Notwithstanding the long Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 and ended with a
stalemate in 1988, Tehran's chief security concern since the fall of the shah
in 1979 has not been with Iraq, but with belligerent US intentions toward the
Islamic Republic itself.
The view persists in Persian Tehran, as indeed it does also in
Arab Damascus, Riyadh, and even Cairo, as well as in the
capitals of all the Persian Gulf states, that after Iraq their separate
countries, for different reasons, with or without nuclear-weapons ambitions,
are destined to be targets on the US hit list to complete its agenda of
imposing democracy in the entire region. Accordingly, Tehran can be expected to
prepare for defending itself from possible militarized hostilities from either
the US itself or its proxy regime in Iraq.
This view is based not on Iranian or Arab paranoia, but on official US policy
declaration. On November 6, 2003, less than eight months after the invasion of
Iraq, addressing the National Endowment for Democracy, a neo-conservative
organization founded during the era of the late US president Ronald Reagan,
President George W Bush, fresh from "catastrophic success" in war, sought to
justify the predictably endless and unsustainably high cost in lives and money
of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by setting out the argument for that war
no longer in terms of defense against a security threat to the US homeland, but
as part of a proactive "global democratic revolution".
After failing to find weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq despite
exhaustive search, the blood and money Bush was expending in that occupied land
were being justified by the noble-sounding aim of promoting democracy in tribal
Arab societies and in the Persian Islamic Republic, notwithstanding that Iran's
democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, had been deposed in
1953 by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to install the autocratic
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah to keep Iranian oil in Western hands.
Bush predicted that successful implantation of a democratic government in Iraq
would energize a global democratic revolution that would sweep away what the
United States alleged to be "tyrannies from Cuba to North Korea". Specifically,
Bush proclaimed a new "forward strategy" for advancing freedom in the Middle
East, declaring that "six decades of excusing and accommodating dictatorships
there on the part of the US did nothing to make us safe, because stability
cannot be purchased at liberty's expense". Even after the rout suffered by the
Republicans in last November's mid-term congressional elections when the
disastrous US occupation of Iraq had been a major campaign issue, Bush
continues to argue not only that US troops should not be withdrawn, but that a
new troop surge should be sent until democracy has been established in the
region, which ironically confirmed the fact that the war itself did not foster
democracy. Democracy has to be enforced at gunpoint after the war.
Thus there are survival incentives in all capitals in Middle East and the GCC
states (Gulf Cooperation Council for the Arab states Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and in Iran to ensure that US
regime-change policy does not succeed and that this geopolitical cancer called
"democracy" be arrested within Iraq by insurgence therapy before it spreads
throughout a region of Arab tribal societies and a Persian civilization that
dates back to 1500 BC.
For Iran, a stabilized Iraq under US control would act as a proxy belligerent
against it, relieving the United States from hesitation over the exorbitantly
high direct cost of military action against a zealous enemy in the form of the
Islamic Republic of Iran with a population of 70 million, substantial oil
wealth and a strategic location controlling Persian Gulf tanker traffic through
the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not forgotten the US tilt toward Iraq in the
eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 in which more than a million
combatants died and countless more were wounded. It was the longest war in
modern history, where weapons were supplied to Iraq by France and by both Cold
War nemeses the USSR and the US, while Iran was supplied by Israel, its mortal
enemy, to prolong the war to bleed both combatants.
Tehran knows that in a war with the US, there would be help from unexpected
sources to keep Iran fighting for years to wear down, if not defeat, the United
States, whose domestic politics cannot sustain a long limited war.
Iranian involvement in the Middle East
Middle East involvement by the Islamic Republic of Iran began in 1982 when
Israel invaded Lebanon, prompting Iran, despite its by-then three-year-old war
with Iraq, to deploy its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the Bekaa Valley
to help the Lebanese Muslims fight against the Israel invasion, and to counter
US support for Israeli aggression.
In July that year, operatives from the US-backed Lebanese Christian forces
kidnapped four Iranian diplomats, including the commander of the Revolutionary
Guards in the Bekaa Valley and the Iranian charge d'affaires. That triggered a
decade of retaliatory kidnappings in which dozens of Westerners were taken
hostage by a network of resistance cells. The first hostage was David Dodge, a
US citizen who was the acting president of the American University in Beirut.
US officials alleged that operatives from the Iranian-backed Shi'ite group
Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, were behind most of the kidnappings.
In April 1983, a suicide bomber rammed a pickup truck loaded with explosives
into the US Embassy in Beirut. Seventeen US diplomats were among the 63 people
killed, eight of whom were CIA operatives, including chief Middle East analyst
Robert C Ames and station chief Kenneth Haas. The Reagan administration again
blamed Hezbollah, which it suspected was receiving financial and logistical
support from Iran with assistance from Syria.
In September 1983, a truck bomb again exploded outside the US Embassy annex in
Beirut, killing 24 people, two of whom were US military personnel. According to
a 1999 US State Department report on terrorist organizations, elements of
Hezbollah were "known or suspected to have been involved" in the bombing,
notwithstanding the oxymoronic nature of the words "known" and "suspected".
In October 1984, a suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives at a US
Marine Corps barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 marines and
wounding more than 100 others. The soldiers were part of a contingent of 1,800
marines that had been sent to help separate warring Lebanese factions. The
incident led to the withdrawal of US troops from Lebanon.
In Frontline Public Broadcasting Service interview conducted days after
September 11, 2001, former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger said that the
US still lacked "actual knowledge of who did the bombing" of the marine
barracks, but it suspected Hezbollah on deduction from motive.
In the same interview, Robert C MacFarlane, national security adviser to Reagan
from 1983-85, told of an internal dilemma over the appropriate US response: "In
1984, it was essentially the same disagreement [within the administration] ...
over the use of force, and its impact on alienating moderate Muslim states.
That led to paralysis in response to the attack on the embassy annex. Secretary
[of state George] Shultz favored a very strong response with the 6th Fleet, and
secretary Weinberger simply opposed it."
In an attempt to end the Lebanese hostage crisis, US officials who believed
that Iran-backed operatives of Hezbollah were responsible for the kidnappings
devised a covert plan. Iran was desperately running out of military supplies in
its war with Iraq, and Congress had banned the sale of US arms to countries
that it said sponsored terrorism, which included Iran. President Reagan was
advised that a bargain could be struck: secret arms sales to Iran in exchange
for hostages back to the US.
The plan, when it was revealed to the public, was decried as a failure and
anathema to standing US policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. In
August 1985, the first consignment of
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
