The Devil We Know

_________________________

THE IRANIAN PARADOX

One Friday morning in 2005, I attended prayer services at Tehran University. I was traveling with a crew from Britain’s Channel 4, and we were treated as VIPs. Security checks were waived and we were given the press booth right next to Ayatollah Kashani, who addressed the faithful for the next two hours. The vast hall was only half full, but Kashani’s sermon was long and furious, something straight out of 1979.

Out on the street, a demonstration was forming. There were effigies of President Bush, blood running from his pointed teeth. Across the street, some demonstrators unfurled banners: Marg bar amerika—“Death to America.”

I walked for a time among the demonstrators. There was one old man who seemed especially passionate about bringing death to America, shaking his fist and shouting. I walked up to him. “Do you mean all Americans?” I asked.

He looked at me curiously. “Where are you from?” he said. I told him I was American. He winked and leaned in closer to me.

“How can I get an American visa?” he asked.

Iran is a country of nuances. Unfortunately, at just the time it most needs to, the United States doesn’t see those nuances, or understand Iran for what it is: a country that’s deeply pious, yet desperately trying to modernize. Iran’s religious parties generally receive only about 10 percent of the vote—considerably less than in Turkey, a member of NATO and an American ally.

Americans see Iran’s president and mullahs as relics from a dark age, when in reality they’re a driving force behind Iran’s modernization. Since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s true, there’s been a conservative retrenchment, with hard-liners winning the presidency and a majority in parliament. A U-turn like this was all but inevitable with hostile armies on two of Iran’s borders. But once the wars are over, Iran will no doubt return to modernizing.

Iranians watch our movies, read our books, listen to our music. They have taken to the Internet and modern technology with an obsession equal to our own. Today Persian is the most common language on the Internet after English and Mandarin Chinese. Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad writes his own blog.

In some ways, Iran has matched our own modern standards. The country’s population growth has plummeted from a high of 3.2 in 1986 to 1.2 in 2001, only slightly higher than America’s. The Iranians also keep an old Shia practice with regard to pleasure and sex, one that Sunni Muslims consider morally forbidden: zawaj al-mita’—“pleasure marriage,” or sanctioned prostitution. The way it works is, a mullah will grant a license for a man and a woman to marry for a set period—two hours, a week, a month. The mullah’s only concern is making sure the man pays for the child if the woman becomes pregnant. It’s paradoxes like these that make Iran so difficult to grasp.

The signs of change are everywhere. One of the most popular dramas on Iranian state television is about an Iranian diplomat who saves French Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The average age of marriage for an Iranian woman today is twenty-five; during the Shah’s last year in power, it was thirteen. And doctors reportedly perform more sex-change operations in Iran than in any other country except Thailand, with the Iranian government even paying up to half the cost for some transsexuals.

If you stroll around north Tehran, the part that runs up into the hills, that’s where you’re really struck by the contrasts. There are food courts serving Thai and Chinese food, with plastic trays and soft drinks. Young unmarried girls and boys share hookahs at outdoor restaurants, the girls’ head covers pushed back, down around the neck. In Iran, unlike in Saudi Arabia, religious police aren’t on every corner to enforce the “moral order.” And unlike in The Sudan, there are no arrests in Iran for the grave offense of naming a teddy bear “Mohammed.”

While I was in Tehran, I was regularly invited to parties; I’d heard rumors they were as hip and wild as anything that goes on in the cosmopolitan Western capitals of the world. But I figured I’d already pressed my luck even coming to Iran, and anyhow I couldn’t stay up that late to find out. What did all this tell me about Iran’s imperial grasp? The parties, the love affair with the Internet, the changing sexual mores—they augur a country modernizing, looking beyond its borders.

One piece of Iran that’s trying to modernize but can’t is the economy. For the life of me, I couldn’t find a single good restaurant in Tehran. The restaurants reminded me of those in the Soviet Union: buffets with lousy service. There were more waiters than needed, but all of them stood around, surly, turning away when you wanted something. Kitchens ran out of everything. And breakfasts were peculiar, with mountains of watermelon and boiled eggs and nothing else. Omelets were apparently an outrageous luxury, though with relentless charm and cajoling you might get one.

Another thing that reminded me of the Soviet Union were the soulless, water-streaked cement apartment buildings, office buildings, and hotels. Concierges are invariably polite but hopeless in trying to help you with anything. Phones mostly don’t work, and Internet connections are erratic. To be sure, there are well-heeled Iranian elite reading Lolita and dining on nouvelle cuisine, but they keep out of sight.

Tehran’s big problem is the internal combustion engine. The Iranian national car, the Peykan, is one of the noisiest, worst-polluting, and least fuel-efficient cars in the world. It was in production for forty years, and many of the cars on Iran’s roads predate the 1979 revolution. With gasoline running as low as 7 cents a gallon until recently, though, there wasn’t much incentive for change. Even so, in the last three years, 250,000 Iranian cars have been converted to natural gas or hybrids, and today Tehran’s smog has cleared up enough to see the snow-covered Elburz Mountains to the north.

When I visited south Tehran’s Kumaila Mosque, ground zero of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, I noticed the distinct smell of opium smoke drifting through the narrow alleys. This was a conservative neighborhood, the place where the Islamic revolution started, yet there was an incomprehensible tolerance for a vice forbidden almost everywhere else in the world.

And it wasn’t as if the Iranian government couldn’t close down the opium dens if it wanted to. Iran is a police state. Every day I drove around Tehran, or walked around the streets and bazaars, I was stopped and my papers checked—just because I looked out of place, a foreigner. The tamperproof ID card I was issued by the Ministry of Information was more sophisticated than those you’d find in the United States—a permanent digital record of the ex–CIA agent, now an accredited journalist in Iran.

The contradictions continue. Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport is one of the most modern and least traveled in the world—and, I should add, the most polite. On arrival, I handed my passport to an immigration official wearing the hijab, or head covering. When she saw I was American, she said, “I’m so sorry.” She entered my name on the flat-screen monitor, then picked up the phone and called someone. A minute later, a man in a suit without a tie appeared behind her. He motioned for me to follow him.

There’s no point in pretending I felt anything other than dread. I knew the reputation of the Iranian secret police during both the Shah’s regime and the revolution. I remembered how we came across pictures of Iranian dissidents in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, left in the courtyard in the freezing cold, their legs broken with baseball bats. Or pictures of the CIA’s station chief in Beirut after he’d been beaten by Iranian proxies and left to die of pneumonia. Or of Iranian liberals in the late nineties, executed in their homes. Even today, the Iranians still occasionally serve up medieval punishment for crimes, including amputations and public floggings.

And Americans, even after a certain thaw in Iranian-American relations, weren’t immune from the Iranian police state. On March 8, 2007, the former FBI agent Robert Levinson flew to the Iranian free-trade zone of Kish Island—and disappeared like a diamond in an inkwell. At this writing, the FBI’s best guess is that a rogue element of Iran’s intelligence service grabbed him. Not exactly what you’d expect from a modern country. But this is the most important nuance of Iran: It’s a country desperately trying to modernize, not one that has already modernized.

I waited nervously until the man in the suit came back. “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but we must fingerprint you.”

As I followed him to his office, he explained that his ministry had started fingerprinting Americans after the United States instituted the same practice for Iranians visiting the United States. It was a simple matter of reciprocity, equal justice. I had to stop him from apologizing. Iran still had the capacity to surprise me.

A misconception Americans have about Iran is that Iranians hate us and our culture. But that’s not true. They simply hate what they consider our occupation of large swaths of the Middle East. I saw this most clearly when making a documentary about suicide bombers in southern Lebanon a couple of years ago. Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy whose name means “party of God” in Arabic, had invited us to film at its martyrs’ school in Nabatiyah, to see how their next generation was turning out—Allah’s little soldiers.

Nabatiyah itself holds a celebrated place in the history of Lebanon’s Shia. On October 16, 1983, on the Muslim observance of Ashura, an Israeli patrol tried to cut through a procession of Shia faithful. Rocks flew, and the Israelis fired back, killing two Lebanese. The incident sparked what came to be known as the Islamic resistance, an insurgency the Israelis couldn’t put down no matter what they threw back at it.

Eighteen years of unforgiving war followed, until the Israelis finally pulled their troops out of Lebanon in May 2000. This was a critical turning point, the first time that Israel was forced to cede land under fire. The Middle East suddenly discovered Hezbollah, which emerged stronger than ever, both politically and militarily. For many Arabs, Nabatiyah was Hezbollah’s Boston Tea Party; Israel’s forced departure from Lebanon was its Waterloo. But Iran knew the fighting wasn’t over, and it built the school in Nabatiyah as an incubator for a new generation of suicide bombers, for the next war.

As we pulled up to the three-story school building, perched on a bare hill, I was struck by the eerie silence. The only sound was the mean, thin wind that cut across the jagged limestone escarpment.

Classes were in session, but there was none of the laughing or shouting you’d normally hear at an American school. There were no students out front. No cars or even a bicycle in sight—the students all walk from their homes in Nabatiyah. The grounds were immaculate, from the raked gravel walks to the avocado exterior and the whitewashed classrooms. The school was a model of order and cleanliness. But that’s something I’d noticed in the last twenty-five years about Iran and its proxy Hezbollah: they manage to impose order where there was none before.

The principal, in an ash-gray chador and steel-framed glasses, was waiting for us at the front door. The look on her face told me she wasn’t happy about our visit, but she didn’t have a choice—Hezbollah was now romancing the Western media. It had driven the Israelis out of Lebanon and was in charge now. Sloughing off old skin for new, guerrillas turned statesmen, they were determined to convince the West they’d left their terrorist past behind and were now perfectly comfortable opening up their inner sanctums.

The principal led me up to the second floor and into a classroom. The twenty or so teenagers, all girls, were silent, attentive. The principal told me I should address my questions only to the teacher. I quickly got around to asking her about her special students, the daughters of suicide bombers. There were three in her class.

She said they pay no school fees, they receive gifts every Father’s Day, and after graduation their university education is paid for. The other students and the teachers treat them with deep respect as living symbols of martyrdom, sacrifice, and Islam’s devotion to justice.

“You have to be proud of your father,” the teacher said, looking at a petite girl in the front row, “because he defended the country. Because he is a hero.”

The girl, whose father died in an ambush of an Israeli patrol, looked steadily at her teacher, neither smiling nor blushing. Her chador barely covered her raven hair.

Why, I asked the teacher, is martyrdom so important for Shia Islam?

“Because it is at the heart of our religion.”

Martyrdom in fact is a canon of Shia Islam, almost as important as the Koran, the mosque, and daily prayer. Hezbollah, like Iran, has turned martyrdom into a state religion. Iran’s Martyrs’ Foundation, a quasi-governmental institution founded to care for the families of Iranian soldiers who died during the Iran-Iraq War, funds the Nabatiyah school.

But I was more interested in what the girls themselves had to say. “May I ask the students questions?” I asked. The teacher looked at the principal, who shot me a nasty look, but then nodded.

“Who watches American TV?” I asked, addressing the class in Arabic.

Every hand shot up.

“What do you watch?”

One girl giggled. “Oprah.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, genuinely surprised at both the answer and the giggle.

At that point the entire class leapt in, in English. “No, no, really!” they said, some of them laughing. “We love Oprah.”

And that’s another paradox Americans need to understand: While the schoolgirls in Nabatiyah may watch Oprah and want iPods and flat-screen TVs, that doesn’t mean they want to be like us. They’ll never slip into bikinis and flip-flops to go to the beach, or watch our R-rated movies or listen to our garage bands. They take from Western culture and technology what suits them, what fits their beliefs, convictions, and sense of propriety. And nothing more. But what they really don’t want forced on them is our politics.

The sooner we understand how a girl from Nabatiyah’s martyrs’ school can watch Oprah, then strap on a suicide bomber’s vest and blow herself up in the middle of an Israeli patrol, the better prepared we’ll be to face what’s coming our way.

Iran is complex enough that even the Iranians themselves have trouble understanding their own country. A conversation I had with one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s former aides, a man I will call Amin, illustrated this perfectly.

We met at Amin’s bookstore in Paris, where he had emigrated after Khomeini’s revolution collapsed. “I sincerely apologize for the cliché, sir,” he said, moving a stack of books to see me better, “but Iran is a mosaic. Yes, ‘mosaic’ is the word I’m looking for.”

As an aide to Khomeini, Amin had lived through the lowest point of American-Iranian relations, the 1979 hostage crisis. He later served in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament. Since he emigrated, he’s had a lot of time to think about Iran and Khomeini’s failed revolution.

Amin admits that at times Iran is barely comprehensible even to Iranians. He told me the story of being in Tehran in 1981 when a terrorist group blew up Khomeini’s party headquarters, killing four cabinet ministers and leading to fears within the regime that Khomeini’s revolution was about to cross over into anarchy. But even though an enormous bomb had just destroyed the building and you could hear sirens screaming through Tehran’s streets, no one had the nerve to tell Ayatollah Khomeini what had just happened.

Amin was in the waiting area of Khomeini’s office when finally the intercom crackled on an aide’s desk, summoning him. The aide tiptoed into Khomeini’s office and came back ten seconds later: Khomeini had just heard the news on the BBC’s Persian Service—the source of most of his information about his own country. Even though Amin sat in the inner circle, it was difficult to know who really ran the country.

Still, Amin believes the United States misunderstands Iran by an unnecessarily wide mark. On one level, Americans are too distant from the Middle East, too naïve to understand its complexities and history. On another, it’s the people who show up in Washington—Iranian and Arab exiles nursing a grudge, with time on their hands and money to pay for a hotel—who influence U.S. policy by default. They color Washington’s view of the world, drawing us into foreign adventures we have no business being in.

And then there’s just plain shortsightedness, the distractions of modern life getting in the way of our understanding. The world is infinite in detail, and we are finite in our ability to select from it. There are just too many facts, and this is especially true with a country as complex as Iran.

Amin pulled down a UNESCO book on migration to the Iranian capital.

“Look here,” he said. “Tehran is a Turkic city. Not Persian. How many Americans understand this?”

Indeed, it comes as a surprise to many Americans that of Iran’s 69 million people, just 51 percent are ethnic Persian. The largest minority is of Turkish origin—or Azeris, as they’re called in Iran. The rest of the population is a mix of Kurds, Arabs, Baluch, and others.

“C’est un pays sous le voile des apparences,” Amin told me—it is a country that hides behind appearances. He went on, “It’s not the veil that blinds Iranians. It’s the veil that blinds you. Americans see the turban, not the brain.” That’s another thing Amin learned to do trying to explain Iran to outsiders: reduce complexities to sound bites we’re comfortable with.

“You look at the Middle East from the cockpit of a B-52 bomber,” he said. “How many Americans realize one of Iran’s most sacred martyrs is an American?” Amin was referring to Howard Conklin Baskerville, a missionary schoolteacher in Tabriz, Iran’s sixth-largest city. During the constitutional revolution of 1905–1911, Baskerville was shot and killed while leading his Iranian students in an attempt to break the siege of Tabriz. To this day, Iranians put flowers on his grave, honoring him along with the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who died on the front in the Iran-Iraq War.

As I left Amin’s bookstore, I couldn’t help but think he was on to something. The reason Americans find it nearly impossible to get a grip on Iran, an anachronism with one foot in the twenty-first century, is because it’s so damned complicated.

Then again, Iran has done little to explain itself. Iran is a closed society, deeply xenophobic and paranoid. All foreign visitors are seen as potential spies. Iranian leaders don’t expose in public Iran’s real policies. There’s no such thing as investigative journalism. You can only get at the truth in snatches, brief rays of sunlight shining through dark clouds. And this is certainly true when it comes to Iran’s pursuit of its core national security interests and quest for empire, subjects Iran never talks about frankly.

The problem is exacerbated, as Amin said, by exiles—usually homesick Iranians who remember an Iran of their dreams. They make themselves indispensable in Washington, in its think tanks, and with Beltway contractors peddling expertise on Iran. But almost invariably the exiles’ only service is to promote their own personal interests, which usually come down to changing the regime in Tehran. This is the same malign influence we saw in the fifties when the China lobby convinced us to back Chiang Kai-shek, or today with the Cuban lobby blocking reconciliation with Castro’s Cuba. Iraq, though, is the real parable for exiles suckering Washington into a debacle.

Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi has been publicly flayed for having prodded and misled the United States into invading Iraq, and for lying about weapons of mass destruction and the reception American troops would get in Iraq. But Chalabi’s most damaging deception may prove to be his dismissing Iran as a threat to Iraq. I got a glimpse of this in a conversation with a former deputy assistant secretary of defense under Reagan named Doug Feith.

I went to see Feith in the summer of 2000, just about the time George W. Bush had won the Republican nomination for president, to talk about Iran. Feith was upbeat. He knew that if Bush won the White House, he could pretty much pick any job he wanted. He was in private law practice then, but he was a star in the Republican foreign policy brain trust.

Before we met, I had been certain Feith would understand the threat Iran posed to Iraq. When he was in the Reagan administration, he surely had read the intelligence reports that Iran was behind the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and the Marine barracks in October 1983. Feith also had lived through Iran-Contra and should have remembered how exiles and middlemen manipulated policy to their own ends, ending up deceiving both sides—Iran and the United States.

But as we sat at opposite ends of the couch in his office, Feith wanted to talk about Iraq, not Iran. Could the Iraqi exiles overthrow Saddam Hussein? Or more to the point, did Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress stand a chance of getting rid of him? Feith thought that Chalabi could, given a little help.

Listening to Feith, I wondered why he wasn’t more skeptical of Chalabi, a lifelong exile who hadn’t seen Baghdad since he was a child. More to the point, I wondered why Feith wasn’t more suspicious about Chalabi’s ties to Iran. In the nineties, Chalabi had traveled through Tehran to get into Kurdish northern Iraq. He also had unexplained ties to Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one reason the Clinton administration dropped contact with him.

I pointed this out to Feith, telling him how in 1994 and 1995, Chalabi had turned over Iraqi National Congress houses and cars to Iranian intelligence, which then used them to stage the assassinations of Iranian dissidents living in the part of Iraq Saddam controlled. Didn’t this sound suspicious to Feith? And that wasn’t to mention Iran’s long-term interests in Iraq, with or without Chalabi. I also wondered why Feith couldn’t draw the obvious parallels between Iraq and Lebanon, which Iran was then effectively annexing.

The longer Feith didn’t respond, the more I wondered whether he thought I was making all this up, trying for some inexplicable reason to undermine Chalabi. I told Feith that if George Bush won the presidency, he’d be in a position to confirm everything I’d just told him.

At that, Feith stood abruptly and thanked me for my visit.

“Ahmed Chalabi will be a wonderful leader of Iraq,” he said firmly, before showing me out and closing the door behind me.

• • •

This is a book about Iran, and Iraq at this point may seem like an unnecessary diversion. But in fact, the one certainty about the Iraq War is that the United States will see Iran’s imperial ambitions played out more clearly there than in Tehran. If it’s in Iran’s interests to have chaos in Iraq, then chaos there will be. If Iran intends to draw the United States into a quagmire, a quagmire is what we’ll get. Our war with Iran will be fought in Iraq, through proxies, on the periphery of Iran’s empire. How could we have missed this so badly?

Ahmed Chalabi certainly deserves his share of the blame for misleading Washington about Iran. In a tightly held paper meant only for the Iraq hawks in Washington, Chalabi had this to say about the Shia uprising in southern Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War:

The insurrection in the south that followed the uprising continues to simmer. The failure of the Islamic groups supported by Iran to wrest control from Saddam in the south has served to diminish any support or hope that the local population had in them. Their behavior during the Intifadah is increasingly believed to have been the cause of its failure.

In other words, according to Chalabi, Iran’s proxies were a compromised and spent force. They—and Iran—had no future in Iraq, with or without Saddam. This, of course, could not have been more wrong. The same Shia groups Chalabi so easily dismissed would decisively win the parliamentary elections in 2005. They’re now the legitimate government of Iraq.

Chalabi’s motives should have been transparent. He obviously had no interest in raising the alarm about Iran and its designs on Iraq. Why give the Bush administration second thoughts about invading? Chalabi’s only objective was to remove Saddam Hussein; he’d take his chances with Iran after he got home to Iraq. This was a gamble, no doubt. But it was better than finishing life as a parlor exile in London.

Chalabi knew he could get away with misleading Americans on Iran because we know so little about the country. It was a child’s game, playing off American ignorance, reciting a few facts sugared with clichés. Add to the mix Chalabi’s beautiful English and you get a glimpse at how he was able to blind Washington to Iran.

Iran myopia is a national ailment in the United States. In his 1008-page memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton devoted a total of four sentences to Iran. And in three preinvasion opinion pieces titled “Thinking About Iraq,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s argument for the war boiled down to this: We needed to remove Saddam in order to plant democracy in the Middle East and force it to join the twenty-first century. Friedman’s argument was that “freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment” were the cure for whatever ailed Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. But not a word about Iran. Friedman, too, fell for Chalabi’s pretty narrative, apparently not foreseeing the certainty that Iran would meddle in Iraq as soon as Saddam’s police state was dismantled.

Chalabi returned to Iraq in April 2003—not as its triumphant new leader, as Feith had assured me he’d be, but riding in the back of an American military cargo plane. His political fortunes hit a low point in 2004, when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) accused him of leaking secrets to Iran. A pro-Iranian member of the CPA appointed him deputy prime minister as a consolation prize, but it was a position with virtually no power. Chalabi had fallen hard—and he knew why. He wasn’t one of Iran’s chosen proxies.

Chalabi lost his gamble. But then again, he’d bet with someone else’s money. And through the stress of it all, he still got to vacation in Iran.

Washington was taken by surprise when Iran swept in to fill the vacuum in Iraq. But it shouldn’t have been. If the United States had listened to its enemies—Iranian proxies who’d fought other wars for Iran, on other peripheries of Iran’s growing empire—it might have understood the problems of occupying Iraq.

In February 2003, a little less than a month before Americans invaded Iraq, a contact in Hezbollah called me, gleefully announcing that the Iraqi-born members of Hezbollah were packing up to go home. Many of them hadn’t been back since 1980, when Saddam expelled them to Iran and Lebanon.

“What are they going to do?” I asked, purposely sounding naïve.

“Organize Iraqi Hezbollah, of course. Take over Iraq.”

“But how many of them are there?”

“I don’t know. Two or three hundred.”

“Is that enough?”

“It was in Lebanon, no?” he said as he hung up the phone.

I was afraid he wasn’t far from wrong. Iran had incited a revolution in Lebanon building on a core of only a few hundred proxy fighters and co-opted clerics, who eventually turned half the country into an Iranian outpost.

Iran knew that with Saddam gone, secular Iraq was dead, making the Iraqi Shia ripe for the picking to fight a holy war against Western occupation. The Iraqi Shia would reject occupation just as surely as the Lebanese had rejected it in 1982. And Iran also knew Lebanon would be the strategic blueprint for its war of liberation: Iran would dominate Iraq not by invading it outright, but rather through proxies, spreading religious conviction, and employing the new form of guerrilla warfare it had learned in Lebanon.

Granted, Iraq is not Lebanon. In some ways, the country of Iraq was permanently shattered by the Mongol invasion in 1258. The Ottoman Empire reconstituted Iraq into three provinces, but only under the force of arms. And Saddam held the country together only with extreme brutality.

Iraq’s soft center, like that of Lebanon in the eighties, is what gives Iran the confidence the Lebanon model is transferable. Even the most nationalist and fractious Iraqi Shia can be manipulated, bribed, and cowed. So, inasmuch as the future in the Middle East can ever be predicted, with time and money Iran stands a good chance of dominating Iraq, annexing it all but in name. It will almost certainly try to do so after the United States leaves.

What Washington missed, and what Chalabi didn’t want us to know, was that Iran understands how to manage chaos—that it knew exactly how to benefit from the U.S.-led destruction of the Iraqi army and state. I suspect Chalabi knew what was coming. His political education was in Lebanon; he saw firsthand what Iran could accomplish when there was an absence of central authority.

I was never privy to what Chalabi was telling the White House, the neocons, and journalists, but I’m almost certain he didn’t point out that if there was one watermark running through the contemporary Middle East it was political Islam, a current the Iranians long ago learned to turn to their benefit. He also almost certainly didn’t point out that a well-organized and well-funded surrogate force, driven by belief, could—and would—easily fill the vacuum in Iraq.

The Iranians know exactly what they have to do in Iraq. They wrote the template in Lebanon, where they learned how to manage chaos, to create order where there was none before. And they know there’s nothing the United States can do to stop them from doing the same in Iraq. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, called it Iran’s “Lebanization” of Iraq.

The question of who lost Iraq isn’t just water under the bridge. The truth is, nothing has changed since the Iraqi invasion. The Americans still do not understand Iran’s strategy—what it wants in Iraq and how it intends to get it. We still do not understand the nature of proxy warfare, and how Iran can get its way through manipulating proxies. We still reduce the threat of Iran to weapons of mass destruction—to a nuclear bomb—but it has started to dawn on those who deal in facts that in Iran we face a problem that demands a second look.

Hopeful signs of this came when Washington’s Iranian policy seemed to turn on a dime in December 2007, after the director of national intelligence issued a judgment, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), stating that Iran had suspended its efforts to make a nuclear bomb. The NIE didn’t say it in so many words, but the implication was that Iran isn’t in a hurry to get a bomb. Nuclear weapons, then, are not vital to Iran’s national security. At the same time, the NIE did not diminish the threat Iran poses to U.S. interests in the region.

One Bush foreign policy adviser, a longtime Iranian specialist with whom I’d worked in the past, told me that he despaired of Washington ever really understanding the problem Iran poses for the United States. He said American understanding of Iran today is worse than it was under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton.

“[Washington officials] have no idea about the role the Iranians were playing in the eighties, the damage they did to our interests in the Middle East,” he told me. “Today, all across the government, you have young men and women who know about Iran from college text-books. They’ve absorbed a conceptual framework about the country that doesn’t even come close to matching reality.”

And our understanding of Iran wasn’t that good to begin with, as he reminded me. In one incident in the eighties, it was discovered that an American who’d been held hostage for a time by an Iranian-controlled group had traces of arsenic in his fingernails. Washington’s conclusion was that the Iranians were poisoning the hostages. Never mind that hostages were a valuable commodity that the Iranians would give up only for a price. Or that if they really wanted to kill them, they’d shoot or hang them in front of a camera, as they’d done with an American colonel working for the UN. The Americans couldn’t understand, my friend at the White House said, that in the Middle East, small amounts of arsenic are a home remedy for stomach bugs.

I could hear the resignation in his voice: the bureaucracy, the press, and academia would never catch up to reality in time for us to change course. It was inevitable we would commit over and over the same blunders that got us into the current Iraq quagmire.

We didn’t talk about confidence men like Chalabi. We didn’t need to. We both knew that exiles were still taking us on another bumpy ride, and Iran would be handed victory after victory. Even today, Iranian exiles showing up in Washington say Iran is teetering on the edge—that it will collapse with a real show of force. If we just stay the course in Iraq, squeeze Iran in Lebanon, get rid of the regime in Damascus, they say, we’ll win. They still can’t conceive that we lost in Iraq, or understand what we lost.

Losing Iraq—ceding it to Iran—marked the first time in history Mesopotamia was ceded to a hostile power without a real fight. It’s the first time the Shia have ruled an Arab country since the Fatimids in Egypt in the twelfth century. It’s also the first time in modern history that an Arab country has been wiped off the map. How could something like this, a God-sent opportunity for Iran, not provoke serious change in the Middle East? The fact that the United States was the agent of this change, in a voluntary war, is tantamount to Rome’s willingly ceding the Mediterranean to Carthage, or Britain’s ceding the English Channel to Nazi Germany. The stakes in Iraq are just as high.

Iran will fairly quickly take control of Iraq’s oil, which as of December 2007 was 2.3 million barrels a day. In the first days of the war, Iranian surrogates immediately started to steal hundreds of thousands of barrels. No one knows the exact figure, because the Iranian-allied oil minister refuses to provide an accounting. But Iran’s grip on Iraqi oil only promises to tighten with its plans for a strategic petroleum alliance with Iraq.

The American backers of the war claimed that with massive investment Iraq’s production could be taken to 6 million barrels a day. If they’re right, and if Iran proceeds with its de facto annexation of Iraq and its oil, the combination of Iran’s current production of 4.21 million barrels a day with Iraq’s 6 million would put Iran within range of becoming the world’s largest producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia.

Under a scenario like this, Iran calls the shots in world oil markets, deciding levels of production that lower or raise world prices, which also aids Iran’s ongoing campaign to decouple oil from the dollar. If oil markets continue to tighten, it could fall within Iran’s reach to set the global price of oil. If Iran were to force a cutback of, let’s say, 5 million barrels a day, Americans could end up paying $10 a gallon for gasoline. If the cutback was compounded with an assault on the dollar, it would start something very much like a depression in the United States.

Nightmare scenarios like this rarely come to pass. Historically, commodity markets have been too fractured, too large, and too subject to economic swings to allow one country to set oil prices. But with oil at $135 a barrel in May 2008, with Iran moving to take effective control of Iraq’s production and intimidating the Gulf Arabs with its eye on their 50 percent of the world’s proven reserves, Iran is not all that far from establishing the oil monopoly it seeks.

Saudi Arabia, for one, takes the Iranian nightmare scenario seriously—the scenario Ahmed Chalabi never talked to Doug Feith about. The Saudis are terrified the United States will abandon Iraq, and Iraq’s chaos will then spill into Saudi Arabia. They’re also terrified about an Iranian invasion. And they know that American staying power in the Gulf is fading by the day. What’s to keep the American people from returning to isolationism and leaving the Gulf? If and when the Americans do go, the Saudis are convinced the entire Gulf will fall to Iran.

In the meantime, the Saudis have two choices: They can goad the United States into a war against Iran, or more likely, they can raise a white flag and hope Iran will be satisfied with dominion over the Gulf rather than occupation when the United States does leave. For the first time in its history, Saudi Arabia in 2007 invited an Iranian president to come to Mecca to perform the hajj. As soon as things in Iraq started to go badly in 2004, and Iran’s role became clear, the Saudi interior minister started flying to Tehran almost weekly, assuring the Iranians they would never join in an attack against Iran. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is buying all the arms it can, hoping against hope that they will serve as a deterrent against Iran.

Iran’s rise couldn’t have come at a worse time for Gulf Arabs. The Saudis would never talk about it in public, but they certainly understand that the Sunni Arab order in the twentieth century has failed. The Sunnis have lost four wars against Israel—in 1948, 1967, 1973, and, indirectly, in 1982. Saddam Hussein, the “shield of the Arabs,” or more accurately the “shield of the Sunni Gulf Arabs,” lost every war he fought: the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, the 1990–91 Gulf War, and now the Iraq War. The Saudis also know that Arab nationalism—a mask for the Sunni order—has also failed. It failed to unite the Arabs. It failed to take an inch of land back from Israel. And it failed to attract support among the Arabs.

A 2008 Zogby poll showed that among Arabs, the three most popular leaders in the Middle East are non-Sunnis: the Shia Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah; the Alawite president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and the Shia Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And a 2008 poll conducted by the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland revealed that support for Nasrallah is growing. Sunni Islam is founded on victory and power, which are now fast slipping from Sunni hands into the hands of the Shia.

It’s Iran’s arc that terrifies the Saudis. They haven’t missed the fact that over the last three decades Iran has quietly transformed itself from an irritating but essentially harmless revolutionary power into a pragmatic, calculating one that intends to undermine the old Sunni order. The Saudis have watched as Iran left its revolutionary tactics behind and became a skilled player in the game of nations, a country that understands how to exploit political vacuums and appeal to the poor and dispossessed. Who can stop it now?

Whatever the rest of the Arabs thought about Saddam, they in fact looked at Iraq as their protector from Persian invasion. And though no one said it aloud, they also saw Iraq’s Sunni-led army as the thin membrane holding back a resurgent Shia Islam. Iraq’s army, once the fourth-largest fighting force in the world, was better equipped than most European ones. For years, the Iraqi army kept Iran from invading the Arab Gulf states, America’s closest allies in the Middle East.

For eight years, Iran tried, and failed, to defeat Iraq. Then, in the span of just over two weeks between March 20 and April 9, 2003, American Apache helicopters, F-16s, and Hellfire missiles obliterated the Iraqi army, unintentionally handing Iran a victory it could never have achieved on its own. The United States was the instrument of its own defeat in the Middle East. By decimating Iraq’s army, we opened the door for Iran to annex Iraq and its oil through proxies—a process that is now well under way.

Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there’s every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq.