the
flurry of conjecture among some Western policy makers about the significance of
Saddam's decision to send his air force to Iran.
Despite Iran having
just emerged from an eight-year struggle against Iraq, some fearfully pondered
whether Iran would now enter the war on the Iraqi side. Perhaps the Iranians
had suggested as much to make sure Saddam returned all remaining territory he
held, but a political gambit for territorial advantage is one thing; entering a
war in the defense of the one person most Iranians could be guaranteed to
detest was another.
Further indications
that the thaw was temporary came in the conduct of the war, when Arab states and
the US became anxious about the possibilities that Iran might exploit Iraq
weakness, especially in the south. This has been cited as one of the reasons
the Coalition forces did not pursue the war all the way to Baghdad and seems to
have been a factor in allowing Saddam Hussein to crush the Shia uprising, which
had gathered momentum as an apparent response to President Bush's call to arms.
The brutal crushing
of this rebellion left deep scars, and many Iraqi Shias fled to refuge in
southern Iran, adding to Iran's expanding total of refugees (at this time there
may have been more than two million Afghan refugees), but also providing Iran
with a crucial lever for potential influence. Persian hospitality was to
contrast favorably with the duplicity of the West, although at least where the
Iraqi Kurds were concerned, there was determined action to relieve the pressure
on them and provide them with protection against Saddam's retribution.
The effective
demolition of Iraqi state power affected the regional balance of power, and
Iran's Arab neighbors were anxious about the revolutionary Shia state
benefiting too much in political and strategic terms from Saddam's folly.
Despite official Iranian attempts to ameliorate any inferiority complex on
behalf of the Arabs, unofficial comments left no one in doubt that imperial
hubris was never far from the surface and that the Iranians considered the Gulf
to be Persian. This suspicion of Iranian intentions in the region was
reinforced and exaggerated by political expediency-local rulers understood that
denunciation of Iranian perfidy was the best way to secure and maintain US
support. This does not mean that the Iranians were not at fault, only that this
was frequently exaggerated for political effect.
Iran's mismanagement
of its regional relations was exemplified by the media storm following the rash
decision by a local Iranian official on Abu Musa island. He turned back a
delegation of two hundred teachers from the United Arab Emirates because their
paperwork was incorrect. The international furor that erupted from this
seemingly routine, if clumsy, decision caught many in Iran by surprise,
especially because some in the Western media drew analogies between this
apparent Iranian annexation of Abu Musa and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This
was absurd, not only because of the size of the islands involved (the Greater
and Little Tumbs were also reiterated as an Arab
grievance against the expansionist Persians), but also because of the
historical fact that the islands were seized, with tacit Western consent in
1971, when the Shah was preparing to become the Gendarme of the Gulf.
Nonetheless, this
latest crisis soon became defined as the issue of Persian territorial
aggrandizement against the greater Arab motherland, fulfilling an agenda dear
to Saddam Hussein's heart. For Iran, it was a salutary lesson in media
management and the need to have a response to such allegations. As one Iranian
official protested, the extent of the media coverage far exceeded the physical
size of the islands, the smallest of which disappeared at high tide. Another
complained that the Shah had given up Bahrein for three useless rocks that were
now being used to beat Iran. Within the country, some advantage was be gained
by whipping up nationalist indignation and presenting the Islamic Republic as
the guarantor of national integrity. In other words, reckless and exaggerated
assaults of this nature assisted the political establishment in developing
further grounds for the political legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.
This sense of
victimization was further reinforced when the United States began discussing
post-war security arrangements in the region. The Iranians felt that they
should be part of any security apparatus, but they were conspicuously excluded
from any discussion. Instead, the US suggested that local states seek an
alliance with Egypt and Syria, a security arrangement many Iranians considered
to be directed towards them rather than Saddam Hussein. Despite the US
excluding Iran from discussions, President Bush was amenable to the idea of a
thaw in relations, and contacts were established with Rafsanjani's office. The
prospective deal would revolve around the release of the US hostages in
Lebanon, after which Bush would begin the process of normalizing relations,
including the release of assets frozen in the United States since the
revolution in 1979. Rafsanjani fulfilled his side of the bargain by bringing
pressure to bear on the various groups in Lebanon (at a reported cost of some
$2 million). Bush then asked that Rafsanjani formally condemn terrorism and
soften the rhetoric emanating from Tehran. This Rafsanjani duly did at a Friday
Prayer's sermon delivered on December 20, 1991, condemning both terrorism and
anti-Western rhetoric. But Bush procrastinated. By 1992, hopes of a strategic
rapprochement were fading and those in Iran who felt that some sort of modus
vivendi could be reached with the United States were finding the odds stacked
against them. Despite his high standing after the Gulf War, Bush was unwilling
to risk valuable political capital in an election year by appearing to be soft
on Iran. Reagan had suffered badly as a consequence of his involvement with
Iran-Contra, and many questions were circulating about Bush's role not only in
Iran-Contra but also in the hostage crisis, more than a decade previously. As
the Democratic challenge of Bill Clinton became more serious, Bush
unfortunately decided that it would be wiser to defer his response to
Rafsanjani until after he had won the election. But the surprise election of
Bill Clinton altered the political landscape in ways most Iranian analysts had
not foreseen.
A History of Iran: The Iran Documents P.1
The Iran Documents P.2: The Impact of Nazi Germany
The
Iran Documents P.3: Aryanisation 1950-2005
The Iran Documents P.4: Today's Culture War to Heat Up?
List
of consulted literature and references
For updates
click homepage here