In the aftermath of the ill-fated "Green" uprising of 2009, which was put down at the cost of many hundreds killed and untold thousands beaten, tortured, or imprisoned, Iran's long-simmering sociopolitical polarization steadily deepened despite the apparent success of the regime in fending off the most severe challenge to its rule since the Iran-Iraq War.
The protests had exposed the discontent of post-revolutionary young Iranians aged 30 or below who had no memory of any other system but an arch-conservative Islamic republic: as a whole, they were anything but liberal by Western standards, and were in fact often patriotic to the point of being nationalistic, yet they felt that Islam had been the exclusive political ideology for too long, and had become a suffocating influence on the nation's public space. The time had come for the aging Ayatollahs to relinquish at least some of their prerogatives in setting the boundaries of acceptable discourse and behavior among the country's leaders and elites.
Pitted against them, however, a new generation of mid- to senior-level hardliner leadership was also emerging. Mostly military and security officials and IRGC commanders in their forties and fifties, they had come of age in the baptism of fire that was the 1980s conflict with Iraq, subsequently ascended the ranks as the regime further consolidated its rule in the nineties, and spearheaded efforts to upgrade and modernize Tehran's domestic security apparatus and foreign defense capabilities as the 2000s brought unprecedented new pressures of a rapidly evolving society at home and the massive presence of high-tech US-led forces fighting the post-9/11 "War on Terrorism" throughout the region.
Having risen to and remained in power since the early 2000s largely through deftly playing off the hardliners' fidelity to the Islamic revolution against the more unpredictable undercurrent of post-revolutionary neo-Persian populism, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was fundamentally weakened by the Green Movement and its aftermath, even though this was not readily apparent for some time: he lost the support of much of the secular, moderately nationalist, urban under-40 population that had propelled his political fortunes earlier, and was now vulnerable to over-dependence on the more rural, religiously conservative, and typically older electorate that did not share his own ideological hybridity. Thus, long before being replaced by the reformist Hassan Rouhani in 2013, he was losing his grip on the country, and more significantly was already being sidelined by more pure and rigid hardline figures, especially those in the IRGC.
Ironically, the fact that the population was now more politically conscious than ever, even after the failure of the Green uprising, meant that foreign adventurism was the best way for Tehran to keep itself on top of things: thus, in the aftermath of the Arab spring's initial promise of ushering in Western-style democracy to the region in early 2011, Iran would fervently throw its weight behind long-suppressed mass Islamist movements in the Middle East, notably the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt - with whom it had collaborated for decades - but opportunistically any other organization it found was open to partnering with it as well (after all, the Muslim Brotherhood had long been a template and guide for all such Islamic dissident groups in the Arab world).
This quickly upset the brief calm that had settled in Iran's relations with its US-allied Sunni Arab neighbors on the other side of the Gulf since post-Saddam Iraq had finally stabilized: led by Saudi Arabia, they began a systematic effort to push back against Persian Tehran's perceived meddling in what they viewed as internal Arab affairs; as Iran pushed back in turn, by late 2011 and early 2012 the renewed rivalry had become a bona fide regional proxy war.
The hardliners in Tehran now had the decisive upper hand in foreign policy, yet the regime had no choice but to continue loosening social and economic controls domestically to the extent that it could, in order to appease a populace still smarting from the 2009 riots. It succeeded so well in this essentially bipolar approach to foreign and domestic affairs that Iran's foes - especially Israel and Saudi Arabia - were apoplectic that US president Barack Obama would not adopt a more aggressive stance against the Islamic republic's increasingly brazen gambits to reshape the regional order.
Thus, in 2011 the twin issues that would define Iran's relations with the world throughout the 2010s - its nuclear weapons program and support for the embattled Shiite-Alawite minority regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria - came to the fore: Tehran's hardliners viewed both as their due from a hand-tied President Ahmadinejad, who could not bring to heel the secular and even overtly progressive forces they viewed as poisoning the atmosphere in domestic society; Ahmadinejad for his part renewed his own ploy of channeling Persian nationalist-populism into universal Islamist-populist militancy, but both secular nationalists and reactionary Islamists were now far harder to manipulate than before.
The pursuit of an atomic device - dating as far back as the late Iran-Iraq War - was now approaching its final stages before producing a testable weapon. Increasingly alarmed, Iran's neighbors as well as the international community tried to dissuade Tehran from following through, but domestic hardliners would have none of it. President Obama determined that only a united effort to sanction the regime would impose a concrete cost on the nuclear program that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself would have to choose whether or not to incur. Khamenei was no fool, obviously: he knew that neither Ahmadinejad's populism nor the hardliners' fanaticism could change the fact that Iranian society was now dominated by the socially and culturally looser and freer post-revolutionary generations, whose desire for full reintegration with the global economy was only bound to grow.
But Khamenei, who without doubt has always viewed younger Iranians' warmer pro-Western sentiments as too feeble to constitute any sustained political influence, bided his time. Once sanctions were slapped on the Islamic republic in 2011-12, freezing tens of billions of Iran's foreign assets as well as drying up foreign trade and oil export revenues, he did not fold to the international pressure as Obama hoped, but instead allowed the hardliners to build up their strength - partly by increasing their role in the critical sectors of the economy in a time of commercial warfare - before any eventual concessions to the reformists. Doing this also tightened his leash on Ahmadinejad until a new presidential election in 2013, as the latter became even more dependent on religious conservatives for support.
Thus, by the time the moderate Rouhani replaced Ahmadinejad as president in 2013, the hardliners were in an ironclad position both domestically and regionally; and they have not looked back since.
As of 2013, both US and Israeli intelligence were certain that Iran had reached a mature stage in its uranium enrichment processes to be on the virtual brink of a nuclear bomb; only massive airstrikes against known and suspected nuclear facilities throughout the expanse of Iranian territory could now deny Tehran entry into the nuclear club, but the prospect was growing that this would trigger a regional war which would tilt the Middle East more in favor of the emerging "Shiite Crescent."
Iraq and Syria had changed everything. In no small part due to Iranian pressure, Iraq had refused to conclude a permanent troop hosting agreement with the US upon Washington's withdrawal of its 2003 invasion force in December 2011; this gave Tehran unimpeded westward access across its democratic Shiite-majority neighbor to supply its partners on the Mediterranean, Assad's Syria and the adjacent Lebanese Hezbollah.
Prior to the Arab spring, Israel had been in negotiations to return its Golan Heights frontier to Assad in exchange for the complete eviction of both Hezbollah fighters and Iranian military advisers from the IRGC foreign legion, or Quds Force, from Syria. Now, however, Assad had become heavily dependent on these old Shiite allies of his father for his very survival, not for some war of liberation of Palestine against the Zionist entity. By early 2012, he had already lost so much territory to the Syrian rebels and, more significantly, so much of his own manpower via defections from his army to the insurgency, that he was compelled to turn to Hezbollah and Iran for assistance.
Initially, this took the form of limited battlefield reinforcement by the former and stepped up arms deliveries and military advice and supervision by the IRGC, which, drawing from Tehran's extensive firsthand experience fighting and organizing unconventional and hybrid warfare since the 1980s, stabilized Assad's lines and even began rolling back the rebels. In response, though, the rebels themselves were increasingly radicalized, as the secular nationalist opposition forces such as Free Syrian Army - upon whom the Obama administration and its European allies had pinned their hopes for a new democratic Syria after Assad - were steadily overshadowed by Sunni jihadist groups of varying degrees of extremism, which ultimately came to be dominated by authentic Salafist outfits such as Al Nusra Front, which became Al Qaeda's Syrian branch.
By the end of 2012, then, the Syrian civil war had become nothing short of a sectarian proxy war between Iran and its two main Sunni regional rivals, Turkey (which supplied many of the advanced rebel and jihadist arms) and Saudi Arabia (which with its fellow Sunni Gulf monarchies largely funded the jihadist insurgency against Assad). As Al Nusra and its affiliates consolidated control over entire sectors of the country's Sunni Arab-dominated north and northwest - not coincidentally along the "Hezbollah model" of its sectarian archrival - and once more threatened to overwhelm Assad's loyalist forces, in early 2013 the conflict truly reached a point of no return as Hezbollah committed fresh battalions from Lebanon into the Syrian fight, just as Iran dramatically increased the number of its advisers in Damascus to organize brand-new local Shiite militias to bolster the regime's front lines.
Iraq now came to prominence as Iran's key direct link to Syria: its democratically elected government, led by the US-installed Nouri al-Maliki, was dominated by the latter's Islamic Dawa Party, which traced many of its roots to Iraqi Shiites' exile in Iran in the early 1980s. To the dismay of Washington and its allies, Baghdad not only refused to support the proxy war effort to topple Assad, but at least tacitly assisted Tehran's own efforts to arm and supply its allies Assad and Hezbollah. The famous Baghdad-Damascus highway - frequented but less than a decade earlier by Sunni extremists and terrorists who traveled eastward from Syria into Iraq to attack the US-led coalition and US-supported Shiite government - was now a convenient artery in reverse for Iranian materiel and advisers to reinforce Hezbollah and newer Shiite militant groups in Syria against the US-backed rebellion.
It was in this context of a still faint but indeed looming specter of Iranian ascendancy across the heart of the Middle East - the historic Fertile Crescent - that the Western powers, led by a circumspect Obama administration, had to open negotiations on Tehran's nuclear program with the new Rouhani government in summer 2013; the Ayatollahs, who without doubt kept a tight lid on the concessions that Rouhani's diplomats could even offer, let alone make, had every advantage because of their improving regional position - and no amount of smokescreen put up by Obama's own and other Western participants in the talks could really hide this over the course of the two years until the nuclear deal was finally reached in 2015.
In the meantime, Iran did have to deal with the consequences of its blatantly sectarian and indeed hypocritical support for Assad, who, on top of being a secular Baathist butcher of political Islamists (Sunni, but Islamist nonetheless) in the stripe of his father and his father's archnemesis Saddam Hussein, was also - as an Alawite - considered an infidel by the strict Twelver Shiism of Iran and Iraq. When the Syrian despot crossed Obama's infamous "red line" on the use of chemical weapons on civilians in August 2013, although post-Benghazi fears of the unknown consequences of regime change in an Arab dictatorship plus worries that the nuclear negotiations with Iran could be scuttled were enough to dissuade Washington from immediate retaliation, Tehran was suddenly in a bind nonetheless: its critical ally came under intensive diplomatic pressure, crimping its own maneuvering room in the nuclear talks. Of course, Russia bailed everyone out, as Vladimir Putin got the UN to pass a resolution eliminating Syria's declared chemical stockpile, thereby warding off sharper Western sanctions or actual airstrikes; but Moscow's dramatic reentrance into the region would be a double-edged sword for Iran's hardliners, because it meant that their leverage with the West on either Syria or the nuclear program now ran through the Kremlin, which as yet was still a ways off from seeing eye to eye with them (and has ever remained so, to at least some degree).
A far bigger challenge came in early to mid-2014, as the virulent splinter group from Syria's Al Nusra, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS), suddenly and drastically seized control of nearly the entire Syrian desert hinterland and in short order poured across the border into Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, where its stunning June 2014 capture of the northern city of Mosul heralded the establishment of a serious Sunni caliphate to deny both Western and Shiite control of upper Arabia. Iran was seen as the big loser from the rise of ISIS - its direct land route to Syria was now cut - and it has since been confirmed that powerful Sunni fundamentalist elements in Saudi Arabia's Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were largely behind the rise of ISIS to create a necessary counterweight to the Shiite stranglehold on Iraq and the Mediterranean Levant, even at the price of terrible publicity in the wider world.
The rest, of course, is history. With the rise of ISIS, the sectarian character of the worsening conflict in the Middle East was now undeniable; it had become clear that the unleashing of Western-inspired democratic forces in the region since the Arab spring had not produced Western-style liberal democracy in place of originally Western-influenced secular nationalist regimes that had decayed into corrupt neo-patriarchal police states. Rather, the lid had been blown on generational, perhaps even epochal, ethnic and religious identitarian pressures and fissures deep within Arab-Islamic Middle Eastern societies, some of which now appeared as though they'd simply been patched together into merely nominal states by their European colonial administrators nearly a century earlier - which had in turn been a rework of the polyglot federation of the defunct Ottoman Turkish empire.
But Iran - being a maturing Islamic republic and demonstrably quite stable by the region's standards - was now the key to the region's future and to the Muslim faith more broadly. Even with Russia's entry into the Syrian conflict in 2015, the subsequent reassertion of US military might in Iraq to defeat ISIS, the power scramble against ISIS by the Kurds both in Iraq and Syria, and last but not least the belated emergence of Turkey as an autonomous regional actor shifting between NATO and the Russo-Iranian camp, Tehran is the pivot upon which southwestern - and eventually probably even southern - Eurasia will turn.
As the Ayatollahs and their jihadist shock troops of the IRGC see it, the generational warfare that their form of Islam is waging is truly multifaceted and truly long-term; they see clearly that the West and its proxies - and even the Russians, to be honest - do not apprehend the deep nexus between Islamic revelation, ideology, and political thought which forms the solid foundation of all aspects of social, cultural, political, economic, and of course military and security activity within the ever expanding Iranian-Shiite sphere of influence in the heart of the 1.6 billion-strong Islamic world that is the Middle East. In the grand scheme of things, they care little for the costs of their peculiar type of quasi-imperialist (some would qualify as neo-Persian imperialist) expansionism, for whether measured in finances or in human lives, these are considered negligible in view of the ultimate prize - which is nothing less than perpetual peace and justice established worldwide in accord with the Heavenly ordinances and strictures revealed by the Prophet himself.
Until the Judeo-Christian West first summons up and then translates into concrete, coordinated action a vision of universal human destiny that exceeds and surpasses that of the Ayatollahs in both the realm of collective thought and that of collective deed, Iran's march will continue unabated.
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