Unthinkable (6 page)

Meanwhile, Iran continues to battle the United States and its allies across the Middle East. In Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, the Iranians provide extensive support to various armed groups. In Syria, Iran is among the last backers of Bashar al-Asad's faction, technically still the Syrian government, but in truth just the (Shi'i) Alawi community and other minorities waging a civil war against mostly Sunni opposition forces. In Lebanon, Iran continues to support Hizballah, which, thanks to spillover from the Syrian civil war, is increasingly in conflict again with Sunni (and Maronite Christian) factions supported by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf states. In Iraq, the Iranians back a range of Shi'i groups that employ violence against Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, and one another. Likewise, Iran still supports Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (although Hamas has distanced itself from Iran since the Arab Spring) in their struggles against Israel and the more moderate Palestinian leadership represented by Fatah. However, with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Iran's only direct confrontation with the United States is in Afghanistan, where the Quds force has provided money, weapons, explosives, and other support to the Taliban and other Afghan groups, albeit not at the same level as it did in Iraq.
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UNDERMINING THE STATUS QUO IN THE MIDDLE EAST.
So far, Iranian foreign policy has singularly failed to achieve its goal of dominating southwest Asia. Especially before the Arab Spring, when Tehran's leadership looked out at the world, they probably found little solace. Tehran had few friends in the Middle East—or Central or South Asia. Across the Middle East, nearly all of the states of the region, and all of its most powerful states, were not aligned with Iran. They were aligned with the United States. Turkey, Israel, and all of the strongest Arab states (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan)
were American allies. Iran had Syria, Hizballah (which had secured tacit control of Lebanon), and Hamas (which controlled Gaza). Iran had made important inroads in Iraq and was more influential there than the United States by 2011, but Iraq was no Iranian vassal, and Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki tried to push back on Iranian pressure. The status quo across the region favored the United States and threatened Iran.

Consequently, virtually anything that threatened to overturn the status quo was positive from Tehran's perspective. It seemed that it was impossible for them to imagine that the geopolitics of the region could get worse for them, given that they had almost nothing.

The Arab Spring, when it came, was thus something of a rude awakening for Tehran. Initially, the Iranians embraced it readily, seeing it as the end of the old Middle Eastern status quo and likely to bring to power regimes far more sympathetic to Tehran. The Iranian leadership appeared to believe that the Islamist movements poised to triumph across the Arab world if the dictators and monarchs were pushed out would be sympathetic to Iran's own Islamist regime. Instead, Iran has found that the Sunni Arab Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and are threatening to do so in Jordan, Syria, Libya, and Kuwait (each in different ways), have no love for the Persian Shi'a.
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Moreover, Tehran fears that the Syrian civil war will end with the destruction of their allies, the Alawite regime. Syria is roughly 80 percent Sunni, and the opposition militias are being armed and equipped by the Gulf states and Turkey with more limited assistance from the United States and the Europeans.
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All of this suggests that the opposition will eventually prevail over the remnants of the regime (really just the Alawite community and several other Syrian minorities, such as the Kurds and Druse, all of whom fear being slaughtered if the Sunnis prevail).

The Syrian conflict has created serious problems for the Iranians even beyond the unpleasant prospect of losing their one real, national ally in the Middle East. The Syrian civil war, coming on top of the Iraqi civil war of 2005–2007, has exacerbated the Sunni-Shi'a split across the region. The animosity has taken a firm hold on the Sunni side, where the Saudis, Jordanians,
Moroccans, Gulf emirates, and even Egypt and Tunisia increasingly see the Arab world as besieged by Iranian-backed Shi'i chauvinists (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) and revolutionaries (Bahrain and the heavily Shi'a eastern province of Saudi Arabia).
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For the Sunni states, this looks like a region-wide Sunni-Shi'a war, and while Syria may be the main battlefield right now, it is only one of many. The Iranians fear that the emergence of this view is rallying both Sunni governments and populations against them in ways that it had not in the past. Hamas, which is Sunni fundamentalist, has distanced itself from Iran as a result of it, and Hizballah (which is Shi'a) tried hard for many months not to choose a side for fear of galvanizing Lebanon's Sunni and Christian communities into action against them.

SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM AND UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE.
Supporting both terrorist attacks and unconventional warfare campaigns
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has been a cardinal element of Iranian foreign policy from the earliest days of the Islamic Republic. At first the regime killed Iranian dissidents living abroad, backed a variety of efforts to overthrow the Iraqi, Saudi, Bahraini, and Kuwaiti governments, and organized various Lebanese Shi'i terrorist and militia groups into Hizballah. Iran has mounted or backed acts of terrorism against Israelis both in Israel and abroad. The regime has attacked American soldiers in Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan
and American diplomats in Lebanon and Kuwait. It has provided assistance to other violent extremist groups across the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Asia. It has enabled al-Qa'ida terrorist operations against Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, and Saudis. In recent years, Iran has added another form of covert warfare to its arsenal: cyberwarfare, which it has reportedly employed against American and Gulf Arab institutions.
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This persistent campaign serves to defend the regime against its foreign foes and, as the Iranian leadership seems to see it, to prevent their adversaries from threatening them at home. Thus, beginning in 2011, Iran unleashed a new campaign of covert attacks to try to deter and prevent what it perceives as a joint American-Israeli-Gulf Arab campaign to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program through similar methods. As part of this, Iran is believed to have been responsible for terrorist attacks on Israeli officials in Georgia and India, on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, and for cyberattacks on the United States and the Gulf Arabs.
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Moreover, as noted above, Tehran typically sees anything that undermines the status quo as beneficial to reorienting the geopolitics of its neighborhood in a favorable way. Overthrowing governments that oppose Iran or ally with the United States (which Tehran often considers the same) and otherwise putting Washington and the conservative Arab states on the defensive can also help prevent them from going on the offensive against Iran.

These points also highlight a common misunderstanding about Iranian support for terrorists, namely that the Iranians always (or even generally) support Shi'i groups. This confusion stems from the misperception that Iran's only goal is to spread the revolution and that Iranian leaders conceive of the revolution as being a Shi'i phenomenon. Neither is correct. Certainly many of Iran's hardline leaders do believe in spreading the revolution, but that is only one of several motives, and the priority that each assigns to that goal seems to vary. Although many Iranian hardliners are Shi'a chauvinists, Khomeini's ideology saw the revolution as pan-Islamist, and therefore embracing Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi, and other, more nondenominational Muslims. More than this, Iran has never allowed ideology to determine which violent extremists to support. Because of
Tehran's emphasis both on defending itself and overturning the regional status quo, Iran has been ecumenical about its support to terrorists and other violent extremists, helping out Shi'a groups (such as Hizballah and Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq), Sunni groups (such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even some indirect support to al-Qa'ida itself), secular Marxists (the anti-Turkish PKK and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Christians (Armenian guerrillas fighting the Shi'i Azeris), and others.
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Iran often finds it easiest to work with Shi'i groups because the Shi'a tend to be more receptive to Iranian offers, but the Iranians have shown a willingness to work with anyone interested in overturning the status quo and damaging the United States and its allies. And it is worth noting that many of the Sunni fundamentalist groups that Iran has provided aid to—including the Taliban—are insanely anti-Shi'a, loathing them as heretics, and spewing far more venom against them than at infidel Christians and Jews. In some cases, the Iranians have even supported non-Muslims fighting Muslims (even fighting Shi'i Muslims), and Sunnis fighting Shi'a (like al-Qa'ida in Iraq). In short, the Iranians are not fussy when it comes to violent extremists. Anyone willing to wreak havoc on the prevailing order is typically good enough for Tehran, regardless of the group's ostensible aims.

HATRED OF ISRAEL.
Iran's leadership seems to vary in its feelings about Israel, from passive distaste to genocidal loathing.
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Ayatollah Khomeini was both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist, and his beliefs have influenced his followers and successors. Khamene'i and other Iranian leaders fulminate against Israel. At times this posture is an adjunct of their anti-Americanism, treating Israel as the “little Satan” to America's “Great Satan” and deriding the Jewish state as an offense inflicted upon the Muslim world by the United States and the West.
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Nevertheless, Iran still has a small Jewish population that is among the largest left in the Muslim world.
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Other Iranians harbor little animosity toward Israel or Jews in general, and some even speak wistfully of the clandestine Iranian-Israeli relationship that existed during the Shah's era (and
led to the Israelis' clandestine agency Mossad helping the Shah to build his fearsome SAVAK intelligence service).
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For the most part, after the revolution, Iran saw Israel as a distant obscenity rather than an imminent threat. Iran would lash out at Israel whenever it was convenient to do so, and embraced the Arab-Muslim cause against the Jewish state with great vigor for ideological reasons, but also because doing so allowed them to ingratiate themselves with the Arabs and other Muslims. It also gave them a seat at the table of a key Middle Eastern dispute.
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That the international community did not punish Israel for its acquisition of a nuclear capability has allowed Tehran to cry hypocrisy and claim that the Western campaign against Iran's nuclear program is nothing but a Jewish conspiracy.
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Since 2002, however, Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon has changed the nature of the Iranian-Israeli relationship. It is not clear how the Iranian leadership saw its acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability affecting its relationship with Israel. However, the Israeli leadership perceived it to be a grave threat to the Jewish state because of Iran's support for terrorism against Israel, its own terror attacks against Israelis, and its ferocious rhetoric against Israel. As Jerusalem demanded international action to prevent Iran from acquiring this capability and threatened to attack Iran's nuclear sites preventively, Tehran's perception of the danger from Israel changed.
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Still, Iran's senior-most leaders—particularly Khamene'i—have been careful to indicate only that they would retaliate for any Israeli attack, avoiding any indication that they want nuclear weapons to attack Israel. Ahmadinejad's stupid and undisciplined comments are the exceptions that prove the rule.

There is no question that Iran now feels a growing sense of threat from Israel, where formerly Tehran had felt none. The most obvious manifestation of that threat is the covert war going on between Iran and Israel, with both sides conducting terror attacks against the other and both governments lashing out at each other on a regular basis. But the Iranians also appear to believe that the Israelis (and the Saudi Mukhabarat, CIA, and MI6) have been encouraging Iran's unhappy minority groups such as the Baluch, Arabs, and Kurds to resist the regime.
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It is likely that Iran has
been encouraging Hizballah and the various Palestinian terrorist groups to ratchet up their attacks on Israel as well, but all of them now have their own problems created by the Arab Spring and all feel the need to distance themselves or to concentrate on their own internal problems rather than picking a fight with the Israelis.

Overall, and particularly since 2009, Iranian foreign policy has largely hewed to the hardline perspective, but Iran has mostly pursued its objectives in a pragmatic and even restrained manner. It has continued to defy the international community in pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability, and despite punishing international and multilateral sanctions, it has shown no willingness to improve relations with the United States. It has clung to its ally in the Syrian regime, no matter how many civilians the regime slaughters or how isolated it becomes from other nations. Although Iran does not appear to be courting a sectarian war across the Middle East, neither has it backed down, challenging the Sunni champions of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Jordan, Morocco, and Turkey, and supporting Shi'i groups in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen.

Although in some areas Iranian policy toward the United States and its allies has been aggressive (and unprovoked), in other areas it has been passive or merely reactive. To some extent, in the conflict in Afghanistan and before that to a much greater extent in Iraq, Iran went on the offensive, providing support to a variety of groups willing to kill Americans. The Iranian regime can claim perverse responsibility for a considerable number of the 6,500 American military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Iran has also been the defender at other times, fending off assassinations, sabotage, and cyberattacks that Tehran believes to have been the work of the United States, Israel, Britain, and Saudi Arabia. Even here, Iran's efforts to retaliate and deter further attacks have shown the mark of its dominant hardline leadership, with the Arbabsiar plot standing out as a serious potential miscalculation. Indeed, the Iranians might
have gotten lucky: had they succeeded in blowing up Café Milano, they may have killed dozens and injured scores—on American soil. It seems most likely that, in the post-9/11 United States, it would have been difficult if not impossible for President Obama to have resisted public pressure for massive military retaliation against Iran for a brazen terrorist attack on American soil.