The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are seen as the watershed in the history of the post-Cold War era, and especially in that of the Middle East. Because they culminated in the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, they marked the beginning of a dramatic American attempt to democratize, even to some degree Westernize, both flanks of the Islamic Republic of Iran - hardly a coincidence, given that Tehran was viewed as the heart and locus of the global radical Islamic terrorist movement.
Iran had remained largely diplomatically isolated throughout the post-Cold War decade of 1991-2001, yet even it had been caught up in the global tide of commercialization and secularization of mass culture to some extent: it had gradually reestablished partial relations with Europe, despite a continued deep freeze of links with the US. By the late nineties, the first wave of post-revolutionary liberalization had taken hold, as the openly reformist scholar Muhammad Khatami was elected president in 1997, launching a series of economic and cultural initiatives that opened Iranian society to the extent that was permissible under the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs who continued to ultimately rule the country, led by Khomeini's successor to this day, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Despite this new air of moderation and partial thaw with the West, the Islamic Republic remained militantly theocratic in its identity and defiantly posed itself as one of the few true holdouts of resistance against the US-led and US-dominated post-Cold War "New World Order", as it had been coined by President George H. W. Bush. The best expression it found for this reactionary posture was in opposing widely perceived Israeli imperialist aggression in the Levant: not only did Tehran provide material and financial support to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but more fervently it supported its Shiite coreligionists in Lebanon, where it would score its first victory abroad against the Zionist entity when its IRGC proxy, Hezbollah, effectively pressured occupying Israeli forces to withdraw from the south of the country in 2000.
Despite the widespread perception of it as a terror-sponsoring rogue state, Iran always viewed its support of perceived terrorist activity as measured and legitimate: Western or Israeli civilians were targeted only in retaliation for what were thought to be unjust crimes committed against Palestinian or Muslim civilians, as in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, which was undertaken as vengeance for the allegedly accidental downing of an Iranian jetliner by the US Navy the previous year; on the other hand, US or Israeli military personnel in the region - be it the Marines in the deadly 1983 barracks suicide bombing in Lebanon or the 1996 Khobar Towers attack that blasted another American barracks in Saudi Arabia - were always considered fair game if the opportunity presented itself. After all, even after the Iran-Iraq War, well into the nineties, the US and Iran would stare down at each other tensely and occasionally lightly skirmish in the Persian Gulf, though it never again rose to the level of actual intensive firefights that cost Tehran both naval vessels and oil installations during the "tanker war" with Iraq and its Western backers in the mid-to-late 1980s.
This meant that, for practical purposes, Iran was still the primary sworn adversary of the US and Israel even as the 9/11 attacks confirmed that Sunni extremists drawn primarily from disgruntled Arab populations of US allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not Shiite militants like Hezbollah, were the immediate actual threat to both American and Western civilian safety. Iran's own links with such groups as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, while always extant, rarely appeared to approach the level of operational collusion; but there was little doubt that Tehran shared the opposition to the US military presence in the region that animated such dissidents from Washington's Arab world allies, and more generally that Iran would always be something of a godfather state for all aspiring Islamist and jihadist groups whether Sunni or Shiite that wanted the US out - or at least its puppet regimes punished for treason to their faith.
And so, in the aftermath to 9/11, after a lightning US air campaign purged the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, the neoconservative hawk faction that had risen to ascendancy in the young George W. Bush administration saw fit to set in motion their real project: remaking the entire Middle East according to the free-market, liberal democratic model by sheer force of American high-tech arms, with one of the key ancillary objectives being the complete military encirclement of Iran.
This meant first and foremost toppling Saddam Hussein's withering Baath regime in Iraq, implanting a permanent US troop presence there to establish a dependable pro-American ally, and thereafter exerting such multifaceted diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on the neighboring regime in Tehran that the latter - now facing a US military with bases to its west (Iraq), east (Afghanistan), north (ex-Soviet Central Asia), and south (Sunni Gulf US allies) - would inevitably fold to American hegemony.
Of course, history had other ideas. While Saddam was easily toppled in the spring 2003 US invasion, the Bush administration was ill-prepared for the long-term pacification of the post-Baathist country: a Sunni Arab insurgency which erupted that summer would essentially consume the remainder of his two-term presidency (2001-09); in the lowest points, the US and its allies lost complete control of entire swathes of the Sunni Arab hinterland - the power base of the previous minority regime - to radical Sunni jihadists, including Al Qaeda with its infamously bloodthirsty Iraqi head, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But the true significance of the US invasion was that, far from weakening Iran, it wound up substantially improving the regional position of the Shiite theocracy by effectively giving a liberal democratic boost to political Islam of the Shiite Ayatollahs' variety: in the security and political vacuum that emerged in post-2003 Iraq, Iran-linked Shiite clerics and political parties emerged as the new power brokers not only in Shiite-majority southern Iraq, but nationally. This was only natural: Shiite Arabs were nearly two-thirds of Iraq's population, and the US occupation was so thinly manned on the ground that Shiite militias - some aided or even sponsored by Iranian regime intelligence and paramilitary like the IRGC - practically controlled large swathes of the country's center and south that were more or less at peace with the post-invasion order, even if no longer welcoming of the US military presence (and by 2004 had even begun armed clashes with it).
As such, the US had little means to prevent the new freely elected Iraqi government from becoming in effect a Shiite majoritarian one; when time came to hand power over from its occupying multinational coalition's provisional government to native Iraqis, Washington's attempts to steer the new Iraqi constitution along the path of a regional caucus system - thereby preventing Shiites from dominating nationally through their numbers - were met with large protests that crucially received the blessing of the powerful Ayatollah of the holy shrine city of Najaf, Ali Sistani: any system that diminished the Shiite bloc's strength was unacceptable, given such recent history of US betrayal of them and even the ongoing US failure to sufficiently secure Shiite civilians from Sunni jihadist terrorist attacks.
The Bush administration had, in any case, badly overestimated the domestic Iraqi traction that its own preferred prospective leaders - secular, technocratic Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds - would have once Saddam Hussein was gone and the country could start over. And so, the great irony is that by empowering Iraqi Shiites with the simple majority ballot box, the US gave a democratic stamp of approval to what was essentially a theocratic mode of governance emanating from Iran - in effect, the precise opposite of the Iran policy it had intended by going into Iraq.
A decade and a half after the US invasion, there can be little doubt that the emergence of a powerful Shiite-led order in Baghdad has been the greatest boon to Iran in modern times - not merely in the post-1979 revolution period. At just the moment when religious conservatism seemed like an increasingly difficult relic to preserve within Iran itself, suddenly the historic spiritual heartland of Shiism - southern-central Iraq - was opened to free two-way exchange with the leading Shiite country. Even as the forces of secularism and even Westernization seemed to continue their advance in Tehran and other relatively cosmopolitan Iranian cities, such key Iraqi cities as Baghdad, Basra, and Nasiriyah experienced quasi-revivals of Shiite worship and culture that reverberated east across the Iranian frontier - a process that was also greatly facilitated by the reopening of pilgrimages to important Iraqi shrines like Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra.
Tellingly, that all this took place under the nose of a great Western-sanctioned democratic experiment and the watchful gaze of occupying US forces only served to bolster the Islamic Republic's confidence that it could not merely survive, but prosper in an environment that supposedly catered to Western political and cultural preferences. In practical terms, the opening of Iraq definitely refined the Iranian regime's own domestic governance in typically subtle but concretely tangible ways: Iranian religious and political figures saw in their Iraqi counterparts useful examples of theocratically sound governance that relied less on coercion and fear and more on consultation and consensus, and were able to adopt and adapt such methods for their own subjects.
But what helped Iran most, in the grand scheme of things, was that the newfound Shiite ascendancy in Iraq was also viciously targeted for destruction by a small but fiercely determined clique of Sunni fanatics: Al Qaeda and its Salafist affiliates, heavily funded by renegade Saudi Wahabbist clerics and oil princes, armed by a vast cache of weapons stashed away throughout the country from the Baath era or smuggled in through the neighboring Syrian or Saudi desert, and manned by young recruits from across the entire Sunni Arab Middle East and North Africa, switched from primarily attacking the US occupation and its collaborators in 2003-04 to sowing mayhem and destruction among newly mobilized Shiite communities after the first free post-invasion elections of 2005 swept into power a Shiite majority government. Their aim was to convert the Sunni Arab minority's anger at its loss of privilege under Saddam Hussein and fear of being singled out by the new government's US-led counterinsurgency to turn them to a hostile sectarian jihadist banner.
The key turning point was 2006, when a series of attacks on Shiite holy sites such as the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra finally provoked a systematic Shiite backlash. Baghdad became a full-blown sectarian war zone as existing Iranian-linked Shiite militias were joined by far better trained and equipped Iranian-led police and paramilitary units in a coordinated effort to clear Sunni Arab neighborhoods in the capital of militants; the resulting bloodbath heralded the end of a mixed Sunni-Shiite Baghdad and its transition to a predominantly Shiite Arab city, though in the immediate term the complete removal of Sunnis was ironically forestalled by US forces, which now typically found themselves caught in the crossfire.
Thus, in 2006 and 2007 Iran effectively conducted a proxy war against not only Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Sunni militants and terrorist groups which tried to roll back the rise of Shiite power in Iraq, but also at times US troops which got in the way of its efforts to expand and consolidate its allies' control of key contested areas. Though direct battlefield participation of Iranian operatives against US personnel appears to have been rare if it did occur, the Iranian regime is known to have supplied large numbers of the deadliest improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of the 2003-2011 Iraq war, commonly called EFPs (explosively formed projectiles), to Iraqi militias and paramilitaries that its liaisons oversaw. These are estimated to have killed several hundred US servicemen - a high ratio of the 4,000-odd total American troops to die in combat in the eight-year conflict, especially in light of the fact that the Sunni Arab insurgency spearheaded by Al Qaeda was also (quite understandably) at its very deadliest for US forces in this period of intensive sectarian warfare across all of central Iraq.
It was also against this backdrop of Sunni-Shiite fratricide in Iraq that Tehran racked up another regional strategic success, if even primarily a political and propaganda one: its ally Hezbollah fought the mighty Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to a virtual standstill in the summer of 2006, when the latter attempted a full-scale re-invasion of southern Lebanon but was met with fierce and effective resistance that not only punctured the image of Israel's high-tech battlefield prowess, but also entrenched the Shiite militant group as a political as well as guerrilla force in the Levant - and very useful forward proxy in any potential future conflict right on the Zionist entity's doorstep.
Taken together, Lebanon and Iraq in 2006-07 cemented Iran's emergent role as a regional spoiler for all US (and thus Israeli) security and geopolitical plans; America's Sunni Gulf allies led by Saudi Arabia now worried that a so-called "Shiite Crescent" would emerge that would span from Lebanon across Shiite-Alawite minority-ruled Syria (the Assad Baathist regime) and newly Shiite majority-ruled Iraq, curve across Iran itself, and bend back down across the Gulf to the heavily Shiite-populated eastern coastline of Arabia (notably Bahrain). While tensions flared between Tehran and Riyadh on account of the sectarian turf war in Iraq, they were at this stage far from creating real acrimony; yet it was now unmistakable that the Middle East was beginning to exhibit a fracture along a general Sunni-Shiite, i.e. Saudi-led and Iranian-led, sectarian fault line.
By the late 2000s, though, the internal situation had also changed markedly in Iran. As Iraq receded into the background in 2008-09, domestic concerns became more prominent. Consistently high oil prices throughout the first decade of the 21st century had buoyed the Iranian economy, but the country remained badly short of investment, capital, and advanced foreign technical know-how - which would only come with an improved perceived business climate stemming from religious moderation. Meanwhile, the dependency on petroleum exports inevitably ensconced a corrupt economic rent class, even if nominally supervised by Islamic law and principle.
Meanwhile, secular Persian nationalism had clearly emerged as a more powerful mass current in Iranian politics than its conservative rival, Arab-Islamist religiosity. While the two were skilfully and often symbiotically managed or manipulated by the country's populist president of the mid-to-late 2000s, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - especially when events in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine were prominent and conveniently gave his government a means to blend the cause of national self-determination under the aegis of divine ordinance - the nationalist strain of public opinion was mistrusted by the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs as being too fickle and too easily swayed by the unpredictable winds of change.
The 2008-09 global financial crisis - coming as it did right on the tails of Iran's regional foreign successes in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Tehran's hand there was strengthened by the 2008 electoral victory of Hamas that, among other things, turned the Gaza Strip into another proxy outpost) - was just such an event that caught Iranian government and society largely unprepared. With oil prices and exports crashing and the national economy and financial stability suddenly far more precarious, the same force that had propelled Tehran abroad now threatened to upset its delicate sociopolitical equilibrium at home.
Though the "Green Movement" of 2009 is best remembered in the West for being quashed in a bloody crackdown by the regime - one that appeared to presage the autocratic repressions of the Arab spring protests less than two years later - it was in fact the start of a more nuanced realignment of Iran's sociopolitical contracts, one that would effectively create the seemingly bipolar combination of increasingly assertive Islamic militancy in the region yet increasing eagerness to open to the wider world, including the West and the US, in the economic realm.
After all, as of early 2018, this paradox is precisely what makes Iran such a formidable nation-state to reckon with: much like China in the early 1990s, it appears to be a civilization-state determining that it truly wants to update and upgrade itself for the third millennium, yet will fiercely guard its autonomy from the dominant rival cultures and creeds of the day in doing so.
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