THE MATTER WITH IRAN
Fred Halliday

Open Democracy, UK
March 1 2007

The key to understanding Iran’s contemporary role in the middle east
is less its millennia of statehood or its Shi’a identity than its
political dynamic as a revolutionary state, says Fred Halliday.

A few years ago, during a visit to Tehran to give some lectures at
the foreign ministry research and training institute, I was taken
to lunch by a senior Iranian diplomat at a once fashionable Italian
restaurant in the northern middle-class suburb of Tajrish. Educated
as a scientist in the United States before the 1979 revolution,
he had been an important figure in the post-revolutionary regime,
and later a senior diplomat. I had met him at various conferences
on European-Iranian relations and we had struck up something of
a rapport. On this occasion, after the usual semi-official tour
d’horizon, we began talking about the early history of the Iranian
revolution and of its foreign policy.

"We made three big mistakes", he said: first, in holding the
American diplomats hostages for a year and a half and thereby deeply
antagonising the US; second, by not accepting the very favourable peace
which Saddam Hussein had offered in the summer of 1982, when Iran had
the upper hand in the war, then already two years old; and third – to
me the most surprising of his points – in not supporting the communist
regime that came to power in Afghanistan in 1978, and instead backing
the pro-American guerrillas that (with eventual success) opposed them.

The reflections of this diplomat are of considerable relevance to the
situation in which Iran finds itself today. For sure, the pressure
being put on Iran by the US is arrogant and in many ways illegal. For
Washington to protest about Iranian "interference" in Iraq when it
is the US which invaded the country in 2003, and when it is Iranian
allies (if not clients) who staff much of the government and armed
forces of Iraq, is also ridiculous. So too is the attempt to blame
Iran for the spread of Sunni terrorism, including al-Qaida activities,
in the region. No country has a greater interest in the stability of
Iraq than Iran, a point Washington has stupidly failed to note these
four years past.

Yet there is another side to the US-Iranian polarisation that could
prove dangerous not only to Washington but also the Islamic Republic
and which arises from the miscalculations of the Iranian leadership
itself. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has made himself popular in much
of the Arab world, and among Muslims more broadly, for his outspoken
denunciations of the US. He has also heartened many by his calls for
the destruction of Israel (something he did indeed call for, despite
claims by some inside and outside Iran that he was mistranslated: the
words mahv bayad bashad [must be wiped out] leave no room for doubt).

Yet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has also thrown caution, and a due evaluation
of the enmity and strength of his enemies, to the wind. (Ayatollah
Khomeini once rebuked Ali Akbar Velayati for following him in a
violent denunciation of Saudi Arabia, reminding the longstanding
the foreign minister that it was his job to maintain relations with
other states.) At the same time the president has indulged in a set
of ill-conceived economic policies at home, squandering oil revenue
to boost consumption, launching retrograde educational and cultural
campaigns against secularism, while failing to meet the campaign
promises to the poor that, in 2005, secured his surprise election.

The failure of his candidates to prevail in the December 2006 elections
to the Expediency Council, an important constitutional watchdog,
and a growth of criticism even from conservatives and other clerics,
augurs ill for his future.

No one can tell where the current confrontation between Tehran
and Washington will lead to. Perhaps, as a result of impatience,
miscalculation or innate risk-taking, Iran and the US will be at war in
the near future. Or it may prove to be the case that both are playing
for time: the Iranians want to spin out negotiations with the west
over the nuclear issue until the US position in Iraq is even weaker,
the US may want to stay its hand in the hope that domestic economic
and social problems will further weaken the regime and allow them to
precipitate political upheaval. Everything is possible.

The roots of turbulence

In this context it is worth looking more closely at the way in which
Iran formulates its foreign policy, and the roots of its high-risk
policy. Much is made of the fact that Iran is an ancient imperial
power, one of the four countries in the world – along with China, Egypt
and Yemen – which can claim continuity as a state over 3,000 years.

It may also be some satisfaction to Iranian leaders that with
their influence in Lebanon and Palestine, Iran now has a military
emplacement on the shores of the Mediterranean for the first time since
the Achaemenid empire (c 550-350 BCE). Moreover, Iran’s aspiration to
nuclear capability, in whatever form, is as much due to the aspiration
to be a major power as to military factors, just as is the retention
of what are in practice useless and expensive weapons by Britain
and France.

Certainly, Iranian official, and popular, attitudes towards nearly
all their neighbours (with the interesting exception of the Armenians)
are replete with prejudice and a sense of superiority.

"You colonialists left your goat’s droppings around the region,
but sooner or later we will sweep them away", one interlocutor in
Tehran said to me. When I asked what these "goat’s droppings" were,
he replied: "Pakistan, Iraq and Israel".

It is in part this self-perception which explains one of the most
constant features of Iranian foreign policy over the past century,
and one to which my diplomat companion was drawing attention during
our lunch in Tehran: namely, the recurrent tendency of Iranian leaders
to overplay their hand. Even a brief list is striking:

in the second world war, Reza Shah, the first of the two Pahlavi
monarchs, thought he could balance British and Russian pressure by
maintaining relations with Germany, but in the end, and as soon as
Russia entered the war in 1941, Iran was invaded and Reza Shah sent
off to exile in Mauritius in the early 1950s, the nationalist prime
minister Mohammad Mossadeq thought he could nationalise Iranian oil
(hitherto a monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today’s BP) on
his own terms and avoid a compromise with western governments: in the
end, he was overthrown in the CIA and MI6 coup of August 1953 during
the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini failed to grasp the
Iraqi near-surrender of 1982, a consequence of his belief that Iranian
forces could topple the Iraqi regime and impose a Shi’a substitute;
the result was six more years of war, the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Iranians, the entry of the US navy into the war on the
side of the Iraqis, and (in August 1988) a far less favourable peace.

Much is made too of the fact that Iran is the most important Shi’a
state and that the last great Persian dynasty, the Safavid (1502-1736)
made Shi’ism a powerful political and military, as well as cultural,
force in the region, a rival for centuries to the Sunni Ottoman empire
to the west. This Shi’a identity, one that the mullahs have in any
case overblown, has also proved to be a mixed blessing for the Islamic
republic; for many outside Iran – and even for Shi’a in countries like
Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – Iran’s projection of its Shi’ism has
put them in a difficult situation, not least for the implied claim
of the superior authority of clergy, and politicians, based inside
Iran. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shi’a cleric in Iraq, and
himself an Iranian, has long sought to limit such influence, as has,
in a much rougher way, the rising Shi’a leader, Muqtada al-Sadr.

Iran’s imperial and nationalist past and its Shi’a identity, are
not, however, enough to explain the noisy and risky policy Iran
is pursuing today. Here two other factors need to be brought into
account. The first is that Iran is an oil-producing country, a fact
that, especially at a time of high oil prices, gives to the state
some leeway simultaneously to mollify the people and pursue expensive
military programmes.

The problem is that these expenditures do little to alleviate the
long-term problems of the economy and are usually, is the Iranian case,
and also that of Venezuela, accompanied by much waste, corruption
and factionalism. In this regard, Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are two
of a kind: intoxicated with their own rhetoric, insouciant about the
longer term economic development of their oil industries and economy
as a whole, and wilfully provocative, towards the United States and
immediate neighbours alike, in foreign policy.

The second and indeed the most important (and neglected) factor
explaining contemporary Iran, however, is a fact evident in its
historical origin, policy and rhetoric: that the Islamic Republic of
Iran is a country that has emerged from a revolution and that this
revolution has far from lost its dynamic, at home or abroad.

It is not in the imperial dreams of ancient Persia, or the global
vision of Shi’a clergy, but in the repetition by Iran of the same
policies, aspirations and mistakes of previous revolutionary regimes,
from France in the 1790s, to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s that the
underlying logic of its actions can be seen.

The trap of revolution

The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 was, as much as those of France,
Russia, China or Cuba, one of the major social and political
upheavals of modern history. Like its predecessors, it set out not
only to transform its own internal system – for sure at a high cost
in repression, wastage and illusion – but to export revolution. And
this Iran did: to Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon in the 1980s and now to
Palestine and, in much more favourable circumstances thanks to the US,
to Iraq again. It can indeed be argued that it is the confrontation
between internationalist revolutionary Iran on one side, and the US
and its regional allies on the other, that has been the major axis
of conflict in the middle east this past quarter of a century. By
comparison, America’s war with Sunni, al-Qaida-type, militancy is a
secondary affair.

Here, however, Iran has fallen into the traps and illusions of
other revolutionaries. Like the French revolutionaries, the Iranians
proclaim themselves to be at once the friend of all the oppressed
and "a great nation" (a phrase Khomeini used that echoed, whether
wittingly or not, the Jacobins of 1793). Like the early Bolsheviks,
the Islamic revolutionaries began their revolution thinking diplomacy
was an oppression and should be swept aside – hence the detention of
the US diplomats as hostages. Like the Cubans and Chinese, they have
combined unofficial supplies of arms, training and finance to their
revolutionary allies with the, calculated, intervention of their
armed forces.

All of this has its cost. The gradual moderation of Iran under the
presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1987-2005) reflected a sense of
exhaustion after the eight-year war with Iraq and a desire for more
normal external relations with the outside world, like the period of
the Girondins in the France of the late 1790s, or the policies of Liu
Shao-chi in China of the early 1960s: but as in those other cases,
and as in the USSR of Stalin in the 1930s, there were those who
wanted to go in a very different direction, and proceeded to tighten
the screws of repression, and raise confrontational rhetoric once
again. A comparison could indeed be made with the Russia of the early
1930s or the China of the 1960s, and say that Iran under Ahmadinejad
is now going through its "third period" or a mild replica of the
"cultural revolution".

How long this can continue is anyone’s guess; but it is likely to
be years, perhaps many, before the Islamic revolution has run its
course. Even Cuba, weak and exposed by comparison, has sustained
its defiance and its model for well over four decades now. Yet even
without war with the US, the risks and the costs (as many people in
Iran realise only too well) are high.

Here, and again in a spirit of comparison, it is worth recalling the
words of one of the wisest observers of modern revolutions, the now
sadly deceased Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. His book The Soccer
War contains a passage observing the Algeria of the mid-1960s under
Ahmad Ben Bella that apply to all revolutions, uncannily so in the
case of Iran today:

"Algeria became the pivotal Third World state, but the cost of its
status – above all the financial cost – was staggering. It ate up
millions of dollars for which the country had a crying need …

Gradually, the gap between Ben Bella’s domestic and foreign
policies grew wider. The contrast deepened. Algeria had earned an
international reputation as a revolution state … it was an example
for the non-European continents, a model, bright and entrancing;
while at home, the country was stagnating; the unemployed filled
the square of every city; there was no investment; illiteracy ruled,
bureaucracy, reaction, fanaticism ran riot; intrigues absorbed the
attention of the government … The country cannot carry the burden
of these polices. It cannot afford to and it has no interest in them."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his advisers, and those of Hugo Chavez too,
would do well to read and ponder these words.