The Bad Guys Are In Charge

Since the election of President Khatami in 1997, a number of European governments and officials within our own State Department have pressed for a policy of engagement (particularly the economic variety) with the Iranian regime, arguing that it will strengthen the reformists' hand and lead to the eventual full democratization of Iranian society.

Whether or not this argument had any objective merit to it is a quite worthwhile discussion, but it is also largely academic. Since 9/11, we have seen progressive marginalization of any serious efforts at reforming the Iranian system from within and watched Khatami behave more or less like a labor boss who's been bought off by the mob (unfortunately, I can't take credit for that, Joe Katzman was the one who came up with such a great formulation) in face of the Expediency Council and the Council of Guardians. These actions have more or less left the inmates in control of the assylum and led to widespread popular unrest that we've seen put down again and again by the likes of the brownshirts in the Baseej and the Hezb-e-Ansar.

A lot of people have died or been imprisoned, but the end-result has been that the nastiest elements of the Iranian polity are now in control of the elected, military-intelligence, and clerical sections of government. The emergence of the Abadgaran movement and its counterparts in other sections of the Iranian hierarchy as the hardliners have consolidated their control over the government should give us a pretty good idea of who we're dealing with:

Abadgaran’s aggressive pursuit of its political vision seems to have caught not only Khatami-aligned reformists off guard, it also has surprised Old-Guard conservatives – namely the actual participants in the 1979 Islamic revolution whose idealism has faded over subsequent decades. The young neo-cons still tenaciously believe in the earlier utopian notions of the revolution; a theocratic and authoritarian state structure; an egalitarian and state-owned economic system; and a messianic foreign policy ...

... Abadgaran members clearly want to develop into the dominant faction within the conservative camp. In striving to do so, the movement has attracted the backing of the Revolutionary Guards and many hardliners within the political and security establishments, as well as a significant number of religiously-inclined members of Iran’s lower and middle classes.

This is part of the problem inherent in the "engaging Iran" policy. The issue is no longer whether or not we can engage Khatami and strengthen him enough so that he can start to implement some Gorbachev-style reforms within the Khomeinist system, but rather whether we're going to be dealing with the utopians in the Abadgaran movement or the more cynical pragmatists like Rafsanjani.

When the choice is between a fanatic and a manipulator, the question is basically whether you want to deal with someone who's going to shoot you in the head or someone who's going to stab you in the back. Or to put it another way, there should be something inherently disturbing about a situation in which Rafsanjani is to be viewed as the voice of sweet reason.

Moreover, I think that the kind of situation we are now in with respect to issues of engagement becomes quite clear in listing what exactly some of the goals of Rafsanjani and people like him are:

1. Power. Or to put it quite simply, they seek to guarantee their own power and the system that supports it throughout the duration of their lifetime. That means that they will be completely unwilling to accept any scenario that they will regard as leading to eventual regime change or a fundamental shift in the Iranian form of governance.
   
   
2. Regional influence. Iran, even before Khomeini, has long regarded itself as a kind of "regional hegemony" for the Middle East and its various attempts to destabilize neighboring states in favor of either pro-Iranian Shi'ites (Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen come to mind as some of the most recent examples) or ecumenical Sunni Islamist dictatorships (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, et al.) should be viewed in this context. I will be quite honest and say that I don't see Iran abandoning either those goals or current means employed to achieve them under the current regime.
   
   
3. The destruction of Israel. If any kind of moderate voice has emerged inside the Iranian hierarchy with respect to Israel, I don't see it. Even Khatami, who is regularly championed as the most moderate voice within the regime, regularly champions Hezbollah and calls for the annihilation of Israel. There is even a holiday, Qods Day, specifically crafted to memoralize these kinds of sick sentiments among the general population. One can argue how much that approach has worked, but the Qods Day festivities certainly reflect the opinions of the ruling class of the regime.
   
   
4. Eviction of the United States from the Middle East. This has been a key part of Iranian foreign policy since Khomeini and can be seen at least in part through #3, as the US is regarded as the force that ensures Israel's security. The successful eviction of US troops from Lebanon in the 1980s in addition to the earlier embassy seizure was viewed by the Iranian hierarchy as a sign that such an outcome is possible, provided enough casualties are inflicted against the US. That the sheer brutality of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in that conflict were not enough to stem the ambitions of the Iranian leadership in this respect should tell you something right there about the character of the regime.
   
   
5. The elimination of the An Najaf school of Shi'ism as a rival to Qom. This is going to be another non-negotiable point with respect to the mullahs - they are not going to allow Sistani or anyone else who rejects Khomeini's velayet-e-faqih to achieve a position of prominence in An Najaf to rival that of the regime ayatollahs based in Qom. By their very existence, people like Sistani pose what the Iranians regard as an unacceptable threat to the legitimacy of the regime. That stance simply isn't going to change, never mind whether or not we can persuade the mullahs to ditch their nuclear program.

There are others I could list, but these are more than enough to I think illustrate the character of the people that we are or would be dealing with here.

So even we by some act of God (since that's what it's going to take at this point) persuade them to ditch or actually suspend their nuclear program, they are not going to alter any of the other issues we have with respect to Iran and all we'll basically be doing is preventing them from adding a new item to our list of worries. That's all well and good as far as it goes, but I don't see that doing much to stop Iran from engaging in the kind of behavior that there is now a perponderance of credible evidence that it is doing with respect to Iraq.

Engagement Can Be Shown To Have Failed ...

I will now share two names with you that you may not have heard anywhere else - Amer Azizi and Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. They are senior Moroccan and Syrian al-Qaeda representatives respectfully, with Azizi being the top leader of the Moroccan Salafi Jihad and Nasar being the head of al-Qaeda's Syrian contingent.

Between the two of them and a number of other al-Qaeda leaders, they masterminded the 3/11 bombings in Madrid that left hundreds dead. And today, despite the election of Zapatero and Spain's excellent economic ties with Iran, both men are being harbored by the elite Qods Force of the IRGC.

While intelligent individuals like Judge Garzon appear to have grasped the current extent of the threat posed by the al-Qaeda leadership based in Iran, such clear-headed views appear to be lacking in the upper echelons of the Spanish government. The same can be said for any number of other European governments, including the "Big 3" that most recently presided over the Iranian uranium enrichment freeze or any number of other European states.

That Iran appears to have made no effort whatsoever to curtail the activities of Qods Force given its documented patronage of senior al-Qaeda figures would seem to suggest that all the European diplomacy, economic ties, and apologetics for the mullahs has done one drop of good as far as discouraging them from allowing their guests to plan and amount mass casualty terrorist attacks, even against European soil. If such things do not prevent a government or hard-line elements within it or whatever else you want to call them from sponsoring attacks against supposedly "friendly" nations like Spain, then what in God's name are they good for?

As for claims that the Iranians were helpful with respect to the war in Afghanistan, I believe I've written on that before. They helped us against the Taliban because it furthered their regional ambitions to do so, but they also fielded Hekmatyar against us and have taken the place of the former Afghan regime in serving as al-Qaeda's patrons.

One of the most recent under-reported stories was the recent closure of an al-Qaeda website containing audiotaped speeches, some of them fairly recent, from Suleiman Abu Ghaith, al-Qaeda's official spokesman who is, per the government of his former homeland of Kuwait, currently present inside Iran. He has been there since at least early 2002, yet his speeches referenced events from at least mid-2003 onwards. If he is in custody and not hosted as the Iranians claim, then why are his rants being regularly posted on the internet? If such privileges are not granted to imprisoned students and dissidents, why then are they being granted to a "detained" international terrorist?

The Flawed Principle of Retroactive Justification

One of the main arguments in favor of an engagement policy with respect to Iran is that the regime's actions can be understood (from the perspective of what we would do if we were bloodthirsty theocrats) in light of its current strategic situation and the fact that the regime leadership is seeking to obtain what deterrence it can in the face of the fact that it is more or less surrounded by a large number of states with pro-US governments (I would tend to take issue with that characterization in cases like Turkmenistan, but okay ...) and, like any institution, seeks to preserve itself at all costs.

Praktike (not trying to pick on him, but his were just an example of a much larger trend that I've noticed among us Iran-watchers) made some very good points in the comments box concerning attempts to retroactively explain the regime's past behavior in the context of later or current US actions.

As for Hekmatyar, they fielded him directly in response to the "Axis of Evil" speech. Good one, George.

I would strongly suggest that perhaps Iran's inclusion in the Axis of Evil had a little something to do with their border policy with respect to fleeing al-Qaeda members - and I'm speaking of them in the hundreds on this one, including a number of senior leadership here. If you want some concrete examples, there's this and this that serves as more than sufficient rationale for calling them out the way the president did in the State of the Union.

Just taking the second story at face value, if a high-ranking advisor to Khamenei showed up in Kabul in October 2001 to offer sanctuary to over 250 senior al-Qaeda leaders and the IRGC let it be known that they would protect any al-Qaeda operatives who got across the border, wouldn't you consider that being more or less sufficient cause for regarding them as one of bin Laden's allies? Hell, one of the reasons we know bin Laden's alive is because his eldest son Saad, Saif al-Adel, and Suleiman Abu Ghaith called him from an IRGC base in Iranian Baluchistan in January 2002 to make sure that he had survived the fighting at Tora Bora and request instructions. Iran actively assisting in the escape of al-Qaeda's top brass from Afghanistan was, in my view, more than sufficient cause for the US saying what it did.

And, dare I say it, the United States is currently surrounding Iran as well as harboring and working with a Marxist, pro-Saddam, anti-Iranian terrorist cult organization, so it's not surprising that certain elements within the regime would want to hold on to some Al Qaeda members as bargaining chips or worse.

What, their own pet Hezbollah isn't enough for the mullahs? If they want to have a proxy terrorist group for what they regard as deterrence purposes, Hezbollah is preferable to al-Qaeda on any number of levels, especially given the number of folks who want to make some kind of farcial distinction between the group's political and military wings. Moreover, the Iranian decision to harbor senior al-Qaeda leaders was made long, long before the US ever invaded Iraq or assumed custody of the MEK. If you want a US provocation that would have sufficiently frightened the ayatollahs to convince them that harboring Osamanauts was the way to go, I'll be quite honest that I don't think you can find one because the whole foreign policy that appears to hold the apple of the Iranian hardliners' eyes is not one of deterrence or defense but rather of offense and aggression.

They're harboring al-Qaeda, because, at some future (or present) date they want to use them, or at least the threat of them, against us. That's why Saif al-Adel can still issue orders to his lieutenants, why Azizi and Nasar can find safe harbor there post-3/11, and Suleiman Abu Ghaith is still allowed to rail against us from the comfort of his website, et al.

This puts us in the unenviable position of choosing between (potentially wrong) intelligence on Iran's nuclear ambitions (yes, I know they were right on Natanz. And?) and the release of a number of top Al Qaeda operatives.

The intelligence provided by the MEK appears to be a mixed bag, as with most intel, and I'm going to take a "wait and see" attitude here until we know more about just how accurate much of this stuff is. We do know that they moonlighted for the Iraqi Mukhabarat with respect to assisting Iraq's intelligence capabilities with regard to Iran. Painting them with the same brush as the flawed intelligence on Iraq provided by the INC or INA is more or less a genetic argument and repeats of a lot of canards that were thrown around more out of animosity against the Iraqi exile groups by their bureaucratic enemies in Washington rather than by the actual facts as revealed in the SSIC report. Somebody want to make a running tally of how many "anonymous" charges against the INC and the people in Feith's office were debunked in the SSIC report?

Now, it may well be that the US government sees nuclear proliferation as more important than terrorism, which makes a lot of sense to me.

I see the two as intertwined. Even if Iran is seriously willing to exchange al-Qaeda leaders from the MEK (which I believe we have only their good word on), that simply shifts the game from whether we want to deal with the potential for a nuclear Iran with its proxy Hezbollah rather than the potential for a nuclear al-Qaeda.

It appears, however, that by refusing to develop an Iran policy, we've allowed the regime to coopt the Euros and even the Brits, while reaching out to the Azeris, Russians, and Chinese to prevent any military action.

Preaching to the choir on that one, but I think that the problem is that you and I are likely to disagree on what said policy should be, hence the lack of movement in that direction. The debates that you, me, and other people here on WoC have mirror real-world debates that occur between the State Department, DoD, CIA, et al. And in case anybody asks, in most cases partisanship or political affiliation has nothing to do with how you view such issues.

Iran is a tough problem, but we haven't made the situation any better by hoping it would go away or be magically solved by the invasion of Iraq. So we could be in a situation where we have supported a terrorist group in exchange for nothing. Given that Douglas Feith has spoken about the war on terrorism being, literally, a war on a tactic, this seems incoherent, not to mention morally dubious.

Not sure I understand that last part exactly, but let me just say that support for the MEK against the mullahs is opposed by most of the people you would likely consider "hawks" when it comes to Iran. A bipartisan number of legislators, however, have supported the legitimization of the MEK because it fights the Iranian regime. Such sentiments, I would think, should be condemned if we're serious about winning that whole war of ideas.

As for Khatami, I wouldn't take his Israel talk too sreiously; he's a politician and he's doing what he thinks he has to in order to survive. I think he is sincere, but his problem is that he's been effectively neutered.

I'm a lot more cynical with respect to Khatami, in large part because of all the times that he's threatened to quit and yet always manages to be back in the position of playing good cop to Rafsanjani's bad cop. Stuff like this article on the origins of the reformist movement don't exactly strengthen my opinion of the man as far as being someone who wants democratize Iran or even end its support for groups like Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad.

As you noted, however, he's been neutered so whatever he might have done at this point is more or less academic at this point.

His outreach to the United States in the late 90s was tangible and serious, but he may have gone too fast and was ultimately outmaneuvered by the hardliners. His failure to take risks and stand up for the rebels in 1999 showed the that he would blink in the face of threats. I'm not sure there's much we can do to strengthen him at this point, and it looks like the students have given up on the reformers generally and are either eschewing politics altogether or proposing a general boycott of the upcoming elections so as to make clear that whatever regime comes out of it is not legitimate.

The actual turn-out (to say nothing of the candidate selection) in the 2004 elections would seem to support the students beliefs with respect to the illegitimate nature of the regime.

As to your points about Sistani, they're not entirely persuasive given that Montazeri and others have been let out and have been relatively outspoken since, and have not yet been murdered.

Montazeri, as far as I can tell, hasn't called velayet-e-faqih into question, so he doesn't pose the same kind of existential threat that Sistani and the An Najaf school. The mullahs also have the virtue of being able to lock up Montazeri again should he prove too outspoken for his own good, an option they don't have with respect to Sistani and his peers.

The various organs of the Iranian state have praised Sistani, notably his handling of the Najaf situation in August.

The usual suspects among the Iranian leadership had been claiming that the US was going to destroy the Shrine of Imam Ali. That didn't happen, so the mullahs didn't have any choice but to praise Sistani. The alternative was to throw in their lot with Sadr, something that I think the regime recognized might draw undo attention to all of the Iranians and Iranian heavy weaponry that had been captured in An Najaf, something I doubt that the ayatollahs believed would be in their best interest.

I think you may be wrong about Iran's involvement in the murder of Khoei, by the way; I recently learned that he and Sadr had been rivals under Saddam and had a deep personal animosity. You could know something I don't, but if not you may need to check your assumptions there.

You're correct in that, but remember that Sadr's proto-Mahdi Army, like many an Iraqi opposition group, had received aid and support from the mullahs, al-Haeri in particular. So he already had ties to Iran even before OIF, they simply weren't as robust as they are now. Those ties, combined with his youth and apparent incompetence, have allowed the hardliners to manipulate him every step of the way, including manuevering him into killing al-Khoei.

They Don't Trust Us, They Don't Like Us, And Nothing We Do Will Change That

One of the reasons why I'm going to such lengths here to argue that engagement can be shown to have failed is because I don't think that the US can provide the Iranians any sufficient guarantees that are going to prevent them from sponsoring or harboring individuals and groups that seek to murder large numbers of US nationals. Unless we are prepared to accept a sufficient number of dead Americans (or Europeans or Iraqis ...) every year to Iranian-backed groups, I really don't think that the status quo is all that workable an arrangement, especially when there are other options available to us that I don't think are being exploited.

Moreover, I think that this whole idea that Iran will be willing to dialogue or make concessions with the US in return for a guarantee against regime change is wrong-headed. As their foreign policy has shown over the last two decades (if one insists that Iran's actions in light of recent history remains in dispute), the mullahs have far wider objectives with respect to foreign policy than mere survival. Such objectives, I would argue, run directly counter to the interests of the United States.

Enough already.