Unthinkable (5 page)

Regardless of what outsiders believed, a great many Iranians concluded that the vote was rigged. They took to the streets to protest, and those protests swelled to numbers and passions not seen since 1979 and the last Iranian revolution. Within a matter of days, hundreds of thousands, even millions of Iranians were pouring into the streets of Tehran and a dozen other cities to protest the stolen election.
³³
Most stunning of all, the protests escalated from demanding that the election results be overturned to demanding the overthrow of the regime itself. Although the leaders of the revolt mostly sought only to reform the system, the young people who made up its rank and file demanded a much more radical overhaul. Iranians stood on their rooftops and shouted “death to the dictator” to the night sky, as they had in 1978–79. But this time they meant Khamene'i, not the Shah.

This was no mere wave of protests such as Iran had experienced periodically since the 1990s. It was a determined—if unplanned—effort to bring about a revolution against what had become an oppressive and sclerotic autocracy, anticipating the revolutions of the Arab Spring by two years. The would-be revolutionaries took the name the Green Movement, echoing the “color revolutions” of Eastern Europe that overthrew the communist dictatorships there, but choosing the color of Islam, green, the color of the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad.

The scale and anger of the Green Revolution caught the regime off guard. To find so many sick of their misrule stunned the Iranian leadership, and initially split the regime. All of Iran's leaders seemed to recognize that they faced the greatest challenge to their power since 1979. But they were divided over how to respond. The more moderate and pragmatic members of the regime, such as former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, argued for reform and reconciliation. They urged Khamene'i to reach out to the revolutionaries and make concessions to them, principally by agreeing to greater transparency, representation, and pluralism coupled with reduced political and social strictures. Predictably, this suggestion horrified the hardline and conservative wings of the regime. They reportedly warned that giving in to the revolutionaries even a little bit would be opening Pandora's box, placing the regime on a path that would lead to their overthrow. They warned that making concessions, showing weakness as they saw it, was the mistake the Shah had made—and why they now ruled in Tehran rather than the Shah. They argued for a crackdown to crush the incipient revolution.

The debate within the regime appears to have been fierce, but not lengthy. Khamene'i seems to have made his decision within a few days, and he sided with the hardliners.
³⁴
Within a week or so of the disputed election, Iran's Law Enforcement Forces (LEF), backed by the government-sponsored goon squad called Ansar-e Hizballah and elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia, smashed the would-be revolution. They shut down Internet and cell phone service to black out the social networking systems that the Greens had used to
coordinate their activities. They arrested all of the opposition leaders along with thousands more; they beat up hundreds, if not thousands, and killed perhaps as many as a hundred for good measure—often at random to drive home to the revolutionaries that anyone involved with the Greens might pay the ultimate price.
³⁵
Within a few more weeks, they had snuffed out the Green Revolution and driven the movement underground.

The public suppression of the Green Movement was only part of the hardline reaction to the events of June 2009. Along with the counterrevolution came the purge. Some have called it a “coup” because it was executed by the Revolutionary Guard leadership and resulted in their political elevation. But it was much more an old-fashioned Stalinist purge than a coup, authorized and encouraged by the Supreme Leader to get rid of a troublesome segment of the Iranian political elite.
³⁶
In an unusual move, the Supreme Leader and his allies in the IRGC, the Majles, and the judiciary moved to root out the moderate and pragmatic elements within the Iranian leadership. Some were stripped of titles and authorities, including even Rafsanjani, who was not reelected as the head of the Assembly of Experts. Others were arrested, placed under house arrest, or had their children (many of whom had joined the Greens) arrested. Still others were excluded from the conversations that mattered within the government—the personalized discourse that is the warp and weft of Iranian governance.
³⁷
When Ahmadinejad submitted the names of his new cabinet in September 2009, seven of the twenty-one ministers named (including the ministers of defense, intelligence, interior, Islamic guidance, and oil) were former IRGC personnel. Many others had ties to Iranian intelligence and security agencies.
³⁸

As a result, the Iranian leadership that emerged from the fires of the 2009 Green revolt is a far more homogeneous and hardline coven than any since 1981. In Takeyh's words, “In today's Islamic Republic, all moderate voices have been excised from the corridors of power, and the debates of the previous decades have been displaced by a consensus among a narrow cast of militant actors.”
³⁹
Or as Sadjadpour has put it, the Iranian political spectrum “now ranges from pitch black to charcoal
grey.”
⁴⁰
They still had disputes—it is Iran, after all—particularly between Ahmadinejad and his coterie on the one hand, and the rest of the Iranian political establishment on the other. However, these are now debates between the Iranian right and its far right. Moreover, these have often been disputes about personality and power masquerading as arguments over substance.
⁴¹
On issues of policy, particularly foreign policy, the disputes have tended to be over tactics and limits, to the extent there have been any differences at all. For instance, Ahmadinejad had shown an interest in cutting a deal with the Americans on nuclear issues, but only on his terms, and reportedly only to claim that he had tamed the Great Satan when no one else could.

Not surprisingly, the triumph of Iran's hardliners since 2009 has been reflected in Iran's foreign policy. However, it has been tempered by Khamene'i's own approach to Iran's external affairs, producing a practice different from what the hardest of the hardliners might have pursued if left to their own devices. As a result, there has been a noticeable shift to the right, but it has been a matter of degree, as Khamene'i remains the consistent polestar of Iranian strategy.

OFFENSIVE DEFENSE OR DEFENSIVE OFFENSE?
One of the great unknowns of Iranian foreign policy, especially since the hardline consolidation of 2009, is whether it is an offensive strategy with defensive components, or defensive with offensive components. Is Iran's support for various terrorist groups an effort to weaken its adversaries to allow Iran to make gains at their expense? Or is it meant to weaken Iran's adversaries to hinder them from attacking Iran? Or might it be both? Iranian actions are consistent with both, and different Iranian leaders suggest one or the other—or both—on differing occasions. Nevertheless, the answer is important because it would provide an intimation as to whether Iran seeks
a nuclear capability to prevent aggression against it or to enable its own aggression against others.
⁴²

BATTLING THE GREAT SATAN.
One of the defining features of Iran's hardline streak is its abiding hatred of the United States. This hatred is no by-product of other Iranian goals, but a distinct strand. When Khomeini branded the United States the “Great Satan,” that rhetoric was not an idle put-down. He meant it. Khomeini had a Manichean philosophy (and it is worth noting that Manes, from whose name the word
manichean
derives, was a Persian who conceived of the world as being divided into good and evil). This worldview characterized human history as a struggle between the forces of God/good and Satan/evil. For Khomeini, the United States was the devil's champion while Iran was God's. To this was added the traditional Iranian mistrust of foreigners, which after World War II and the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (toppled in a coup aided by the CIA) became largely focused on the United States as the external force subverting, controlling, and suppressing the Iranian people for its own benefit. These twin strands of ferocious anti-Americanism make up one of the critical pillars of the Islamic Republic's worldview.
⁴³

This concern may have faded or even been discarded for the moderate and pragmatic elements of the Iranian elite, but for its most zealous adherents, it remains gospel. As Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, one of the hardest of the hardliners and a member of the powerful Council of Guardians, said in 2007, “When all is said and done, we are an anti-American regime. America is our enemy and we are the enemies of America.”
⁴⁴
It is also clear that the hardliners continue to stoke the fire of anti-Americanism to legitimize their own increasingly autocratic rule. Indeed, Jannati also said in January 2009, “If we are to assure that the Islamic establishment, the revolution and Islam are to stay and the people are to live comfortably, the flag of the struggle against America should always stay hoisted.”
⁴⁵

Although Khamene'i shares the hatred, fear, and distrust of the United
States, he appears to prefer a more pragmatic policy toward America than others, particularly the leadership of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. The tendency of key actors within the system—particularly the Guard—to freelance appears most often when it comes to Iranian anti-Americanism. This tension makes it hard to sort out just how much consensus there is in Tehran for conducting various attacks on the United States. We know that attacks occur. What we do not know is whether the most provocative attacks are conducted by freelancers or sanctioned by the highest authority, and if the latter, did they represent the farthest that Khamene'i was willing to go, or (as seems likely with the IRGC leaders) was it a compromise position to maintain a consensus with more risk-tolerant elements of the regime? This question may seem esoteric, but it looms large when nuclear weapons enter the mix.

In the fall of 2011, the attorney general of the United States announced the arrest of Mansour J. Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen and the cousin of Gholam Shakuri, a high-ranking officer in the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The Quds force (named for Jerusalem, “al-Quds” in Arabic and Farsi) is the arm of the IRGC that conducts terror attacks, supports terrorist groups and other violent extremists, wages unconventional warfare beyond Iran's borders, and exports the Iranian Revolution abroad. As best we understand the operation, Arbabsiar's cousin asked him to make contact with various Mexican drug cartels to try to hire one of them to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. Arbabsiar arranged for the Los Zetas cartel to bomb a popular restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Café Milano while Ambassador al-Jubeir was having dinner there. When all of the preparations were in place, his cousin from the Quds force told him to execute the operation. It never happened. Arbabsiar's Los Zetas contact was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. government caught Arbabsiar with extensive evidence of his guilt.
⁴⁶
American officials then taped a conversation between Arbabsiar and Shakuri in which the latter told Arbabsiar about killing al-Jubeir, “[j]ust do it quickly, it's late.”
⁴⁷
Ultimately, Arbabsiar confessed and pled guilty to the charges in October 2012.
⁴⁸

There is a lot we don't know about the plot. The U.S. government is confident that the operation was ordered by high-ranking officials of the Quds force. However, they have never indicated that they know that the operation was blessed by Iran's highest political leadership (including Khamene'i). In the past, Khamene'i
did
have to approve all terrorist operations abroad, and in 1997, a German court had sufficient evidence to conclude that Khamene'i had ordered the killing of four Iranian Kurdish dissident leaders in a Berlin restaurant (the Mykonos) in 1992.
⁴⁹
So either the Iranians have gotten better at concealing Khamene'i's involvement in such activities, or the Quds force was freelancing.

Either way, it seems likely that the attempted killing of Ambassador al-Jubeir was in retaliation for the assassination of several Iranian scientists connected to Tehran's nuclear and missile programs.
⁵⁰
And either way, it represents an important escalation in Iranian attacks on the United States. In the past, Tehran had always steered clear of attacking the U.S. homeland, for fear that doing so would trigger an American conventional military response, which the Iranians fear. During the so-called Tanker War of 1987–88, Iran attempted to block the oil exports of the Gulf emirates for their support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, prompting American air and naval intervention. Iran's naval forces clashed with the U.S. Navy, only to take severe losses in several encounters with only a tiny fraction of America's armed forces.
⁵¹
That experience has taught Iran to respect U.S. conventional power. Despite glib assertions to the contrary, Iran has avoided provoking an American military retaliation against Iran since then. At least until the Arbabsiar incident.

What has changed, if anything, remains unclear. Was the Quds force freelancing to provoke a war with the United States and the international community? Was it Khamene'i signaling his desperate fear that his rule was being undermined by America's soft war? Or the belief that the United States was killing his nuclear scientists? And how much did it represent an Iranian assessment that the Obama administration would never retaliate, either because it was seen as weak or so determined to end America's military involvement in the Middle East that it would never
start down a path that could end in a full-scale war between the United States and the Islamic Republic? Moreover, why was it not repeated—and is that a sign that it was a rogue operation that won't recur now that the senior leadership is aware of what almost happened? We don't know the answers, but know that they would tell us a great deal if we did.