The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Some of the most significant accomplishments of the Khatami presidency were in changing the tone and tenor of domestic Iranian politics. As president, he sought to give substance to his campaign promises of encouraging the spread of civil society and observing the rule of law. As much as he could, and within limits, he relaxed social strictures concerning the youth in general and women in particular. Restrictions on the printed media were also relaxed, and, in a departure from the past, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, one of whose responsibilities it was to grant licenses for books to be published and movies to be made, loosened its previous guidelines of what were and were not permissible forms of academic and artistic expression. It is no exaggeration to maintain that under Khatami Iran underwent an intellectual revolution of sorts.68

  Despite initiating seismic shifts in Iran’s international relations and its domestic politics, by the time Khatami left office in June 2005 his popularity among Iran’s urban middle classes had dwindled. This was largely because of his multiple failures to overcome trenchant opposition within the system to his reform programs. Khatami had been reelected back in 2001 with the assumption by most urban Iranians that he would give added substance and weight to his reforms. But it soon became evident that the president was either unwilling or unable to do so, and his star steadily dimmed among those who had vested so much of their hope in him. Part of this halted approach to reforms was a product of Khatami’s own fears that he would become the Mikhail Gorbachev of Iran, inadvertently initiating reforms that would bring about the collapse of the entire system. But even more significant was the fact that in the larger scheme of Iranian politics Khatami was a relatively powerless president. The president and some of his allies controlled the offices of the presidency and the cabinet. But the Majles and the judiciary, and far more significantly the office of the Leader, remained firmly under the control of conservatives and radicals. In fact, it was not so much Khatami’s reforms but rather factionalism—at times bitter internal divisions—that appeared to be emerging as the defining feature of Iran’s Third Republic.

  It was precisely these internal divisions that resulted in the election of the hard-line mayor of Tehran to the presidency in 2005. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s career closely mirrors those of countless others who actively took part in the revolution and the war against Iraq. Once the war was over, many of these individuals, deeply committed to the ideals of the revolution and to Ayatollah Khomeini, went on to assume increasingly influential positions in the state bureaucracy, at the same time enhancing their academic and professional credentials. In the process, they developed diverging views about the proper interpretations of Khomeini’s legacy and the next stage in the evolution of the revolution. Khatami and the “reformists” (eslahtalaban) had to contend with the “conservatives” (mohafezehkaran), who cared less about instituting political reforms than about attending to economic development. Both camps were in turn opposed by the radical “principlists” (osulgarayan), who rejected as revisionist and deviant any digression from what they saw as the revolution’s true principles. Reversing many of Khatami’s domestic reforms and international initiatives, Ahmadinejad’s presidency was not just a reaction to the openness and reformism of the Khatami period. It was, in fact, a throwback to the earliest days of the revolution. The president’s rhetoric, his populist domestic policies, his confrontational and uncompromising foreign policy objectives, and even his persona—down to his choice of clothing—all harked back to the early days of the Islamic Republic, when ideological politics and rousing speeches ruled the day.

  Ahmadinejad’s presidency polarized the factional alignments and tensions inherent within the system, resulting in its near implosion during the June 2009 presidential elections. In his attempt to secure reelection, the incumbent president based his campaign on promises of destroying Iran’s “power mafia.” For his part, Ahmadinejad’s main opponent, Mirhossein Mousavi (b. 1942), prime minister from 1981 to 1989 and long a member of the regime’s inner circle, openly and repeatedly accused the president of corruption and incompetence. The electorate, which had not seen anything quite like this in the thirty-year life of the Islamic Republic, took to the streets in the millions, generating an election euphoria that shook the very foundations of the regime.

  When election results determined that Mousavi had suffered a resounding defeat, demonstrations in Tehran and in other major cities, made up of millions decrying electoral fraud, became even more threatening to the establishment. A brutal campaign of suppression followed, with the Basij forces, often in plainclothes, unleashing indiscriminate violence on the protesters. When people took their protests indoors and started shouting “Allah-o Akbar” (God is great) from rooftops at night, the security forces began breaking into homes, beating up women, and hauling men to jail. The suppression campaign bore fruit. Mousavi, the insider turned reluctant revolutionary, was quieted down, and many of his vocal supporters were jailed; the street demonstrators, fearful of being discovered, retreated into their homes and kept their heads down; families whose loved ones were killed by the Basij mourned in quiet; and Ahmadinejad remained the president. Another longtime regime insider turned reformist, former Majles Speaker Mehdi Karroubi (b. 1937), who had also run as an opposition candidate in both the 2005 and 2009 elections, was, like Mousavi, placed under house arrest.

  Mousavi’s campaign gave rise to the Green Movement—green being the color of Mousavi’s campaign—which emerged spontaneously and was made up of supporters of the former prime minister. Members of the Green Movement, who were mostly students and other young Iranians, often used holidays and other notable dates on the regime’s own revolutionary calendar to gather in city squares and streets across the country and to protest what had steadily become a dictatorship bereft of any popular legitimacy. As the regime’s indiscriminate campaign of suppression against the Green Movement and other scattered acts of civil disobedience continued, the Green Movement gradually petered out, its leaders in detention or in exile, its foot soldiers dispirited and resigned to the status quo.69

  Besides the rise and fall of the Green Movement, Iran’s 2009 presidential elections had a number of far-reaching consequences for the country’s political system. Relying on the Leader to come to his defense in the bitter aftermath of the elections, Ahmadinejad found himself increasingly marginalized within the political system and the subject of relentless attacks from other regime insiders, so much so that the Majles’s efforts in late 2012 aimed at “questioning the president,” amounting to an impeachment of sorts, were halted only after the Leader’s intercession. After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the office of the Leader had been given to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a former Speaker of the Majles and later president of the republic. But in his first decade as the Leader, Khamenei found himself overshadowed by the energetic presidencies of first Rafsenjani and later Khatami. The year 2009 marked a turning point in the conduct of the office of the Leader, with Khamenei becoming directly involved in the country’s daily politics in unprecedented ways. Iran’s contentious relations with the United States, policies regarding its controversial nuclear program, and the regulation of the intrainstitutional relations within the regime all began to be run directly out of the Leader’s office. The security forces and especially the Basij, meanwhile, which had played key roles in putting down the 2009 protests, also became highly politicized, purportedly reporting directly to the Leader. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s penchant for incendiary rhetoric and his polarizing policies prompted Khamenei to rein him in as much as possible and to instead assume a more public profile himself.

  Thus Iran’s Third Republic came about not through constitutional engineering and institutional changes, as had been the case with the Second Republic, but as a result of the fracturing of elite cohesion, leading at first to an opening of political space and reforms (1997–2005) and later to the narrowing and forcible closure of that space (2005–9). To keep the system intact amid turbulent expansions and
contractions, the Leader has assumed more roles in more domains. Nevertheless, his exhortations to the contrary notwithstanding, deep political and ideological fissures continue to separate factional groupings across the Islamic Republic system. Such a system cannot survive indefinitely.

  Figure 12. Iran’s atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi (left) and head of the Russian nuclear agency Sergei Kiriyenko hold a joint press conference following a ceremony initiating the transfer of Russia-supplied fuel to the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran on August 21, 2010, after more than three decades of delay. Getty Images.

  Like most other revolutions, especially the French, with which it shared a number of parallels, Iran’s “Islamic” revolution was accompanied in its early years by a repressive reign of terror that brutally eliminated enemies, rejected the outside world, and went about creating the institutions that it needed to consolidate itself. Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary zealot, was determined, shrewd, and brilliant at gauging popular sentiments and manipulating them. Within a year of coming to power, he had constitutionally sanctified his position and had officially ensured his personal role as Iran’s supreme leader.

  But even imams die, and the ayatollah’s death in June 1989, less than a year after the end of the war with Iraq, ushered in a new era and a new emphasis for Iranian politics. The emphasis on revolutionary purity was replaced by one on the urgent need for national reconstruction. Economic limitations hampered the extent to which such a “construction crusade” would be fruitful, but the state’s shift in focus and priorities was undeniable. The postrevolutionary state, it seemed, by now felt secure in its hold on power and the resilience of its institutions to take on the daunting challenge of economic reform. Evidence, nonetheless, does not reflect too kindly on the state’s accomplishments in the economic arena.

  The third and current phase in the life of postrevolutionary Iran started with the surprise election of Hojjatoleslam Muhammad Khatami in May 1997. Since then, we have seen the bitter rivalry of deeply entrenched factions along the three axes of reformism, conservatism, and radicalism. In unprecedented ways, the bitterly fought presidential election of June 2009, which controversially returned President Ahmadinejad to office, showed the alarming degree to which the Islamic Republic state is internally divided. To what extent the Iranian masses, especially those in the major cities, remain bystanders in this factional state conflict or become participants in social movements that feed off of the state’s ideological divisions remains to be seen. What is clear for now is that the last act of the Iranian revolution is yet to be written.

  Of course, Iran’s 1978–79 revolution did not alter the life of Iran and Iranians alone. It set into motion events whose repercussions were felt both in the immediate vicinity and in places as far away as the United States and western Europe. The fears that the Iranian revolution inspired among its immediate neighbors, and the regional vacuum that the shah’s sudden demise left behind, prompted Iraq to invade Iran in September 1980. The duration and outcome of this war in turn prompted Iraq to undertake further, and in hindsight riskier, international ventures. The next chapter turns to these international conflicts.

  6The Gulf Wars and Beyond

  By nature, the consequences of revolutions go far beyond domestic boundaries. They influence, often with great ferocity, prevailing international power relations and the diplomatic status quo. They create power vacuums and opportunities to be exploited, look for allies and enemies on the other side of the border, give rise to those who seek to export the revolution’s message and ideals, and, quite often, culminate in a war involving two or even more belligerents.

  The Iranian revolution was no exception. The overthrow of the shah had left a power vacuum in a region of great significance to western Europe and the superpowers, especially the United States. Beginning in the mid-1960s and especially the 1970s, the Persian Gulf had been lined from one end to the other by overtly pro-Western leaders, the 1973 oil boycott and Iraq’s occasional rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. By the late 1970s, the states of the Persian Gulf had firmly placed themselves in the Western camp in the Cold War competition, and, despite repeated efforts and considerable investments in diplomacy and hardware, Soviet policy in the region had suffered one setback after another.1 However, by early 1980, the fall of the shah, the capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (in December 1979) had thrown the policies of the United States and other Western powers toward the Persian Gulf into serious confusion.2 The revolutionary rhetoric emanating from Tehran, promising export of the revolution to the nearby countries ruled by conservative monarchies, aggravated the regional instability and chaos that were beginning to engulf not just the immediate vicinity but much of the Middle East. Within this volatile and charged international atmosphere Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, setting into motion an eight-year war between the two countries.

  The Iran-Iraq War was a bloody and devastating conflict, with an estimated one million dead and tens of thousands of prisoners of war captured by both sides. But as wrenching as the conflict was for Iranians and Iraqis, it had ramifications far beyond the two warring countries and their respective allies. The direction in which the war evolved and the circumstances under which it was concluded directly led to another war, this time resulting in Iraq’s invasion of its neighbor to the south, Kuwait. The “liberation” of Kuwait was carried out by a U.S.-led force of international allies under the banners of defending national sovereignty, upholding international law, and defeating aggression. Had the Iranians not violated international law themselves so blatantly by taking American diplomats hostage, perhaps the same level of moral outrage would have been directed at Iraq’s earlier invasion and occupation of Iranian territories. That Kuwait was very much pro-Western and a major producer of oil added force to the immorality of its occupation by Iraq. Ultimately, Iraq itself was invaded and the country was occupied, this time by an American-led “Coalition of the Willing” searching for weapons of mass destruction and promising to root out terrorism.

  In some ways, the Iran-Iraq War appears to have been the last gasp of the dying phenomenon of Arab unity. A credible argument can even be made that such a phenomenon never existed beyond the tired and hollow rhetoric of leaders such as Nasser and Qaddafi. Empty as it might have been, the rhetoric served as a rallying cry for some, and, if nothing else, at times it succeeded in provoking panicked reactions by Israel and the West. Given the history of flimsy political institutions in the Middle East and the greater importance of personalities, rhetoric was a powerful political tool for both domestic constituents and international audiences. But with the death of Nasser and the dismantling of Nasserism at home and abroad, even the rhetoric of Arab unity started to die out, only occasionally sounding from the Libyan desert or from isolated and desperate Palestinian “revolutionaries.” Ironically, the religious character of the Iranian revolution did nothing to promote unity with the Iranians’ co-religionists in the Arab world. In fact, although the radical and radicalizing rhetoric of the revolution led to a brief episode of Arab unity, it only widened the rift between the Iranians and much of the Arab world.

  As we have seen so far, much of the modern history of the Middle East has been shaped by the two seemingly contradictory forces of nationalism and Arab unity. In reality, these forces have been one and the same, differing only in the definition and scope they attach to the concept of nation. Is the Arab nation defined by virtue of its common language and literary tradition, its common culture and religion, or its common ethnic bonds? Or is it fragmented into smaller units that are separated by borders drawn up in the period of colonialism? Whatever the depth and breadth of the Arab nation, for more than fifty years it has had to contend with diverse states, and the resulting entities have come to assume different characters, proud identities, and widely differing priorities. Emotional appeals to an overarching Arab nation have resurfaced only when they have suited the interests of specific Arab leaders
at particular times: Nasser in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Qaddafi in the 1970s and 1980s, and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. For many years, a genuine sense of commitment to the Palestinians, coupled with a need to blame domestic shortcomings on outside evils, made Israel the common enemy of many Arab states, thus keeping the ideal of unity alive in the collective memory of the Arab masses. But ideal and reality are two different things. As Israel proved again and again to be undefeatable, hopes for Arab unity grew increasingly dimmer and its promises more empty. When in the 1980s Iran emerged as a new common enemy, menacing Arab states near and far, the old ideal regained some life. Saddam, declaring himself the defender of the Arab nation, promised to slay the new enemy and to defend the honor and interests of all Arabs against Iranian ambitions. But as it turned out, he assumed that the Arab nation would be only a passive audience, viewing with admiration his state’s countless victories. Soon the Iraqi state would itself rampage through the Arab nation with the banner of Arab unity. What started as a tragic farce—the Iran-Iraq War—soon led to another wrenching charade, the Second Gulf War.

  The cumulative effects of the two bloody Gulf Wars was a serious weakening of the regional state system in the Middle East. By the early 1990s, any measure of unity that had once grouped the Arab states in a “focused system” with a single goal was all but gone, and potential hegemonic powers like Egypt and Iraq had been weakened or isolated both within the region and internationally. The ensuing power vacuum was filled by the United States, now emboldened by the demise of the Soviet Union and the dawning of an American-dominated “New World Order.”

  Power has its privileges, but it also attracts anger and resentment. A decade after the Gulf War ended, that anger manifested itself in a horrific attack on the American mainland by fanatics from the Middle East. September 11, 2001, marks a watershed in American diplomacy around the globe and especially in relation to the Middle East. This chapter examines the causes, consequences, and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, especially the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as those of the two major military conflicts in the Middle East before that—the Iran-Iraq War and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.