By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 06, 2020
Since 1979, no one in the United States has figured out a
good way to handle the regime in Tehran. For 40 years, we’ve been having the
same arguments, and no matter what we tried, the results were disappointing.
It is hard to overstate just how spectacularly unprepared
the U.S. government was for the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The House
Intelligence Committee revealed in a January 1979 report that two CIA long-term
analyses written in the late 1970s had left policymakers with the impression
that the rule of American-aligned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was stable and
strong. The House report cited a 60-page study from August 1977, titled “Iran
in the 1980s,” that predicted that “the Shah will be an active participant in
Iranian life well into the 1980s” and “there will be no radical change in
Iranian political behavior in the near future.” The House also cited the CIA’s
separate assessment in 1978, in its report titled “Iran After the Shah,” that
“Iran is not in a revolutionary situation or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’
situation.”
Watching in horror as thugs grabbed our blindfolded
embassy staff and paraded them before the cameras, Americans instantly learned
that this was a regime that had no regard for any international law,
traditional diplomacy, or morality. A revived relationship and summit meetings
were unthinkable; anyone who met with Iranians on their soil was a potential
hostage. The crowd of angry revolutionaries chanted “Death to America,” and the
Iranian parliament and other official government meetings and rallies routinely
began with the chant. Not even the Soviets began their Politburo meetings like
that. By 1987, the regime instituted “Death to America Day.” Their Iranian
prime minister introduced the national holiday by saying, “Tomorrow will be . .
. a day of God on which America should tremble . . . the day when the
arch-Satan will be placed under our feet.”
The odd thing is that no matter what happens between the
U.S. and Iran, we keep repeating the same patterns and having the same debates.
From the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy and the bombing of the Marine
barracks in Beirut, Lebanon; to the “Tanker War” and the mines in the Straits
of Hormuz in the late ’80s; to the truck-bomb attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi
Arabia in 1996; to Iran’s letting the 9/11 hijackers go through Iranian
territory without stamping passports; to IEDs against our soldiers in Iraq . .
.
In their eyes, we’ve attacked them in unfair ways: We
backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war, imposed sanctions that squeezed
the Iranian economy, and in 1988, our Navy blew up two of their oil platforms.
That same year, we accidentally shot down one of their civilian airliners. The
frustrating reality is that our actions rarely hurt the mullahs and ruling
class. Our sanctions made life tougher for the average Iranian, but the mullahs
still ate well.
Our relationship with Iran has rarely been predictable.
Somehow, during an administration when relations with Iran were openly hostile,
when our president was seen as an implacable foe of the Ayatollah, we traded
arms for hostages. Our alleged cowboy warmonger president, George W. Bush,
avoided direct conflict with the Iranians. Barack Obama seemed to believe that
a grand new era of peace, or at least nonconfrontation, was possible. He pushed
through a generous deal in exchange for a (supposed) pause in Iran’s nuclear-weapons
program. Obama was so eager to get the nuclear deal that he even “derailed an
ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the
Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.”
And throughout it all, the leaders of the regime and at
least some of the citizenry continued to chant “Death to America” — even during
ongoing talks with the United States about the nuclear program. In 2015, John
Kerry told the Iranian government directly to stop the chant. It was
particularly unhelpful, he said, in persuading Americans and the world that a
deal could be reached and that Tehran would honor its terms. The regime
continued using the chant anyway — and in Iraq and elsewhere, the Iranian
regime kept directing and financing efforts to bring real death to real
Americans.
You can find a lot of experts on the region who will
assure you that the chant of “Death to America” is merely rabble-rousing
nationalism or some sort of inconsequential gesture to placate “hardliners.”
They will assure you that Iran is in fact a sophisticated, multifaceted,
democratic, modern society, and that far too many Americans simply can’t
understand the nuances of the real Iran. Many Americans apparently make the
mistake of concluding that when crowds chant, over and over again, that they
want America to die, they mean it.
The American people looked at Iran and saw an implacably
malevolent force in power. They were continually told by prominent voices that
their perceptions were wrong — as in Fareed Zakaria’s 2009 Newsweek
cover piece, “Everything You Think You Know About Iran Is Wrong.” Zakaria has a
sterling résumé when it comes to studying foreign affairs — Yale, Harvard,
managing editor of Foreign Affairs, adjunct professor at Columbia — and
he wrote, in what must have been a heavily researched piece, that Iran’s regime
might “be happy with a peaceful civilian [nuclear] program” and that “Iranians
aren’t suicidal.” “Iran isn’t a dictatorship,” he declared, and it has a
culture of “considerable debate and dissent.” Newsweek’s readers no
doubt concluded that hyperbolic media coverage had obscured the reality of
Iran, which was a sophisticated, multifaceted, modern state that is not so
scary or brutal after all.
Along with Zakaria, one of the loudest voices insisting
that the Iranian regime had been misunderstood and unfairly demonized was New
York Times columnist Roger Cohen.
Cohen wrote many columns in early 2009 urging his
American audience to “think again about Iran,” and on June 10, 2009, he warned
against the “dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state.” At the
heart of the problem was American policymakers’ reflexive hostility to the
Iranian regime: “Radicalism in the Bush White House bred radicalism in Iran,
making life easy for Ahmadinejad. President Obama’s outreach, by contrast, has
unsettled the regime.”
A month after the Zakaria piece ran, the Iranian regime
announced that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won reelection with 60
percent of the vote, a result that many Iranians believed was fraudulent.
Thousands of ordinary Iranians took to the streets in protest, in what was
described as the biggest uprising by the Iranian people since 1979:
“Demonstrations swelled to throngs of hundreds of thousands on some days and
were focused in Iran’s main cities and provincial capitals, including Tehran,
Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz,” the AP reported.
And then the regime crushed them, violently and
ruthlessly. More than 100 members of the political opposition were arrested.
Government forces shot women such as Neda Agha-Soltan in the street. An
estimated 110 people were killed: university students, professors, some killed
in government detention centers.
To his credit, Roger Cohen did something you almost ever
see a prominent foreign-policy columnist do: He admitted he had been wrong. He
had misjudged the Iranian government. “I’ve also argued that, although
repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by
regional standards,” he wrote. “I erred in underestimating the brutality and
cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.” He had been on
the ground in Tehran:
Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple
bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his
back. “They beat me like a pig,” he said, breathless. “They beat me as I tried
to help a woman in tears. I don’t care about the physical pain. It’s the pain
in my heart that hurts.”
He looked at me and the rage in his
eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.
He wrote that four days after warning about “the
dangerous demonization” of Iran.
As for the contention that Iran’s regime might “be happy
with a peaceful civilian [nuclear] program,” in September 2009, within a matter
of months of Zakaria’s Newsweek cover story, President Obama announced
that “the United States, the United Kingdom, and France presented detailed
evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been
building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years.”
If you had previously seen Iran as a country dominated by
a brutal, dangerously aggressive, regime that had nuclear ambition and that had
already demonstrated a
willingness to use children to clear minefields and embraced a bloody
ferocity that shocked and appalled the West . . . it turns out everything you knew
about Iran wasn’t wrong. Everything Fareed Zakaria and Roger Cohen knew, or at
least believed, was wrong.
Zakaria and Cohen are not dumb men. But they saw what
they wanted to see in Iran. The world would be a better, happier, nicer place
if the Iran of 2009 or today lived up to the benign, reasonable portrait that
Zakaria and Cohen painted in their reporting. But it’s not. The regime has been
clear about who they are, what they want, and what they stand for from the
beginning: “Death to America.”
Last week, President Trump moved past the sanctions,
exposure of their agents, and all the other measures that have hurt the Tehran
regime on the periphery. He went after the chief architect of Iran’s regional
aggression and left Quasem Soleimani a corpse on the road to Baghdad
International Airport. Maybe this strike will make things worse, in the sense
of bringing this constant low-level conflict with the Iranian regime into
high-level open conflict. But now everyone in the Iranian regime has a new
factor in their calculations: If the Americans can find and kill Quasem
Soleimani, they can probably find just about anyone up and down the chain of
command. Maybe the audacity of this attack stirs the Iranian leaders into a
frenzy — or maybe it gets them to think twice and hesitate and face their own
concerns about tit-for-tat escalation into all-out war. Such a war would
undoubtedly hurt the United States, but it would devastate Iran.
Nothing else has gotten the United States to the point it
desires — where the Iranian regime either drops “Death to America” as a slogan,
a goal, and a philosophy, or everyone can genuinely rest assured that it is
merely rote agitprop. The strike on Soleimani was something new — an experiment
of sorts to see if it can generate the results that 40 years of other
approaches have failed to generate. Let’s all hope that a new spirit of caution
and prudence takes root in Tehran.
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