Given the momentous events in Iran and the latest botched US-Israeli response to them (i.e. Trump and Netanyahu's ignorant support for the protesters despite the likelihood that the whole thing was a setup by Iranian hardliners), it's important to recall the much longer-term factors and forces at play both in Iran and also the entire region more generally - these factors have never been properly understood by the US and Israel even as the Islamic Revolution approaches its 40th anniversary, but they will become increasingly prominent as the Trump-Netanyahu strategy to contain Iran begins to backfire more and more visibly in the form of ever greater Iranian influence within the Arab-Islamic world.
With the benefit of hindsight - though far from 20-20, much clearer than the muddled picture that is always the present as it unfolds in its own day - we see now that the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution was the key marker in the history of the Arab-Islamic Middle East that has set the tone for all other events since.
The rise of political Islam - or more popularly, "Islamic fundamentalism" - was a foregone conclusion by the mid-1970s, after a whopping four failed wars to drive Israel out of the region and the contemporaneous flat outcomes of secular Arab dictators' attempts to modernize their economies and societies along Western and Soviet-inspired socialist models.
Tellingly, Iran had always been an outlier - not only geographically more peripheral, but politically and culturally, it had long been assumed to be a fundamentally Western-leaning or even pro-Western country, ever since the Allies had accorded the oil-rich Persian kingdom special status in their war against the petro-hungry fascist expansionists.
In that sense, while the 1979 revolt is best remembered in the West for the 444-day US hostage crisis that consumed Carter's remaining presidency until the accession of Reagan in 1981, what happened that year was actually much more of a post-monarchic, post-aristocratic free-for-all involving initially allied coalitions of secular socialists and republicans on the one hand, and Shiite fundamentalists on the other.
The Shah's long rule since WWII had swept the increasing polarization of Iranian society under the rug (no pun intended), especially since the infamous CIA-backed coup against President Mossadegh in 1953, which though widely viewed in the West as having formed the basis for much of the '79 revolution's animus towards America, was at the time actually tacitly blessed by the religious conservative establishment, which feared the rapid secularization of a progressive leftist agenda.
Because the Shah took down with him so many of the prior structures and hierarchies of the modern Persian state, it was inevitable that both the radical socialist and reactionary fundamentalist strains of the anti-Shah insurrection would rush to fill the void with their more fringe ideas and influences - giving the entire combined movement a sense of disorder at times bordering on outright chaos from its earliest days exercising actual authority from Tehran.
What changed all this was the September 1980 invasion of Iran by its predatory neighbor, Saddam Hussein's Western-backed Iraq. Fearful that increasingly dominant Islamic fundamentalists openly hostile to the US and Israel were about to seize full control of one of the world's largest oil supplies, Washington gave Saddam its effective blessing to seize portions of Iran's border region with Iraq adjacent to the critical, oil-rich Shatt-al-Arab estuary where the combined Tigris and Euphrates empty into the Persian Gulf.
Saddam rightly saw himself as the secular republican bulwark against a rising tide of not merely Shiite, but generally Islamic, radicalism that would quickly turn the region's most energy-rich sections into a springboard for deeply pocketed militant or terrorist movements - a view that was only bolstered by his interactions with US and other Western officials who also seized the opportunity to grease their military-industrial complexes with massive sales of sophisticated weaponry to an oil-rich client buffer state.
Three decades after its conclusion, we can view the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War as something of a last stand of secular republicanism and secular nationalism in the entire region: by the time the armistice was forced upon the stalemated combatant powers in August 1988, it was clear to astute observers that whereas Saddam had won the immediate victory, he had only temporarily delayed the ascent and spread of Islamic fundamentalism even within his own borders.
In the conflict's early years, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - the virtual face of Islam to the Western world in the eighties - rose from something of a moral and spiritual figurehead of revolution to an actual autocrat exercising true despotic powers. This he gained only by stages until 1983 or '84: the point at which all residual socialists and communists were finally purged from the post-revolutionary government, which, combined with dramatic battlefield successes against Saddam's overrated invading Iraqi forces, led Tehran into an ill-fated gambit to go on its own offensive, greatly prolonging what was already a grinding war of attrition - but ultimately only cementing the main undercurrent that would later underpin the basis of Iranian regional ascendancy to this day, namely its sponsorship of downtrodden Shiite masses in Sunni-ruled Gulf oil states amidst an environment of increasingly harsh repression by their corrupt and kleptocratic elites, monarchic or republican alike.
The Iran-Iraq War also demonstrated a deep Iranian flexibility in dealing pragmatically with all manner of neutral or even unfriendly actors - in marked contrast to Saddam Hussein, who spent much of the war capitalizing on what amounted to a blank check from the West to indulge in all manner of power excesses, be it surreptitiously pursuing an atomic bomb (conveniently ended by the famous June 1981 raid on his main nuclear reactor by the Israelis) early on or gassing untold thousands of innocent Kurdish civilians towards the end (the 1988 Anfal campaign). Tellingly, this manifest itself best in how the respective armed oppositions of both countries conducted and established themselves within their domains of exile: the main Iranian dissident movement, the secular republican People's Mujaheddin (PMI or MEK), grew so checkered by its association with Saddam's atrocities against disobedient Shiites and Kurds that it lost much of its moral and material support in the West, whereas the Shiite religious parties expelled from Iraq, notably Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, became key players both in civil Iranian politics and later on a useful intermediary between Tehran and the West whenever tensions flared between the latter and Iraq, as they finally would explode with Saddam's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The 1991 Gulf War to eject Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait was the true turning point of the region's cross-border, intra-Shiite religious political consciousness. In the wake of a massive defeat by the US coalition's Operation Desert Storm and retreat from the occupied oil sheikhdom in February, a mutiny within Saddam's military in the southern Iraqi port of Basra quickly mushroomed into a broader Shiite Arab insurrection across the entire southern half of the country.
Though the precise role and nature of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) early involvement in staging and coordinating the '91 rebellion against Saddam remains the subject of debate, the undisputed fact is that for days or even weeks on end, the Sunni minority Baathist regime in Baghdad lost effective control of its southern Shiite dominions, which hosted not only the nation's most abundant proven oil reserves, but also its lucrative sole access to the Gulf for exports. The critical decision seems to have come to Washington when it became clear that the permanent displacement of Saddam from southern Iraq would create a "Shiastan" that would be too uncomfortably cozy with Iran, however free or democratic it might in theory become. Where the US and the West may have been willing to take such a risk anyway, the decisive opposition almost certainly came from their Gulf allies led by Saudi Arabia: these Sunni hereditary monarchies, including the royal family that had just been restored to Kuwait, were in no hurry to offer any democratic hopes to their own large Shiite populations which had been heavily imported from Iraq or Iran to begin with to bolster the thin petroleum sector workforce.
And so, after initially encouraging the Shiite revolt against Saddam, the US withdrew all support, inviting the Baathist tyrant to return to the south with a vengeance: not only did he do so, in the process massacring (through various ruthless means) up to an estimated half-million or even full million Shiite Arabs over the remainder of 1991 into '92, but he almost certainly did so only with covert assurance from US president George H. W. Bush's intelligence that any Iranian attempts to come to the rescue of their beleaguered coreligionists would be met with US retaliation in support of Baghdad. (This would go a long way to explaining why, even a dozen years later, Saddam thought the younger George W. Bush was actually bluffing about invading Iraq up to the very moment he was targeted for assassination by the opening airstrike.)
But needless to say, the depths of Shiites' sense of betrayal by America and the West - not only those in Iraq and Iran, but throughout the Middle East - would form yet another solid pillar in the subsequent edifice of an emergent regional pan-Shiite bloc; from henceforth, post-1991, Iran would steadily implant itself as the true power lurking beneath the oil-rich sands and shores of its Sunni Arab-ruled neighbors to the west. Long before 9/11 and the consequent US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Ayatollahs were sowing the seeds through every available crack of an Iraq and indeed an entire western shore of the Persian Gulf that would nominally answer to their official Sunni leadership, but in reality was tilting ever so imperceptibly yet no less actually towards Tehran's brand of theocratic fundamentalism.
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