Unthinkable (3 page)

The Supreme Leader himself is ultimately Iran's chief executive, although the president is nominally the head of government. The Supreme Leader seems to set policy on whatever issues he likes whenever he wants, although the president is responsible for all government activity. Iran has two complete militaries (the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Iranian Armed Forces) and multiple internal security organizations. Almost every former senior official stays on as a senior advisor of one kind or another. Moreover, some of them seem to have real influence while others have none. As a result, whenever anyone attempts to produce a wiring diagram of the Iranian government, showing all of its entities and their lines of authority and responsibility, it becomes so labyrinthine and speculative as to be useless.

What matters is often not the formal powers or responsibilities of any government office, but the informal authority of the person who heads it. The government of the Islamic Republic is highly personalized. An office that seemed all-important when one man held it can become irrelevant the moment someone else takes it over. It is often difficult to know which institutions matter unless one understands how the Supreme Leader views the officeholders at that moment—and the Supreme Leader's views of people are constantly changing.

There are only two exceptions to this rule: the Revolutionary Guards and the Supreme Leader himself. The leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, or Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Islami, in Farsi) has consistently played a critical role in Iranian decision-making
from its formation in the wake of the 1979 revolution and subsequent Iraqi invasion of 1980. Today the Guard is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, institution in Iran.
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It plays vital roles in defending the regime from enemies both foreign and domestic, and its leaders and veterans have gone on to hold many other key posts in the Islamic Republic. Almost alone among Iran's high offices, the IRGC commander has been a key policymaker and advisor to the Supreme Leader regardless of who has held either post.

The Supreme Leader (or Rahbar, for “leader” in Farsi), Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, is the highest manifestation of the personalized functioning of the Iranian regime. Ayatollah Khamene'i is the man in charge of Iran. This was not always the case, and it took at least a decade or more after he was named the Supreme Leader upon Ayatollah Khomeini's death in 1989 for Khamene'i to consolidate his power and emerge as Iran's undisputed authority. But Khamene'i now sits alone atop the Iranian power pyramid. Khamene'i makes all of Iran's most important decisions, including those related to Iran's nuclear program. And Khamene'i may be the deepest of all of Iran's mysteries.

It is rare that outsiders—or even other Iranians—ever know when Khamene'i makes a decision, or if he does, what he has opted to do. He relies on a number of trusted emissaries to convey his decisions. Likewise, when he makes a decision, it is difficult for outsiders and insiders alike to know whose counsel (if any) Khamene'i sought, let alone heeded, to reach his conclusions. To some extent, this limitation is inherent in autocracies because the autocrat's views are decisive and it is never possible to know what is in another person's head. Consider one of the most infamous and closely scrutinized autocrats of all time. Even with two books written by his own hand (or at least dictated by his own mouth), dozens of memoirs written by those who knew him, scores of public speeches, and a welter of documents reflecting his decisions and orders, we still have an imperfect understanding of Adolf Hitler. And we know much less about Khamene'i's views than we do about Hitler's. The Ayatollah speaks in public, but his private views rarely ever reach those beyond
his closest circle of confidants—an ever-changing group, never large and often shrinking.

Khamene'i's secretive, personalized method of decision-making appears to stem from both his nature and his environment. He is said to be suspicious and conspiratorial even to the point of paranoia. This may well have been reinforced by his accession to power as a nonthreatening compromise whom few respected at the time. This was followed by a long struggle to become the master of Iran's political circus, during which his position and authority were repeatedly challenged from within the system and without.
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Yet Khamene'i remains a weak man in a strong position. His unique ability to act to overcome the inertia of the Iranian political system also entails the power to alienate those who do not favor his decisions to do so. Khamene'i has tried to minimize the numbers of people who could be angered by his rulings, often by not deciding at all or by issuing Delphic pronouncements open to widely varying interpretations. Obviously, such decisions reveal little about his true preferences.

For these reasons, we need to respect the limits of our knowledge when it comes to Iran. Unfortunately, that does not excuse us from making hard choices regarding Iran, but we must do so without any false confidence. Churchill famously called Russia a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but that image seems to fit modern Iran even better.

Our sense of humility regarding our ignorance about Iran should be reinforced by all of the times that we and so many others have gotten Iran wrong over the past three decades. In particular, every time that the United States has tried to influence Iran's internal political processes, we have ended up hurting the people we sought to help. From the Iran-Contra fiasco to President Clinton's failed bid at rapprochement to the Obama administration's Dual Track approach, the United States has tried to help the more moderate voices within the Iranian political system—and there
have
always been real moderates among Iran's political leadership—only to find that far from assisting the moderates, our efforts only undercut them. Our modesty about the limits of our knowledge should also be reinforced by our experiences with Iraq, especially
the stunning and terrible realization that Saddam had eliminated his weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion. We (and most of the world, including this author) missed it completely.

Our understanding of Iranian goals is imperfect, to say the least. The Islamic Republic has never published an authoritative statement of its goals. Ayatollah Khomeini wrote any number of things about what he hoped Iran would accomplish, but few of these were concrete. Many still seem well beyond Iran's current capacity. Khamene'i and his lieutenants have done little to enlighten the world regarding their ultimate aims. Moreover, we should recognize from the authoritative statements of foreign policy objectives regularly intoned by American officials that even formal enunciations of governmental goals often have little or nothing to do with actual goals. Thus, as always when we think about Iran, we have to acknowledge that when it comes to Tehran's goals, we don't really know and it depends.

Yet Iranian goals and the priority among them are critical to understanding both how we still might prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability (and the extent that that is still a possibility), and how Iran would behave if it were to acquire such a capability. If, for instance, Iran valued spreading its Islamic Revolution even more than the survival of the Iranian state, it would be both difficult to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability and difficult to deter Iranian aggression once Tehran acquired such a capability. Thus, we have no choice but to try, as best we can, to discern Iran's objectives from their behavior over the years.

PRESERVING THE ISLAMIC REGIME'S CONTROL OVER IRAN.
Whether their inspiration is ideological or venal, Iran's leaders are determined to hold on to power. The evidence suggests that this aim is their highest priority, as demonstrated by their willingness to use force (including mass arrests, torture, and large-scale killings) to hold power.

DEFENDING THE IRANIAN NATION FROM HARM.
In some ways, it is hard to know if this goal should come before or after preservation of the regime's control over Iran. Doubtless, the Iranian leadership seeks to save Iran and the Iranian people, to keep them safe from harm and to see them prosper. Over the years they have acted to defend Iran and Iranians from external attack. However, just as consistently, the clerical regime has willingly endured tremendous damage—damage to the Iranian nation and the Iranian people—in pursuit of other goals. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran suffered more than a half million casualties in pursuit of Ayatollah Khomeini's determination to “liberate” Baghdad, Mecca, and Jerusalem.
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Whether the current leadership would tolerate similar levels of misery inflicted on the Iranian people is uncertain, but it seems less likely. Khomeini is gone and his ideology commands much less reverence from many Iranians. Moreover, in 1988, when the leadership realized how much Iran would have to endure to continue the war, even Khomeini relented.
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REGIONAL HEGEMONY.
For more than 2,500 years, with only a six-hundred-year interruption for the (Arab) Islamic and Mongol conquests, Iran was the dominant power in southwest Asia. Heralded by Cyrus the Great's defeat of the Medes in 549
BC
, the Persian empire became the world's first superpower, the height of political, military, economic, and cultural civilization. The Seleucids, Parthians, Sassanids, Safavids, and Qajars that followed continued to dominate their corner of the world in a way that modern Iranians have been taught was something like the “natural” order. In their view, Iran is the greatest civilization in the region—far above the Turks, Arabs, Afghans, South Asians, and Central Asians, whom Iranians often hold in contempt. Whether by nature or divine provenance, a great many Iranians agree that Iran ought to be the dominant power, the hegemon of the region.

Few Iranians will come right out and say that they seek to be the regional hegemon. Instead they speak endlessly of “respect.” Of course, Iranians have difficulty defining what “respect” means to them.
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Often,
when Iranian officials are asked to explain what they mean by “respect,” the conversation devolves into puerile assertions that anything Iran does not like is a sign of “disrespect.” Obviously, this tack is not helpful and only reinforces the sense of Iran's neighbors that Iranian hegemony would be similarly undefined—and therefore potentially all-encompassing. It resurrects their traditional fears that Iran will want to choose their governments for them, if not control their territory outright.

Despite the ineffable quality of Iranian insistence that it should be the dominant power in the region, it seems unlikely that Iran seeks to conquer any of its neighbors outright—although the small, wealthy Gulf emirates might tempt Tehran if it were within Iran's power to grab them. Instead, it seems more likely that Iran seeks to ensure that all of the region's governments are friendly to it and subservient. That, rather than outright conquest, appears to be Iran's goal in places like Iraq and Lebanon.

What's more, Iran's determination to regain what it sees as its rightful place as the dominant force in southwest Asia extends beyond its immediate neighbors. Tehran appears to be of the opinion that any major event, dispute, or crisis in the Middle East is Iran's concern. Iran continues to insinuate itself into the Arab-Israeli confrontation, Lebanese politics, the Yemeni civil war, and even events in North Africa and the Balkans. Although Iran often has multiple motives for doing so, an important theme appears to be Tehran's determination to assert its importance.

SPREADING THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION.
For the first decade after the fall of the Shah, when Khomeini ruled Iran, spreading his Islamic Revolution may have been Iran's highest priority. Today, for the majority of Iranians, that is no longer the case. Many would like to see less of Khomeini's revolution at home and have no interest in seeing it spread abroad. But Iranian opinion runs a gamut. At least some Iranians continue to see the spread of their Islamic Revolution as not just relevant, but imperative. For them, Iran must be willing to continue to make sacrifices for the sake of spreading the revolution and seeing their vision
of God's will enacted.
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A significant number of influential Iranian policymakers—typically referred to as radical hardliners, principalists, or ultraconservatives—seem to share that view. In Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, this view predominates among the senior officers, as it does with numerous key figures in Iran's parliament (the Majles), judiciary, and intelligence services.
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Where things get tricky with this goal, however, is that it is often difficult to distinguish between spreading the Islamic Revolution and the more traditional Iranian (and Persian) goal of regional dominance. Especially for many of Iran's hardliners, the policies they advocate are often consistent with both goals, and they seem to use arguments related to one or the other interchangeably. Iranian hardliners favor aid to the oppressed Shi'a majority of Bahrain as a way to spread the Islamic Revolution, in the expectation that the Bahraini Shi'a will be able to overthrow their king just as the Iranians overthrew the Shah. Yet they also see it as a way of increasing Iranian regional sway, as they expect that a new Shi'i government in Bahrain would be deferential to, and dependent on, Tehran. Which motive is stronger? Do Iranian hardliners recognize a difference between these arguments? We don't know, and it likely varies from hardliner to hardliner.

In addition to the role Khamene'i plays to obscure the workings of the Iranian regime to outsiders, the Supreme Leader is important to the story of Iran's nuclear program in a number of other ways. In particular, as the most powerful decision-maker in the Iranian system by far, what Khamene'i wants from the nuclear program matters a great deal, and it may be all that matters. Although we don't know a lot about Khamene'i's views at any given time, we do know some. More than that, we have a sense of his general approach to important topics that bear on Iran's nuclear program and how Iran might behave with a nuclear arsenal.