by TARIQ ALI
The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’
The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.
Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.
Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.
Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisors (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad.
Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.
Most of these forces were under the indirect command Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true:
He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.
Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.
Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.
In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the runup to that year’s election.
At the time, I argued inthe Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:
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