Tomgram: Danny Sjursen,
Beating the War Drums... Again
Posted by Danny Sjursen at
7:46am, May 30, 2017.
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You couldn't make this up,
could you?
Just before President Trump’s
recent visit to Saudi Arabia, a genuinely despotic land with an extreme
ideology and lacking elections, Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, was
swept back into office. It was an exuberant election campaign in which he
trounced a hardline fundamentalist opponent, winning 57% of
the vote. Voter turnout was reportedly close to 73%, which, by the way, beat turnout in the 2016 American
presidential election by about 18%.
In Riyadh, addressing an “Arab Islamic American summit,” Trump had no
words of sympathy or encouragement for any “victims” in Saudi Arabia. He
was, however, little short of effusive on the Iranian “victims” who had just
voted in that election. “The Iranian regime’s longest-suffering victims,”
he said, “are its own people. Iran has a rich history and culture, but the
people of Iran have endured hardship and despair under their leaders’ reckless
pursuit of conflict and terror.” Undoubtedly with the hardships of the
Iranian people in mind, he also came bearing a gift for the Saudis who now live
with an increasingly brutal quagmire of a war in neighboring Yemen: $110 billion in shiny, “beautiful” new American weaponry of every sort and the
implicit threat to Iran that some of those weapons might, in the future, be
used against its military.
In response to the American
presidential visit, Rouhani commented sardonically, “Mr. Trump arrived in the region at
the time when he saw 45 million Iranians participating in the elections. Then
he visited a country that I doubt knows the definition of elections. The poor
things have never seen a ballot box.” In what might be taken as a
backhanded reference to Trump’s 2016 campaign claims that the Saudis were behind the 9/11 attacks, he
added, “I do not think the American people are ready to trade the lives they
lost in September 11th with billions of dollars gained through weapons sales.”
As it happens, from CIA
Director Mike Pompeo to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the Trump
administration is filled with figures who seem to believe that, of all the
countries in the Greater Middle East, Iran has the least in common with the United States and is
the greatest threat to it. Back in 2010, when he was still head of U.S.
Central Command, for instance, then-General Mattis reportedly responded to a
query from President Obama about the top three threats in his vast area of
responsibility by saying, “Number one: Iran. Number two: Iran. Number three:
Iran.” According to the Washington Post, before the White House
reined him in, Mattis was also preparing to launch a “dead-of-night” attack on
Iran to take out a power plant or an oil refinery (his idea of a measured
response to Iranian-armed Iraqi Shiite militias then killing American
soldiers). Little has seemingly changed since, except that Iran’s unique evil
and the dangers it poses to the U.S. have emerged as something of an idée fixe
of the new president, not just his commanders.
Today, TomDispatch regular Army Major Danny Sjursen, author of Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of
the Surge, explores the irrationality of Washington’s thinking when it
comes to Iran, an obsessive hysteria that could lead to yet another
catastrophic American conflict in the Greater Middle East. Tom
America’s Iran Hysteria
The Irrationality of Iran
Vilification
“Everywhere you look, if there
is trouble in the region,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis told
reporters on a mid-April visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, “you find Iran.”
I must admit that when I
stumbled across that quote it brought up uncomfortable personal memories.
East Baghdad, January 25,
2007: my patrol had missed a turn and so we swung onto the next grimy avenue
instead. As platoon leader, I rode shotgun in the second of our four
vehicles, yakking away on the radio. The ensuing explosion rocked the
senses: the sound, the blinding dust, and the smell -- a mix of burnt metal
and, well... I still can’t bring myself to describe it.
Our lead HMMWV, a military
utility vehicle, aimlessly swerved right and came to rest beside a telephone
pole. Only then did the screams begin.
The “cost” would be two
wounded and two dead: my then-unborn son’s namesakes, Specialist Michael
Balsley and Sergeant Alexander Fuller. These were our first, but not
last, fatalities. Nothing was ever the same again. I’m reminded of poet Dylan Thomas’s line: “After the first death, there is
no other.”
The local militia had shredded
our truck with an advanced type of improvised explosive device that was then
just hitting the streets of Baghdad -- an explosively formed projectile, or
EFP. These would ultimately kill hundreds of American troops. Those EFPs and the
requisite training to use them were provided to Iraqi militias by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It’s a detail I’m not likely to forget.
Still, there’s one major
problem with bold, sweeping pronouncements (laced with one’s own prejudices) of
the sort Secretary of Defense Mattis recently offered on Iran: they’re almost
always wrong. It’s the essential flaw of “lumping” -- that is, of folding
countless events or ideas into one grand theory. But, boy, does it sound
profound! The truth is that Iran is simply not behind most of the turmoil
in the Middle East, and until Washington’s policymakers change their
all-Iran-all-the-time mental model, they are doomed to failure. One thing
is guaranteed: they are going to misdiagnose the patient and attack the wrong
disease.
Look, I’m emotionally invested
myself. After all, I fought Iranian-trained militiamen, but a serious,
workable national strategy shouldn’t rely on such emotion. It demands a
detached, rational calculus. With that in mind, perhaps this is the
moment -- before the misdiagnosis sets in further -- to take a fresh look at
the nature of America’s thorny relationship with Iran and the Islamic
Republic’s true place in the pantheon of American problems in the Greater
Middle East.
Let’s start this way: How many
Americans even realize that there are only three countries in the world with which their country has
no ongoing diplomatic relations at all? Actually, the number was four until the
Obama administration began slowly normalizing
bilateral ties with one longtime member of the naughty list: Cuba. How
many could name the three remaining states on that roll of shame? The
first and easiest to guess is surely North Korea; the most obscure is Bhutan
(the “Switzerland of the Himalayas”). And, yes, of course, last but by no
means least is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Think of all the scoundrels
not on that list: Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; our Pakistani “frenemy”; Vladimir
Putin’s Russia; Equatorial Guinea with its craven, 40-year dictator, accused of cannibalism; and, until 2012, Bashar al-Assad’s
grim Syrian regime. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. kept an embassy in
the Soviet Union and it similarly maintained formal relations with apartheid
South Africa. As of 2014, the State Department officially dealt with
nine-tenths of the globe’s most abusive regimes, according to the Human Rights Risk Atlas.
So, is the secretary of
defense correct? Is Iran really behind all regional trouble in the Greater
Middle East?
Hardly. In fact, such an
assertion -- and the language of absolutes that goes with it -- is by
definition problematic. In a Washington filled with Iranophobes, the demonization of that country
is already a commonplace of everyday political chatter and it almost invariably
rests on three inflated assumptions about Iran’s menacing nature: that it is on
an eternal quest to develop and perhaps employ nuclear weapons (especially
against Israel); that it massively supports regional “terrorists” and their
proxies; and that it regularly exhibits an unquenchable desire to establish its
regional hegemony by force of arms. All three suppositions rest on
another faulty assumption: that Iran has a straightforwardly dictatorial system
of fundamentalism led by irrational “mad
mullahs.”
Let’s consider each of these
propositions.
The Iran Exaggeration
Close your eyes for a moment
and imagine a Middle Eastern country -- no, not Israel -- but one with a
sizeable, protected Jewish community, a place where Islam is the state religion
but its president regularly tweets Rosh Hashanah greetings for the Jewish New Year.
Sounds like somebody’s wild
fantasy, but it’s actually Iran. In fact, the Islamic Republic sets aside one
mandatory seat in its parliament for a Jew, three for Christians, and another for a Zoroastrian.
It would be a mistake to conclude from such token gestures that Iran is a
paragon of tolerance. But they do speak to the complexity of a diverse
society full of paradox and contradiction.
It certainly is a land in
which hardline fundamentalists chant “Death to America!” It’s also a country
with an increasingly young, educated populace that holds remarkably positive
views of Americans. In fact, whatever you might imagine, Americans
tend to have significantly more negative
views of Iran than vice versa. Don’t be shocked, but Iranians hold
more positive views of the U.S. government than do the citizens of Washington's
allies like Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. In reality,
there’s long been a worrying paradox in the region: an inverse relationship
between the amiability of a government’s relationship with Washington and the
favorability ratings of this country among its people.
In other words, when it comes
to Iran... well, it’s complicated. The trouble is that Americans
generally don’t do nuance. We like our bad guys to be foreign and
unmistakably vile, even if such a preference for digestible simplicity makes
for poor policy.
If you want to grasp this
point more fully, just think about Secretary of Defense Mattis’s recent
statement again. He assures us that Iran’s shadow hovers over every regional
crisis in the Middle East, which is empirically false. Here, for
instance, are just a few recent conflicts that Iran is not behind or where its
role has been exaggerated:
* The Arab Spring and the
subsequent chaos in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Iran didn’t start or
significantly influence the uprisings in those countries.
* Turkey’s decades-long war
with separatist Kurds in its southeast provinces. Again, not Iran.
* The ongoing spread of
al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria and on the Arabian
Peninsula. Iran actually abhors such groups, and certainly wasn’t
behind their rise.
* Or, if you want, take Yemen,
since supposed Iranian meddling in the Middle East’s poorest state happens to be one of the favorite drums
Washington’s Iranophobic hawks like to beat. And yet a range of credible reports
suggest that the much-decried collusion between Iran and the Houthi rebels, who
are the focus of the Saudi war in that country, is highly exaggerated.
Look, Iran is a significant,
if often thwarted and embattled, regional power and a player, sometimes even a
destabilizing one, in various regional conflagrations. It supports
proxies, funds partner states, and sometimes intervenes in the region, even
sending in its own military units (think Syria). Then again, so does
Saudi Arabia (Yemen and, in funding terms, elsewhere), the United Arab Emirates
(Yemen), Russia (Syria), and the United States (more or less everywhere).
So who’s destabilizing whom and why almost invariably turns out to be a matter
of perspective.
The State Department and
various other government agencies regularly label Iran the world’s leading “state sponsor of terrorism”
-- and that couldn’t sound more menacing or impressively official and
authoritative. Yet to tag Iran as #1 on any terror list is misleading
indeed. The questions worth asking are: Which terrorists? What
constitutes terrorism? Do those “terror” outfits truly threaten the U.S.
homeland?
As a start, in 2016, the State
Department’s annual survey of worldwide terrorism labeled ISIS -- not Iran, Hezbollah, or the Houthis -- as
"the greatest [terror] threat globally." How do we square that
“greatest sponsor” stamp with an Iran that has proven both thoroughly hostile
to and deeply invested in the fight against ISIS and various
al-Qaeda-linked groups in Iraq and Syria?
Iran does support Hezbollah in
Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. However, lumping
regionally focused nationalist organizations like Hezbollah with genuine global
jihadist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda (in its proliferating forms) is
deceptive, often purposely so. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, for example,
is largely fixated on Israel, but has sometimes even fought ISIS in Lebanon and Syria. In other words,
Hezbollah, though it had previously attacked U.S. troops in the region, isn’t sending its
operatives to crash planes into American buildings.
To think of it another way,
more foreign ISIS volunteers hail from Belgium or the Maldives Islands than from Iran.
In fact, most of the top sources of ISIS’s foreign recruits (Tunisia, Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, and Jordan) turn out to be “friendly” American “partners.” From
1975 to 2015, Iranian-born terrorists inflicted zero deaths in attacks on U.S. soil. In
contrast, citizens of key U.S. allies -- Saudis, Egyptians, and Lebanese -- killed thousands on 9/11. In fact, since then, 85% of domestic terrorists turned out to be American
citizens or permanent residents. Most were American-born. Of the 13
U.S. citizens involved in such fatal terror attacks, none were
Iranian-American.
As to the charge that Iran is by nature an aggressive
power, there can be little question that the Islamic Republic aggressively
pursues its regional interests. That, however, by no means makes its
moves automatically antagonistic to Washington’s interests in the region.
If anything, as a Pentagon assessment concluded in 2014, its military strategy is
ultimately defensive in nature and based on a feeling of being threatened,
which makes sense when you think about it. After all, when it comes to
American power -- from the 1953 CIA-British coup that overthrew Iran’s elected prime
minister and installed the autocratic Shah to Washington’s support for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein in his war of
aggression against Tehran (1980-1988) to the present administration’s all-in support for the autocratic Saudis in an anti-Iranian
partnership, they have legitimate reasons to feel threatened.
In addition, unlikely as it
may seem to most Americans, on certain issues like a Taliban-free Afghanistan, the U.S. and Iran actually have
had converging, if complex, interests. Additionally, though Iran once promoted
Iraqi Shiite militias that attacked and killed U.S. troops (including my
soldiers, Mike Balsley and Alex Fuller), today, both countries desire a relatively stable, ISIS-free Iraq. None of this is
easy to swallow (least of all by me), but prudent strategy demands a
dispassionate, rational assessment of inherently emotional issues.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Iran, that’s hardly an American predilection at
the moment.
The Company We Keep
In 1957, the U.S. supplied a key regional leader with his first (“peaceful”)
nuclear reactor, as well as the necessary scientific training for those who
would run it and some weapons-grade uranium to power it. Then, in the 1970s,
American experts began to fear that their partner might be seeking to develop
nuclear weapons on his own. A few years later, revolutionaries overthrew
him and inherited that American-originated program. That leader was, of course,
the man the Americans had installed as ruler of Iran in 1953, Reza Shah
Pahlavi.
It always struck me as odd
that Iran made the cut for the very exclusive membership in George W. Bush’s “axis of
evil.” After all, unlike those 15 Saudi hijackers and perhaps even the Saudi government, it had no connection to
9/11 and was “comprehensively helpful” in the initial takedown of the
Afghan Taliban and the arrest of fleeing al-Qaeda fighters.
By contrast, consider just a
few of Washington’s “partners” in the region:
* Saudi Arabia: this monarchy
enforces a strict brand of conservative Wahhabi Islam not so terribly different
from the basic theology of ISIS. The Saudi government publicly executes an average of 73 people per year, including
juveniles and the mentally ill. Beheading is the favored technique.
(Sound familiar?) Nor are all the victims convicted murderers.
According to a 2015 Amnesty International report, “Non-lethal crimes including adultery,
robbery, apostasy, drug-related offenses, rape,
‘witchcraft,’ and ‘sorcery’ are punishable by death.” In
addition to its citizens carrying out the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia supported a branch of al-Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra) in the
Syrian conflict. Furthermore, its ongoing U.S.-backed air strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels have
been killing numerous civilians and may have helped to cause and further intensify a disastrous famine. The U.S.
response: a record-breaking $110 billion arms deal for the Saudis.
* Egypt: In the wake of a 2013
coup d’état led by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi against an elected
government, that country’s military gunned down hundreds of demonstrators. Since then,
its strongman has used “mass, arbitrary arrests,” tortured detainees, and
conducted “extrajudicial executions” -- all in the interest of retaining
power. The U.S. response: $1.4 billion in (mostly military) foreign
assistance in fiscal 2017. To top it off, President Trump recently
invited Sisi to the White House, lauded the dictator’s “fantastic job in a very difficult
situation,” and is planning a future visit to Egypt.
* Turkey: this formal ally
boasts NATO’s second largest military and hosts an important U.S.
airbase. Unfortunately, Turkey is increasingly unstable thanks to a
recent coup attempt, its ongoing war with Kurdish separatists, and an
escalating intervention in Syria’s civil war. Worse yet, after
relaunching an internal war against Kurdish rebels, its president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, has taken the country into distinctly autocratic terrain in the wake
of a narrow victory in a referendum that does away with the office of prime minister
and further centralizes executive power in his hands. Turkey’s
deteriorating human rights record includes the pre-trial detention of more than 40,000 coup
“suspects,” the summary dismissal of 90,000 civil servants, the shuttering of
hundreds of offices of nongovernmental organizations and media outlets, and the
imposition of a 24-hour curfew in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern part
of the country. The U.S. response: $3.8 million in direct (military) assistance
in fiscal 2017, and promises to continue arms sales which topped $2.3 billion last year.
This motley crew has one thing
in common -- they’re no angels.
“Rip It Up”
Iran hawks live on both sides
of the political aisle. In 2015, for example, Hillary Clinton told an audience at Dartmouth College that Iran represents
“an existential threat to Israel.” Though she expressed tacit support for
Obama’s then-pending nuclear
deal -- the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA -- she added that “even if we do get such a deal, we will still
have major problems... [Iran is] the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism.”
When it comes to real rancor
toward Iran, however, you have to look to the right. Senator John McCain,
for instance, immediately cried foul about the JCPOA, calling it a “bad deal” likely
to “nuclearize” the Middle East. More colloquially, as both a candidate
and as president-elect, Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to “rip it up,” while former governor and
presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee accused President Obama of “marching the Israelis to the
door of the oven.”
Despite the bellicose
rhetoric, intelligence and congressional testimony indicate that Iran is complying with the JCPOA.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey -- not exactly a
dove -- believed
that the deal reduced the risk of Iran weaponizing its nuclear power. All the
appeals from the president, various pundits, neocons of every sort, and congressional
hawks to withdraw from it also neglect an obvious reality: the JCPOA is a
multilateral deal and none of our partners (Russia, China, Great Britain,
France, and Germany) will support “tearing up” the agreement. Imagine the
optics of a future American unilateral abrogation of an agreement Iran is
complying with: the onus will be on Washington alone; its allies will continue
to abide by the deal and, with genuine justification, Iran’s leaders will be
able to depict the Americans as destabilizing “cowboys.”
Here’s the reality of the
present situation: despite decades of sanctions and the military containment of
Iran, the U.S. has not significantly affected its policies or stance in the
region. Few in Washington display the courage to ask the crucial
question: Why continue? Why not a creative new approach -- the gradual
normalization of relations?
Though you wouldn’t know it,
given the prominence of Iranophobes in Washington, the U.S. has little to
lose. Current policy is counterproductive in so many ways, while
Washington’s never-ending bellicosity and threats to “rip up” the nuclear
agreement only undercut Iran’s moderates and the eminently sensible
President Hassan Rouhani, who recently won a smashing electoral victory against a hardline,
fundamentalist opponent in which a stunning 73% of Iranian voters cast ballots.
Why not make it more, not ever less, difficult for Iran’s conservatives to
vilify the U.S.?
Forty Years of Failure
There’s an uncomfortable truth
that Washington needs to face: U.S. policy toward Iran hasn’t achieved its
goals despite almost four decades of effort since an American-installed
autocrat was overthrown there in 1979. Foreign policy hawks -- Democrats
and Republicans alike -- will undoubtedly fight that reality tooth-and-nail,
but as with the Cuban embargo, Iranian isolation has long outworn any imagined
usefulness. That ostracizing Iran remains fashionable reflects domestic
political calculus or phobic thinking, not cogent strategy, and yet our new
president just traveled to Saudi Arabia, a truly autocratic country, and in the
wake of an Iranian election that was by all accounts resoundingly democratic,
denounced that land as despotic and all but called for regime change.
So here’s a question that,
believe it or not, is okay to ask and is not actually tantamount to treason:
What exactly does Iran want and fear? It wants international legitimacy,
security, and a reasonable degree of regional power (not world domination). It
fears continued isolation, any coalition of hostile Sunni Arab nations led by
Saudi Arabia (assisted by Israel), and U.S.-sponsored attempts at regime
change. If you think that makes the Iranians sound paranoid, just check out the
recent celebratory get-together in Saudi Arabia or remember how, just before
the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, Newsweek quoted a senior
British official summing up the situation in Washington this way: “Everyone
wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
In sum, U.S. policy in the
Middle East is confused, contradictory, counterproductive, and dangerous.
It could leave Washington involved in a war with Iran. (And given our recent
wars in the region, imagine where that’s likely to land us.)
The U.S. doesn’t require more
enemies. Its hands are already full enough without additional faux
“existential” threats or, as John Quincy Adams warned so long ago, eternally going “abroad seeking
monsters to destroy.”
Oddly enough, the Trump
administration has a unique opportunity to normalize relations with Iran.
While President Obama’s modest overtures toward that country were greeted with
scathing partisan scorn, President Trump might just be able to garner enough
Republican support to do so much more, were he ever to try. At the
moment, he clearly possesses no such plans, and yet, as only Nixon could go to
China, perhaps only Trump can go to Tehran!
My small bit of advice,
however: don’t hold your breath...
Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former
history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in
Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq
War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of
the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas.
