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THE MASTER PLAN:
HOW IRAN ARRIVED AT ITS SECRET BLUEPRINT FOR EMPIRE
Something extraordinary occurred in May 2000. For the first time in modern Middle Eastern history a small guerrilla force defeated a committed, Western-equipped-and-trained conventional army. Until its defeat in Lebanon, Israel had never lost a war. This marked the first time Israel ceded land under the force of arms.
Certainly there have been other guerrilla victories in the Middle East—Lawrence of Arabia’s legendary Bedouin tribesmen overrunning the Turkish garrison at Aqaba; Yemeni rebels in the sixties beating the Egyptian army. But the Turks at Aqaba were the remnants of a dying Ottoman Empire who didn’t have a fight in them. The Egyptian army in Yemen was anything but committed. In neither case were their armies in the same class as Israel’s, a juggernaut that had crushed every enemy it ever encountered.
Israel’s retreat from Lebanon in 2000 is sometimes compared to America’s defeat in Vietnam—a political rather than a military defeat. An optional war that became too expensive. But the comparison doesn’t stand. First, the Vietcong were never a threat to America proper, as Hezbollah is to Israel. Second, Lebanon, with its relatively flat, open terrain in the south, should have been ideal for Israeli tanks and its total control of the air. Israel shouldn’t have lost to Hezbollah.
The better comparison is Afghanistan, where Muslim guerrilla forces defeated the Russians, small arms overcoming heavy armor. Like the Israelis, the Russians were a modern army and were fighting on the border of their own country. And the long-term consequences for Israel may prove as dire as they were for the Soviet Union. Israel does not have an empire to lose, but it lost something as valuable: its deterrence credibility, the ability to intimidate its enemies to a point where they deem it too costly to attack Israel.
The Winograd Commission Report—the official Israeli investigation into the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, the second conflict the Israelis lost—laid it out in stark terms: “Israel cannot survive in this region . . . unless people in Israel itself and in its surroundings believe that Israel has the political and military leadership, military capabilities, and social robustness that will allow her to deter those of its neighbors who wish to harm her.”
In Arab eyes, Israel is now beatable. It’s no longer the giant they thought it was. A dark shadow has been lifted from the imagination of the Arabs.
Iran’s 2000 victory in Lebanon was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, almost everyone was convinced the Iranians’ stay in Lebanon would be a short and pointless one.
On June 12, 1982, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who climbed out of the Iran Air 707 at Damascus airport didn’t look like liberators. There were only two dozen of them. More would arrive later. But there were never more than five hundred assigned to Lebanon at a time. Anyhow, where were they going to fight? Lebanon was bedlam. There were no battle lines; the roads were clogged with refugees. The main Damascus-Beirut highway was cut. The Israeli army was as ruthless as it was efficient. What could these taciturn, bearded young men in olive drab hope to do?
There also was the question of whether the Lebanese would even accept them as allies. The Lebanese Shia had welcomed the first Israeli troops as liberators, happy to be rid of the Palestinians, who had caused them nothing but misery. Generally, the Lebanese, even the Shia, look at the Iranians as foreigners; Persians are seen as a race almost as different as Eskimos are from Bulgarians. The Lebanese knew how Persians looked down on Arabs, how they considered all Arabs uncivilized nomads.
And then there was the Iran-Iraq War. Even as the Revolutionary Guards were deplaning in Damascus, Ayatollah Khomeini was ordering wave after wave of Iranian martyrs to attack the Iraqi front lines—Persians killing Arabs, reopening ethnic divisions older than history. Although the Revolutionary Guards didn’t come to Lebanon to kill Arabs, the Lebanese still had Arab blood running through their veins.
But it wasn’t all bad news. The Revolutionary Guards would count on historical ties between Iran and Lebanon’s Shia to at least get them a hearing. When the Safavid Dynasty came to power in Iran in 1501 and decided to convert the country from Sunni to Shia Islam, it sent envoys to Lebanon to recruit Shia clerics to teach Iranians the tenets of their sect. Ties between Iran and Lebanon remained unbroken in the intervening years. The Shah supported Lebanese Shia institutions, schools, and charities, and many opponents of the Shah took refuge in Lebanon. Iran’s first defense minister under Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile in Lebanon for years, where he had made close, lasting friends among the Shia. And several of the Revolutionary Guards who arrived in Damascus were Arabs from Iran’s Khuzestan Province who spoke Arabic fluently.
Still, the Syrian military intelligence officials who watched the Revolutionary Guards drive away in trucks, heading toward a camp on the Lebanese border, were convinced the Iranians were going to be nothing but trouble. They were right, in ways they couldn’t yet understand.
During the first few years of the war in Lebanon, there was little the Revolutionary Guards could do other than cause trouble. The Guards truck-bombed the U.S. embassy in April 1983, the U.S. Marine and French barracks in October 1983, and the new U.S. embassy in October 1984. They kidnapped and killed dozens of Westerners. But in the end, all it won them was a reputation as ruthless murderers, spoilers, no different from the other foreign spoilers that came to Lebanon—Nasserists, Ba’this, Syrians, and Palestinians. The Revolutionary Guards had managed to drive out the West. But what good did it do the Lebanese?
No one knows how or when, but along the way Iran’s Revolutionary Guards discovered two truths about Lebanon. First, there was a deep vein of nationalism to be tapped. The Lebanese didn’t want to be occupied—by Israelis, Syrians, Americans, or anyone else. Even supposedly pro-Syrian groups didn’t want Syrian troops quartered in their country. It was a sensitivity Iran would learn to guard against as well as exploit.
Second, the Iranians discovered that there was an endless pool of street and guerrilla fighters, hardened in the crucible of Lebanon’s civil war. They were the best fighters in the world. Combine this with Lebanese rejection of occupation, add money and organization, and the Iranians discovered they would have at their service the most lethal guerrilla army in modern history. During Israel’s eighteen-year war in Lebanon, until the day Israel brought the last soldier home in May 2000, the Israelis would constantly ask themselves, Where did these people come from?
Answer that question and we start to answer what we face today in the Middle East. The Lebanon war is Iran’s blueprint for its new empire, fought for and held by proxies: the first Middle Eastern empire since the Ottomans, a superpower, as the Iranians intend to demonstrate to the world. Flush with victory and experience in Lebanon, the Iranians have set their sights on replicating their Lebanon campaign across the Middle East, claiming ever more pieces of it—and oil—for themselves. Gaza, Bahrain, Iraq—Iran will take them all, as long as there are proxies like Hezbollah’s soldiers of God, ready to take Iran’s money and pick up a Kalashnikov.
The Iranians had no idea that within three years after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the United States would blunder into Iraq, destroy Iran’s historical enemy Saddam Hussein, and offer up Iraq on a silver platter. How could the Iranians not see Lebanon when they look at Iraq today?
In October 2000, Ayatollah Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader—the only real executive power in Iran—made it clear what the victory in Lebanon meant for Iran. It was during a secret address to Iran’s National Security Council. After the usual long preamble, larded with quotations from the Koran, Khamenei put both his hands on the conference table. He looked around the room to make sure everyone was listening.
“Lebanon,” he said, pointedly using the Arabic pronunciation Lubnan, “is Iran’s greatest foreign policy success. We will repeat it across Dar al-Islam (the Islamic world) until all of Islam is liberated.”
This wasn’t the flowery propaganda Iranians were so used to hearing from their leaders. The men sitting around the conference table were already convinced it was within Iran’s power, its destiny even, to dominate the Middle East just as it had Lebanon. Most of them had served in Lebanon during Iran’s eighteen-year war there. Many of them owed their position to that war. They had tasted victory, and wanted more of it.
And why not topple the vulnerable parts of the Middle East? Iran had already turned Hezbollah into a military force stronger than the Lebanese army. And Hezbollah’s political writ was such that it could block the election of a president. Now there was other low-hanging fruit: Kurdistan. Bahrain. Central Asia. And the rim of the Gulf, which is 90 percent Shia—the same place under which the world’s oil reserves lie. If the Iranians succeeded in raising armies of proxies in those places, like the one it raised in Lebanon—and who can stop them?—they would control up to 55 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Iran would have a hydrocarbon empire the likes of which the world has never seen.
Then there’s the question of what Iran would do with all that oil. Iran has been at war with the United States for the last thirty years. It was never a classical military confrontation; the Iranians knew they could never win. Still, it was a war. The Iranians understand how vulnerable we are thanks to our addiction to oil. If Iran were to dominate the Persian Gulf, along with its reserves, why not manipulate the price of oil in the interest of empire? When times are good, drive up the price of a barrel to $250. When times are bad, lower it, feed our addiction. Iran doesn’t care if Americans pay $15 a gallon at the pump, or heating bills of $2,000 a month, or $5 for a can of Coke. And while they’re at it, why not unseat the dollar as the currency the world uses to buy oil?
It all sounds far-fetched. But so was Iran’s Revolutionary Guards creating the world’s most lethal guerrilla force out of the mess in Lebanon in 1982, and beating the Israelis. With Iran’s star on the rise, the worst-case scenario is often the most likely one. The will to empire is powerful, but especially so when there is the means—in this case, domination of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves.
Prognostications like these invite the question: What do we do about it? As a start, we overhaul the way we think about Iran and the Middle East—stop taking our wisdom from White House press releases, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and TV pundits with Pentagon contracts. We must accurately define who the enemy is, his tactics, and what he wants. If we continue to fight on blindly in the Middle East, trying to contain Iran, spending trillions of dollars fighting wars without end, we will lose or be forced into a full-fledged war. It would be a war requiring we bring back the draft, settle into thirty years of conflict, and survive on the hope that a million soldiers permanently based in the Persian Gulf will change our luck.
Or we could figure out how to settle with Iran. If we examine Iran’s Lebanon war and the army that Iran rode to victory on, we will understand Iran’s coming campaigns, how Iran learned the lessons from a failed revolution and transformed itself into a Middle East hegemon. That knowledge will allow us to define our choices.
South Lebanon, June 6, 1982
It went fast. Faster than anyone anticipated.
At 11:05 A.M. the first Israeli tanks rolled across the Hamra bridge. By June 8, the coastal city of Sidon fell. The disorganized and underarmed PLO that occupied southern Lebanon was no match for the Israelis. By June 11, they were at Beirut’s edge, ready to invade the Arab world’s most modern and sophisticated city, the brightest light in the firmament of the Arab nation.
The Israelis knew the PLO wouldn’t put up much of a fight; the PLO wasn’t much of an army. Hopelessly divided into two dozen or so corrupt, competing militias, which themselves were divided into factions, the PLO couldn’t even coordinate its retreat. And the Israelis knew the Lebanese army wouldn’t be an obstacle either. Like Iraq in 2003, Lebanon had stopped being a country in 1975, when the first shot of civil war was fired. The army, as well as the police, fractured along the lines of Lebanon’s three major sects—Shia, Sunni, and Christians. The three sects hated one another more than they hated the Israelis. That would change, but in 1982 the only question was how fast Israel’s tanks could cover ground.
The PLO didn’t so much retreat as scatter like a flock of pigeons hit by lightning. The PLO abandoned Beirut without a fight, fleeing to the Biqa’ Valley and to the far north of Lebanon. Yasser Arafat himself retreated through Lebanon’s northern port of Tripoli, and would be forced to leave there December 20, 1983, on a Greek ship, to enter into a long, inglorious, and irrelevant exile in Tunisia. Remnants of his forces would remain scattered around Lebanon, but they would never again pose a threat to Israel. Arafat would never return to Lebanon. Only after he signed what many Palestinians and Arabs considered articles of surrender, the 1993 Oslo Accords, did he return to the Palestinian territories to spend his last years under virtual Israeli house arrest. In the meantime, Israel had created the perfect vacuum in Lebanon.
The Reagan administration was elated, at least for the first few months after the Israeli invasion, convinced that Lebanon, now free of the Palestinian terrorists, would go back to being the Switzerland of the Middle East—a Western outpost, a beacon of change. Lebanon would be the first domino in transforming the Middle East into a moderate, democratic, prosperous, pro-American part of the world. Just as the neocons in 2003 would count on Iraq doing the same.
Lebanon also seemed to the Reagan White House a far more solvable problem than the greater Arab-Israeli conflict. Who knew, it might even serve as a back door to peace. The Reagan administration was so confident of the success of Israel’s Lebanon war that even before the fighting stopped, it started pushing the Lebanese to recognize Israel.
But there was one thing the Reagan White House and the Israelis overlooked: the generation of tough, young Lebanese street fighters who were more comfortable with a Kalashnikov than a lever in a voting booth. Some had fought with and some against the Palestinians. But it didn’t matter. The point was they knew how to fight, and were ready to bleed and die, given a cause. And unlike the Palestinians, the Lebanese weren’t going anywhere. They could either fight for their country or surrender. The unexamined assumption of the Israelis and the Reagan administration, that the Lebanese would be happy to turn in their Kalashnikovs for the old Lebanon, overlooked these young men.
In the meantime, the Iranians wasted little time crossing from their camps along the Syrian border into Lebanon. At first they camped in vacant houses just outside Balabakk, in a village called Ra’s al-‘Ayn. Those first Revolutionary Guard foot soldiers may not have looked as though they were about to change the course of history, but they were a promise of hope. The PLO may have rolled over, and the Israelis may have achieved total victory, but as the Iranians again and again reassured their hosts, they were there to stay. All the Iranians asked for was time.
Balabakk was fine for a start, but what the Iranians really needed was to get a foothold in Beirut, the gateway to the Shia south, where the same Shia who had welcomed the Israeli invaders lived. The Lebanese Shia tolerance for the Israelis wouldn’t last long, the Iranians were certain. What tolerance for occupation does? The Iranians would turn the Shia in the south, convince them to fight against the Israelis. But first, Beirut.
The southern suburbs of Beirut are a miserable, dusty warren of one-and two-story cinderblock houses and apartment buildings. The apartment buildings, six and seven stories tall, were illegally built, many close enough to each other that the residents could reach across and touch hands. Telephone and electrical wires ran naked up the stairwells, and there were constant power cuts. The better-off bought 5-kilowatt generators and put them on their balconies; when the power was off, you’d have to shout to be heard over the generators. It was a chaotic, beaten-down slum, very much like Baghdad’s Shia slum, Sadr City.
The neighborhood called ‘Ayn al-Dilbah was one of the poorest parts of the southern suburbs. Displaced Shia from the south lived there, and Palestinians too poor to live in their own camps, middle-aged men and women dying from tuberculosis and diseases the modern world had long ago stamped out. There were only a couple hours of electricity a day. The houses were crammed so close together that in the summer, you couldn’t even feel the breeze off the Mediterranean.
On July 4, 1982, in a one-story house just off the airport road, a rail-thin, clean-shaven young Shia—a boy, really, with eyes the color of honey—sat in a bare room on mats, his legs pulled up underneath him, with two friends. There was no electricity or water—the Israelis had cut them off when they started their siege of Beirut. As he and the other two young men speculated about what would come next, they could hear the Israeli cannons pound Ramlat al-Bayda, a string of luxury apartment buildings along the Mediterranean. They knew it wouldn’t be long before the PLO would give up and flee its headquarters in Verdun Street—the headquarters the PLO had operated out of since the early seventies. And then it would be over.
All three young men had fought with the Palestinian resistance group Fatah in their teens, mostly sniping in a poor Christian neighborhood, Sin al-Fil, turning it into a pockmarked wasteland. The young man and his friends knew all about sudden death. They had learned to accept it the way we accept a cold. Approximately 100,000 Lebanese lost their lives in the 1975–90 civil war, a remarkable number considering Lebanon’s population is less than 4 million. Looking at the destroyed buildings in Sin al-Fil at the end of the civil war, one had to wonder how anyone had survived the fighting.
These men were prodigies of street warfare: There wasn’t an AK-47 they couldn’t unjam or field-strip in the dark. They could drop a rocket-propelled grenade through a window at a hundred yards, or crimp a blasting cap with one hand and blindfolded. They knew as much about street fighting as anyone in the world. And now that the PLO was fleeing, they needed a new flag to fight under. They would soon find one. One of them, within a few years, would become the world’s most wanted terrorist—the commander of the “A team” of terrorism, as the Bush administration would come to call him.
The three young men didn’t care about democracy, or restoring the old Lebanon. They were eaten up by resentment and anger. They were internal exiles, poisoned by poverty and exclusion from the larger Lebanese society.
‘Ayn al-Dilbah sits at Beirut airport’s edge. The planes landing at Beirut airport pass right overhead, day and night—planes filled with rich Lebanese vacationing in Paris, Rome, and London. Every day the young men had watched the chauffeured Mercedes as they jock-eyed in front of the airport to pick up pampered boys and chic women in scant dresses, speaking French, weighed down with duty-free bags of French champagne, Belgian chocolate, and Cuban cigars. They raced past ‘Ayn al-Dilbah on the way to their mansions in the hills around Beirut.
To these angry young men, this was a constant reminder that they were second-class citizens—that Lebanon was, and always had been, occupied, by the Ottomans, the French, and now this Western elite that had “let” the Israelis invade their country. The airport was closed now because of the Israeli bombardment, but everything would resume as soon as the Israelis finished their dirty business. Yet that would come to an end if these young men had anything to do with it.
The men were faithful Shia Muslims, but the war they were aching to fight was not a religious one. When they had fought the Maronite Christians, it was not because they were Christians but because they were the proxies of colonizers, the French. And when the Israelis invaded, it wasn’t because they were Jewish that the young men hated them. It was because they were colonizers too—proxies of America, as they saw it.
The three young men knew the PLO was finished. Yasser Arafat had failed both the Palestinians and the Lebanese. He was finished too. But that didn’t matter; what good was someone with no fight in him? They knew too, firsthand, that the rest of the Palestinians were as corrupt as Lebanon’s Westernized elite, the way they passed the days on Beirut’s Corniche, smoking hookahs, clubbing at night. They weren’t fighters. All the Palestinian leaders cared about was stealing as much money as they could from their Gulf Arab patrons, who were an even more corrupted race. They only gave money to the Palestinians out of guilt.
Either way, the Palestinians, or even the other Arabs, were never going to take back Lebanon, let alone Palestine, from the Israelis. So where were the young men—and the thousands more like them across Lebanon—to turn? Who could organize them to fight back against the latest colonizers? Who would be clever enough to tap this vast, seething, powerful resource to put an end to the colonization of Lebanon?
The honey-eyed young man stood up to leave. He said he was going to walk north and take a service, a shared taxi, to Balabakk to meet a man who went by the name of “Sheikh Hossein.” All he knew about Sheikh Hossein was that he was an ethnic Arab, a Shia who was an officer in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He was making the trip to see for himself whether Sheikh Hossein was serious about fighting Israel and the American and French soldiers who would soon be arriving in Lebanon. He’d find out for himself whether or not Sheikh Hossein would flinch at shedding blood.
Days after the first Revolutionary Guard officers started crossing the border from Syria into the Biqa’ Valley in June 1982, a former schoolteacher turned Shia zealot, Husayn al-Musawi, offered himself as the public face of Iran.
“We are the children of Iran!” Musawi announced to the world.
Musawi loved the limelight. He delighted in sending shivers down the backs of the Western media, coming across as half insane. The group he led was called the Islamic Amal, a breakaway faction from Amal, the mainstream Shia political party. But in fact Islamic Amal was only a false front, little more than a family enterprise. It didn’t have enough soldiers to fight the Israelis or anyone else. They were smugglers, hashish farmers, and common criminals. Iran gladly funded them anyway, to draw the attention of Israel and the West away from what the Revolutionary Guards were really doing.
The Iranians were following a long tradition: Persians through history have believed that any serious work is done in the dark. Whenever Iran deviated from this practice, it got into trouble, including in Lebanon.
In July 1982, the Revolutionary Guards hired a gang of Palestinian thugs to kidnap the acting president of the American University of Beirut, in hopes of trading him for the Iranian chargé d’affaires, who had also been kidnapped. Iran would have kept its hand hidden had it not made the mistake of putting its American hostage in the back of a truck, driving him to Damascus, and sending him to Tehran in a cargo plane. The American was held in Tehran’s Evin Prison. The United States found out and raised hell with the Syrians, and Iran was forced to release him.
The Iranians would never again make the same mistake. From then on, proxies would take care of the hostage business, as they would terrorism. Which is why no one knew about Sheikh Hossein’s invitation to the Lebanese Shia to come to Balabakk, except the courier who delivered it.
Imad Fayez Mughniyah sat down in the chair across from Sheikh Hossein and listened without even nodding, his honey eyes barely blinking. That’s the thing most people remembered about Mughniyah, his unnerving stare. A stare that said I would as soon kill you as shake your hand.
It was clear what Sheikh Hossein was proposing: a war with the United States and Israel; driving the West out of Lebanon—the Americans, British, French, and Italian troops that were coming to replace the Israelis in Beirut. The Western diplomatic missions and even the press would have to go too, to purge Lebanon of all Western influences. Iran would put an end to colonialism in Lebanon forever. Were Mughniyah and his followers ready, Sheikh Hossein asked. He already knew Mughniyah’s answer because he already knew a lot about him.
The war Sheikh Hossein proposed would be fought entirely by Lebanese. The Iranians were there only to provide money and weapons. Mughniyah would receive an officer’s commission in the Revolutionary Guards. He would be head of a secret unit called Amin al-Haras—the Security of the Guards. Everything he did, and the names of his fighters, would be a tightly held secret. Only Sheikh Hossein and a handful of Revolutionary Guard officers in Tehran would even know that Mughniyah worked for Iran.
Sheikh Hossein would never call Mughniyah. He would convey orders and money face-to-face, at meetings in Balabakk, where Sheikh Hossein was out of reach of the Israelis and the Americans. Even Iran’s host, Syria, wouldn’t know about the relationship between Mughniyah and Sheikh Hossein.
In return, Mughniyah would offer the same strict degree of secrecy. He would recruit trusted relatives and fighters from his Fatah days, people who would never betray him. Even between them, there would be no communication by phone. There would be no payroll; all expenses would be handled in cash. In other words, there would be no record at all of a relationship between Mughniyah, the Revolutionary Guards, and the young men shedding the blood. There would be no trail to follow back to Iran; no return address. Mughniyah, the guerrilla, didn’t need to be told why. Iran was the rear base. You protect the rear base at all costs.
As Mughniyah got up to leave, Sheikh Hossein remembered one last thing to tell him. He had come up with a name for Mughniyah’s group: the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO).
The Iranians were always in charge of the IJO, using it to establish a beachhead in Lebanon. Every attack, car bombing, kidnapping, and assassination carried out by Mughniyah was approved by the Revolutionary Guards, which in turn was approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and after Khomeini’s death, by his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei.
In almost every other way the Iranians don’t behave like us. They are some of the most secretive people in the world. They don’t keep bureaucratic records. They don’t rationalize their decisions on paper. They don’t leak. They don’t splash mistakes or scandals on the front pages of their newspapers. They don’t hold parliamentary hearings, or allow anyone to write frank memoirs. The Islamic Jihad Organization would soon become the most mysterious, elusive terrorist organization in the world thanks to Iran’s ability to hide its hand.
The Iranians calculated well that Husayn al-Musawi and his Islamic Amal would distract us. It was not unlike the French Resistance during World War II: Charles de Gaulle was only the face of it. Killing or capturing him would have made no difference to the resistance cell leaders fighting the Nazis in France. The execution was left to the anonymous captains—men like Sheikh Hossein and Mughniyah who did the real work underground.
Sheikh Hossein was one of the best the Revolutionary Guards had to offer. He understood how to make himself invisible. Although a devout Shia, he avoided large Shia assemblies and the mosque, where he might be recognized or have his picture taken. Indeed, the United States doesn’t know of any existing photo of Sheikh Hossein. He was a man who would never be able to understand America’s cult of celebrity.
Sheikh Hossein was a brilliant general in a war of proxies, the perfect handler for someone like Mughniyah. From the beginning, he rigorously vetted and tested Mughniyah and his cell. Discipline was crucial. Sheikh Hossein had to know exactly who was picking up a gun in Iran’s name. Just as important, no attack could fail. The Islamic Jihad Organization had to appear invincible, striking where and when it wanted. And it made sure that the world knew only what the IJO wanted it to know about its attacks. To this day, we don’t know the name of the suicide bomber who drove a van into the Marine barracks in 1983.
And the mirage wasn’t just in Lebanon. Iran, too, is a mirage of sorts. President Ahmadinejad is supposedly the executive power in Iran. He’s the man Iran puts on CNN, who speaks at the UN and Columbia University, who writes a weekly blog. But little real power resides with Ahmadinejad. Instead, it lies with Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s security apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards, the army, and other influential ayatollahs.
“Ahmadinejad is just a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard and the hardcore commanders in the Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani intelligence who has spent years dealing with Iran, told me. “Khamenei is primus inter pares—maybe even the final word, depending on the issue.”
Iran’s executive authority sits not in the office of the president, but in an informal politburo that has no name, whose deliberations are never made public, and whose membership shifts with the currents of regime politics. For example, the reformist president of Iran before Ahmadinejad, Muhammad Khatami, had absolutely no voice in Iran’s national security decisions. None of this is new, as Persia has been governed in a secretive way forever, from the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 B.C.) until today.
“Many of the shrewdest and most influential political figures in Iran have intentionally avoided the blinding sunlight of publicity and have sought to exert power in the more shadowy corridors of the political system,” Iranian scholar James Bill writes in The Lion and the Eagle. “Here they presented no targets to potential enemies and their influence often transcended that of those who have held ministerial positions.”
Iran is a culture completely alien to ours, one more reason Americans are confused about the country. Even when it comes to the face of Iran, President Ahmadinejad, we know very little about him. The few hard facts we know are that he was in the Revolutionary Guards and served as Tehran’s mayor. He’s an apocalyptic Shia who believes in the “end times,” but then again, so are many other Iranians. We also know virtually nothing about the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Muhammad Jaafari. This would be as if Americans had no idea who the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff was, other than a name and a rank. The Iranians laugh at the idea of our publishing photos of our military commanders playing Pee Wee football in elementary school.
Iran’s embrace of secrecy and deception has proven to be extraordinarily useful. In November 1982, an armed force seized the Lebanese government’s police barracks in Balabakk. Husayn al-Musawi’s group, Islamic Amal, took credit, but in fact it was the Revolutionary Guards who ordered it. Staying behind the silk curtain spared the Iranians worse international condemnation than they were already receiving.
When the Iranians use proxies to seize the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, rocket the Green Zone in Iraq, or invade a sovereign state, they stymie the traditional international response. The West is so used to thinking in legalistic black-and-white it doesn’t know how to respond. A state either commits an act of aggression or it doesn’t. If a fictitious organization takes credit, even when it’s clear Iran is behind it, Iran gets away with saying, “It wasn’t us. But let’s see what we can do to help.” So not only do they get away with it, they also get credit for trying to solve it. In this way, the Iranians have managed to undermine the international state system to a degree the West hasn’t experienced since Communism.
One reason this worked was that Tehran had confidence in its civil servants, enough to delegate complete authority. When Sheikh Hossein got on the plane for Damascus, his orders were clear and simple: Turn the fanatics and believers into a force for destruction, and convince the United States and Israel that the war is unwinnable. Sheikh Hossein didn’t need to report back to Tehran, write quarterly reports, or chart his progress in graphs. Tehran would hear about his successes on BBC Persian Service.
The Revolutionary Guard headquarters in Tehran gave Sheikh Hossein carte blanche to do whatever he needed to succeed, and all the money he needed. The money passed through the ultrasecret Jerusalem Force.
Even before Sheikh Hossein arrived in Balabakk, he knew he’d be looking for recruits from the PLO, and not just from among Lebanese Shia. The PLO’s leadership may have been feckless, but like Mughniyah, its foot soldiers knew how to fight. It also helped that many were believers; in the seventies, the PLO had set up an Islamic wing to accommodate them. One of Sheikh Hossein’s first acts was to get his hands on the Islamic wing’s membership list.
The timing couldn’t have been better for Sheikh Hossein. With the Israelis shelling Beirut, deepening Lebanese and Muslim grievance and humiliation, he knew he could turn it all to Iran’s benefit. The argument was easy: The Arab leaders had failed to do anything for Lebanon other than watch the invasion on TV. They hadn’t even mounted an oil embargo as they had in 1973. One more Arab failure, no doubt to be followed by more.
Sheikh Hossein reminded the young men who came to see him that the secular Arab states and the PLO had never taken back an inch of land seized by Zionists. Now was the time to forget Persian-Arab enmity and think about what they could do to right history. It was a persuasive argument, and the PLO was unable to put up a good counterargument.
In fact, the PLO was forced to cede the mantle of resistance to Iran. On October 18, 1979, at a meeting between Ayatollah Khomeini and Arafat, Khomeini declared that “the matter of Palestine is an Islamic issue.” A month later, on November 18, Arafat issued orders to Palestinian cadres “putting the PLO on alert to protect the Iranian revolution.”
The honeymoon between Palestinians and Iranians would end when Arafat backed Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, but there was no way to undo the Palestinian-Iranian ties. The PLO cadres now had a new beacon. Over the next three decades, the Palestinians and their Lebanese followers would drift over to Iran, if for no other reason than that Iran was the only state to show itself willing to fight Israel and the United States. Iran’s ability to impose order and discipline was something the PLO always lacked.
It’s impossible to overstate how important it was that Iran won over these Palestinian and Lebanese resistance fighters. Khomeini had humiliated the United States when Iranian forces toppled the Shah and seized the American embassy in 1979. But in a sense that was a parochial issue, a symbolic act of Iranian defiance that had little to do with the Arabs. At that point, the United States was the Iranian revolutionaries’ enemy but not the Arabs’ enemy. If Khomeini wanted to expand his revolution beyond Iran’s borders, he knew he needed to universalize it—to encompass the Arabs and make common cause with them against their enemy, Israel. The war on Israel would be Khomeini’s fulcrum for staking out something bigger than Iran.
Khomeini intended to fire Arab anger as he had that of the Iranians. His message was simple: If Iran could beat the United States—David slay Goliath—then the Arabs could beat Israel.
Another pool Sheikh Hossein recruited from was the Iraqi Da’wa Party. For many Shia, this came as a surprise. The founder of Da’wa was a rival of Ayatollah Khomeini. His writings directly challenged many of Khomeini’s own innovations to Shia jurisprudence. The Revolutionary Guards’ embrace of the Da’wa, so soon after the revolution, showed a pragmatic streak that would serve them well in the future.
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the founder of Iraqi Da’wa, shared with Khomeini the belief that a regenerated and purified Shia Islam would liberate the Shia from colonialism and Sunni oppression—that justice could be obtained in the here-and-now and didn’t have to wait until the afterlife. But Sadr and Khomeini differed over a major doctrinal tenet: velayat-e faqih, the rule of the jurisprudent. Khomeini believed that a truly Islamic republic had to be ruled by a cleric with the highest level of scholarship, someone with an unfailing understanding of the Koran, the sayings of the prophet, logic, and Islamic jurisprudence. Such a man—the representative of God on Earth—was divinely ordained to hold executive power in an Islamic republic. Sadr, on the other hand, was wary of having clerics running a state; clerics had enough to do saving the souls of men.
Even when Khomeini was in Najaf, there was a running dispute between him and Sadr. Sadr was a powerful and charismatic leader, and an influential writer. And because Sadr, rather than Khomeini, posed a threat to Saddam Hussein, Sadr’s authority was seen as a challenge to Khomeini’s.
In 1980, after Da’wa attempted to assassinate Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam ordered Sadr executed and his followers arrested. The Da’wa members who could fled to Lebanon and Iran. Those who ended up in Iran were forced to adopt Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih, abandoning Sadr’s more pragmatic political theory.
It came as a surprise, then, when contrary to Khomeini’s interpretation of Shia doctrine, the Revolutionary Guards took Da’wa under their wing—with or without acceptance of velayat-e faqih. The Guards were more interested in Da’wa’s capacity to stir up problems in Iraq than obscure points of theology. In time, the Guards would treat other Islamic groups the same way—groups such as the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood that shared almost nothing with Khomeini’s brand of Islam. Because in the end, all that mattered to the Revolutionary Guards was that these groups were prepared to confront their common enemy at the time, Iraq.
Pragmatism like this is rare in revolutionary movements, especially religious ones. The Spanish Inquisition could never have embraced the Protestants. The Bolsheviks could never have compromised with the Mensheviks, nor Mao with China’s Nationalists. But Iran was more than happy to cross sectarian lines; in lumping Iran into a monolithic “Islamofascism,” Western pundits couldn’t have it more wrong.
Tour Tehran’s Martyrs’ Museum and you’ll find memorials to every sort of martyr, from Hezbollah to Da’wa, from Egypt’s Sunni Muslim Brotherhood to Zoroastrians—and, oddly enough, Iranian Jewish martyrs who died in the Iran-Iraq War. Iran’s pragmatic, almost ecumenical approach to anti-imperialism gives it a much wider, much more supple base. The foundation for an empire.
Unlike any other power in the Middle East, Iran learned how to harness the millions upon millions of oppressed. The angry, proud, dispossessed Shia; the frustrated Sunni—anyone with a grudge and a readiness to fight. Iran stole the Promethean Islamic fire when the Sunni couldn’t, organizing the faithful into a disciplined military force, unlike anything the world has seen since the Ottomans.
Iran may not have liked Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, but it understood how his 1980 execution infuriated and galvanized the Shia. In 2005, two years after the United States invaded Iraq, I asked a Hezbollah cleric what it meant to the Lebanese Shia when the Iranians showed up in 1982. His name doesn’t matter; he spoke not for himself but as the voice of the party. Which is why his response was so extraordinary.
“The 1979 Islamic Revolution caused an earthquake that shook the Islamic consciousness,” the imam said, pulling at his beard. “It was a new dawn.”
Khomeini’s message alone accomplished that? I asked.
No. “The martyrdom of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Iraq,” the imam told me, “is the symbol of the oppression of Shia.”
Evoking Sadr’s name wasn’t what surprised me. It was the fact that it came out of the mouth of a Hezbollah cleric—an Iranian loyalist who should have been regurgitating Khomeini’s doctrine. Once again, Iran and its proxies were proving to be far more pragmatic than anyone expected.
It wasn’t just Khomeini’s revolution that provoked the Shia revival, the Hezbollah imam went on. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was the first ayatollah executed in modern times. His execution deeply shocked all Shia, a reminder of the unacceptable oppression they had suffered for 1300 years. Saddam had crossed a line, and Sadr would be avenged.
The imam wanted me to know that Sadr wasn’t just another ayatollah. Ever since the disappearance of the legendary Twelfth Imam in the ninth century—the imam who, many Muslims believe, will return to save the world in the end times—the Shia believed there was no point in revolt, in fighting for justice in the here and now. Justice would return only when the Twelfth Imam reappeared.
But Sadr reversed this, arguing that Imam Husayn hadn’t died at Karbala in A.D. 680 for nothing. He had fought back. And as Sadr taught it, his defiance—rather than his murder—was the true metaphor for the Shia. Iran was not above co-opting that message as its own. The Iranians cared only that it appealed to the angry and the dispossessed.
When you fly into Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, the thing you can’t see but should know is that everything, from the concession stands to the jet fuel supplies, is owned by the Revolutionary Guards. In a famous incident the day before Iran’s reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was to dedicate the new airport, Revolutionary Guard forces simply rolled up in tanks and seized it. Another business, another piece of Iran the Revolutionary Guards own. Ever the pragmatists.
On Iran’s face, it’s impossible to tell whether religious authorities or the military is in charge. Ask the question on any street in any of the world’s major capitals, and you’ll hear that Iran is a theocracy, run by religious ideologues. But that view is dated, by twenty-five years. While theology forms a basis for many of Iran’s beliefs and policies, the men who hold the power derive it from the military and security services, even if they are themselves clerics. Even before Khomeini’s death, Iran stopped being a country run by mullahs and Islamic militias and turned into one run by the “power ministries,” as they’re called in military dictatorships. Almost within months after Khomeini returned to Tehran in February 1979, he had to quietly concede that he couldn’t make Iran a theocracy overnight. It could take decades. Or maybe even centuries.
Still, Khomeini never abandoned his belief that the Koran, properly interpreted, contained all the laws necessary to govern the ideal Islamic society. A mujtahid, a Shia jurisprudent, alone could bring justice and God’s will to the affairs of man. This wasn’t too far from Plato’s rule of philosopher king—along with all the idealistic baggage that came with it. The only problem was that once in power, Khomeini could never figure out how to translate that idea into day-to-day politics. He couldn’t find the passage from rebellion to governance.
Khomeini openly acknowledged failure when in 1989 he removed Ayatollah Montazeri as his successor. Montazeri was the most learned mujtahid after Khomeini, so when Khomeini passed him over, he abolished velayat-e faqih in all but name. Khomeini instead named as his successor Ayatollah Khamenei, a man who was not really even qualified to be a mujtahid. But Khamenei had the following and political skills to control the Revolutionary Guards and the secret police. So Khomeini, as it turned out, was as pragmatic as Sheikh Hossein.
If there were any doubts about this shift, they were put to rest in 1995 when Ayatollah Khamenei removed Khomeini’s son from power and later, it is believed, had him poisoned. Khamenei needed Khomeini’s son out of the way, because he was a rival for the loyalty of Iran’s security services. Also, Khamenei early on in his rule had arrested the closest advisers of Ayatollah Montazeri, including Montazeri’s son-in-law, who was executed. And Khamenei put Montazeri himself under house arrest. When he needed to, Khamenei made Joseph Stalin look soft.
Iran prevailed in Lebanon not by religious conversion or cultural diffusion but by sheer power—guns and money. It prevailed just as the Soviets had conquered their empire, not through Lenin’s words but with the Red Army. The French Revolution succeeded not as a war of ideas but thanks to Napoleon’s army. Iran’s “ideological” war was, like so many others, won on the field of battle, not from the pulpit.
Americans generally are blind to complexities like these, finding it easier to simply reduce Iran to a theocracy. This is a mistake that has led the United States to appeal for democracy and Western values in order to bring down the Iranian regime—to reveal the mullahs as false prophets. What we miss is that our ideals will never bring down the mullahs, because the mullahs long ago gave up the Koran for the Kalashnikov.
That metaphor may be a slight exaggeration, but still, it helps make the point that the Shia approach the world from a perspective completely alien to ours. They have suffered repression and economic privation for 1300 years; they have been slaughtered at the hands of Sunni; they are too tough, and too bloodied, to be appeased with our faith in nineteenth-century democracy and liberalism. Combine this with their secretiveness, clannish loyalties, and piety, and the courage not to run under fire, and the Shia come close to being an undefeatable foe. The Israelis in Lebanon were fighting not so much an army but a fierce tribe that would rather die than surrender.
Indeed, it is blood ties that have made the Shia so strong. The Shia who live in Beirut’s southern suburbs all know one another, with whole families and clans settling in the same block. They know about the birth of a child, a marriage, who’s doing well and who’s not. They know who the believers are, the alcoholics, the philanderers, who they can trust and who they can’t. They know who will fight and who won’t. There is no way for outsiders to break down these bonds, not even through one of the most massive aerial bombardments in history, such as the one Israel launched in 2006.
The Shia also don’t talk freely. Their sect has a peculiar tenet called taqqiyah—permission for a Shia believer to lie in order to protect the faith. This kind of sanctioned deception spills over into every aspect of a Shia’s life, in particular when dealing with outsiders. In conversation, or even listening in on a conversation among other Shia, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish what’s true and what’s not. There’s an inner meaning to every sentence, one that a Shia will instantly pick up on but a non-Shia can’t comprehend. Taqqiyah is one reason that American and Israeli intelligence were never able to effectively penetrate Hezbollah.
Even the Iranians were astonished by Hezbollah’s ability to keep a secret, a key to fighting any guerrilla war. In 1996, when Hezbollah launched an offensive against the Israelis, the Iranians called Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah to Tehran. They wanted to be certain that Hezbollah fighters wouldn’t reveal Iran’s role.
Nasrallah reassured Iran that Hezbollah’s cadres would never betray Iran. They would lie, cover up, obfuscate—whatever was necessary—to keep Iran’s involvement secret. Hezbollah also knew how to compartmentalize information—its fighters were only told what they needed to know for their missions. So even if they were caught and somehow forced to talk, they knew only about their own cells. In the battle between America’s college-educated, Internet-surfing “experts” on Lebanon and Hezbollah’s tough, street-smart, loyal fighters, we were hopelessly outmatched. As, apparently, were the Israelis.
Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 passed without any serious comment in this country, because it was a war the Americans didn’t know. It dragged on for eighteen years, but it wasn’t fought on the front pages of newspapers. It was a confusing war. There were no set battles, no major cities that fell. With Iran using proxies, and the fact that there were no victory parades in Tehran, no campaign ribbons, no after-action press briefings, no white flags, it was difficult for Americans to put a face on the war. Even today, the Americans and the Israelis don’t know the names of Hezbollah’s field commanders. Israel fought and lost to a phantom.
Americans should definitely be scared about Iran and the Middle East, but not for the reasons the Bush administration has put forth. Iran’s foot soldiers are no longer terrorists. They’re a formidable army, which makes Iran something much more dangerous. And the creation of that army can be told through the story of one man, Imad Mughniyah: a terrorist turned guerrilla fighter.