A Bad Deal: Iran’s Forty-Year Proxy Wars and the Failure of Conciliation
America can’t do a damn thing.
—KHOMEINI, 1979, AND KHAMENEI, 2020
THE JCPOA were initials likely to trigger an animated conversation with President Trump. Negotiated in a multinational forum comprising Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Germany, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, was, to him, an example of an agreement in which the United States forfeited its bargaining power and gave away too much for too little.
I was sympathetic to the statement candidate Trump made many times during his presidential campaign characterizing the JCPOA as “the worst deal ever.” I believed that the JCPOA had both strengthened an adversary and undermined U.S. interests because of fundamental flaws in two areas. First, there were practical problems. In an agreement designed to prevent Iran from threatening other nations with nuclear weapons, the omission of nonnuclear capabilities relevant to deployable nuclear weapons, such as missiles, and the inclusion of a “sunset clause,” which would relax and then terminate restrictions on nuclear development after 2025, cut against the deal’s purpose.1 Second, the agreement was divorced from the very nature of an Iranian regime that was fundamentally untrustworthy and hostile to the United States. Inadequacies in the deal and the unwavering hostility of Iranian leaders made it likely that the JCPOA would succeed only in providing cover for a clandestine nuclear program while sanctions relief gave Iranian leaders more resources to fight Iran’s proxy wars against the United States, Israel, and Arab states that opposed its ambition to extend its influence across the Middle East. Because monitoring and enforcement mechanisms were far from foolproof, the absence of evidence that Iran was breaking the agreement was not reassuring to those familiar with the regime’s long record of hostility and duplicity.
Iranian leaders did not make it difficult for others to discern their intentions. President Obama declared that signing the “strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated” would give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “access where necessary, when necessary.”2 But before the ink on the agreement was dry, the spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization stated that “in the inked roadmap, no permission has been issued for the IAEA’s access to any military centers and the nuclear scientists.”3 Iran’s leaders constantly contradicted their diplomats, which should have raised doubts about trusting them to uphold any of the deal’s stipulations.
The JCPOA was an extreme case of strategic narcissism based on wishful thinking—wishful thinking that led to self-delusion and, ultimately, the deception of the American people. It was wishful thinking to trust an openly hostile regime to adhere not only to the letter but also to the spirit of the deal. It was self-delusion to indulge in the conceit that lifting sanctions against Iran might evolve the regime into a responsible nation that no longer supported terrorist organizations. And it was deceptive to portray the flawed deal as unrelated to Iran’s destructive behavior in the region and as the only alternative to war.
Far from persuading the Iranian regime to abandon its sponsorship of militias and terrorist organizations, the JCPOA had the opposite effect. The deal gave the regime a cash payment of $1.7 billion up front and a subsequent payout of approximately $100 billion in unfrozen assets.4 Even more cash flowed to the regime after sanctions relief. Iran used the windfall to intensify its proxy wars and expand sectarian conflicts in the region.5 In the words of former U.S. Central Command commander Gen. Joseph Votel, Iran grew “more aggressive in the days [after] the agreement.”6
Although President Trump was eager to get out of the “terrible deal,” I wanted to give him comprehensive options to address the broad range of challenges that the Iranian regime presented to U.S. security and prosperity. And it was important to consider the effects of pulling out. If other nations regarded the U.S. departure from the deal as unjustified, for example, efforts to impose costs on the regime might be diluted. Although the reimposition of U.S. sanctions alone would deliver a significant financial blow, we might stay in the deal and sanction Iran for behavior not covered in it, such as missile development and support for terrorists. Staying in the JCPOA despite common knowledge of President Trump’s inclination to get out would create leverage for us to isolate the regime diplomatically as well as economically. The president might use that leverage to get others to support fixing the deal’s flaws, insisting on robust inspections, and applying additional sanctions. Why not see how much we might accomplish before pulling out?
I was also concerned that pulling out could put the United States on the defensive and divert attention from the Iranian regime’s criminality and brutality. Iran’s smooth-talking, Western-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, would undoubtedly attempt to portray Iran as a victim of a U.S. president whom some foreign leaders, especially in Europe, regarded as brash and impulsive. Corrupt Iranian clerics and officials would use the U.S. pullout to shift responsibility for Iran’s failing economy away from themselves and toward the United States. Conversely, applying sanctions for nefarious Iranian activities abroad while staying in the flawed agreement might make it clear to the Iranian people that their leaders were the true authors of their problems, as they were squandering the nation’s potential wealth on violence and destruction abroad.
It was for those reasons that I asked the president to give his cabinet time to develop options for an overall Iran strategy into which the JCPOA decisions fit, instead of viewing “stay or get out” in isolation. Toward that end, I asked our weapons of mass destruction senior director, Andrea Hall, and the senior director for Middle East affairs, Michael Bell, to intensify their work to frame the problems associated with Iran. They worked with Dina Powell, deputy national security advisor for strategy; Brian Hook, the director of policy planning at the Department of State, and all relevant departments and agencies to identify the challenges associated with the Islamic Republic and draft goals, objectives, and assumptions as the foundation for a fresh Iran strategy. In May 2017, I convened a Principals Committee meeting, composed of the relevant members of the cabinet, to review our collective framing of Iran’s challenge to our national security and provide direction on the development of options. After the meeting, the president approved our assessment. All agreed that the fundamental problem was the Iranian regime’s permanent hostility to the United States, Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the West.
But the president was impatient. And what made him more impatient was domestic legislation that the Republican-majority House of Representatives and Senate had passed in 2015, meant to force an expected Hillary Clinton administration to publicly and serially confront flaws in the nuclear deal. The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA) required the administration to certify to Congress every ninety days that the agreement “meets United States non-proliferation objectives, does not jeopardize the common defense and security,” and ensures that Iran’s nuclear activities will not “constitute an unreasonable risk . . .”7 It was a tall order, and one that cut directly against the president’s assessment of the JCPOA.
The first INARA deadline arrived in April 2017, less than two months after I started as national security advisor. When I discovered that the secretary of state intended to send a perfunctory letter certifying that Iran was in compliance, I knew that the president would be incensed. Our team worked with the State Department and other agencies to propose alternative language that certified under the INARA legislation, but also stated clearly that Iranian behavior in the region, enabled by sanctions relief under the nuclear deal, threatened “common defense and security.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who at times seemed reflexively opposed to suggestions from the White House, rejected that option and sent the terse certification letter. After the president reacted as anticipated, I joined Secretary Tillerson in the Oval Office for a discussion. Tillerson subsequently amended the letter, noting that the nuclear deal “fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran. It only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.” He stated further that the Iran deal “represents the same failed approach of the past that brought us to the current imminent threat that we face from North Korea,” telling reporters that “The evidence is clear: Iran’s provocative actions threaten the United States, the region and the world.”8
In anticipation of the two remaining INARA certifications in 2017, one in July and another in October, I asked our team to accelerate work on the Iran strategy. We referred to the series of discussions prior to those deadlines as the “gift that keeps on giving.” It was our job to give the president options and, once he chose a course of action, to assist with the sensible execution of his decision. At each deadline, we were prepared to either get out or stay in—we had two sets of diplomatic and communications responses ready that reflected each option.9 Though the decision changed after nearly every conversation, in the end, the president was persuaded to stay in the deal while asking other nations to join us in the imposition of non-JCPOA-related sanctions and help fix the deal’s flaws, an endeavor that ultimately proved unfruitful. In July, simultaneous with the State Department’s certification that Iran was conforming to the letter of the agreement, Treasury secretary Stephen Mnuchin announced sanctions on eighteen Iranian entities that supported terrorist organizations.10
Still, this action was not enough to placate critics who saw pulling out of the deal in much the same way that Obama administration officials had viewed signing it in the first place: as an end in and of itself. Partly in response to those critics, President Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he would be “surprised” if Iran were found compliant in ninety days.11 Unfortunately, public discussion on Iran continued to focus almost exclusively on whether the United States would stay in or get out of the deal, rather than on the broad range of Iranian actions that undermined peace and security in the Middle East and beyond. Few people, either inside or outside the government, articulated how the decision would fit into an overall strategy not only to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but also to end its proxy wars.
I asked our National Security Council staff to develop Iran strategy options for presentation to the president prior to the next INARA deadline, in October. The president approved the new Iran strategy in early September, and we started work on a presidential speech meant to inform the American people and international audiences of the Iranian threat and our strategy to protect U.S. and allies’ interests. Another painful conversation on INARA certification was impending, but the president could finally consider options in the context of a comprehensive approach to Iran.
In October, in addition to the binary choice of past certifications, we provided the president with a third choice on INARA: to decline to certify that the deal was in the national interest, but stay in the agreement conditionally as a way to incentivize other nations to address the deal’s fundamental flaws and join the United States in sanctioning Iran’s continued support for terrorists and militias. He approved that option. In his speech, Trump announced that “despite my strong inclination, I have not yet withdrawn the United States from the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, I have outlined two possible paths forward: either fix the deal’s disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw.”12
In retrospect, tying the speech on Iran strategy to the INARA decision was a mistake. Press coverage focused almost exclusively on that narrow issue and skipped over the significant shift in Iran strategy. We were running out of time to show how staying in the JCPOA, despite its flaws, was the best way to accomplish the new strategy’s objectives. Mike Bell, Joel Rayburn, and Brian Hook, who would later become the State Department’s lead on Iran policy, traveled to Europe to ask allies to support our efforts and keep the international conversation, and pressure, on Iran. Working with the European signatories, we attempted to marshal support for addressing missile development and restricting Iran’s uranium enrichment permanently, rather than allowing those restrictions to expire in 2025 under the agreement, but I knew it was a long shot. In his last certification of the deal under INARA, the president said, “I am waiving the application of certain nuclear sanctions, but only in order to secure our European allies’ agreement to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal. This is a last chance. In the absence of such an agreement, the United States will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. And if at any time I judge that such an agreement is not within reach, I will withdraw from the deal immediately.”13
We had created a window of opportunity for our allies to demonstrate the viability of staying in the deal while imposing costs on Iran for its destructive behavior in the Middle East. That window closed soon after I departed the White House. My last day as assistant to the president for national security affairs was April 9, 2018. A month later, the president withdrew from the JCPOA. The international reaction was as predicted: the conversation shifted from condemnation of Iran to exasperation with the United States. The following year, President Trump announced his intention to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization, recognizing that “Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”14 Israel and the Gulf states, those countries suffering directly from Iran’s proxy wars, were supportive. Though the response from European allies was initially negative, I was confident they would recognize the importance of sanctioning Iran. It was only a matter of time before Iranian aggression clarified that the Iranian regime was the real problem—we could count on the mullahs in Tehran to demonstrate their hostility to the West.15
BY SUMMER 2019, Iran felt the pressure of the reimposed sanctions. The economy was contracting even faster than in 2018, when GDP fell from 3.7 percent growth per annum to 3.9 percent contraction. Crude oil exports, 2.3 million barrels a day in 2018, fell to 1.1 million barrels a day by March 2019. Inflation rose from 9 to 40 percent. Iranian leaders faced three fundamental choices. First, they could attempt to wait out President Donald Trump and work with other countries to avoid the sanctions. But the economic pressure was significant, and faced with doing business either with the United States or Iran, companies and investors were unsurprisingly choosing the United States. European efforts to circumvent the U.S. financial system in trade and investment were insufficient.16 Second, the regime could enter into talks with the United States and other nations to renegotiate aspects of the deal and address their support for terrorist organizations and militias in exchange for sanctions alleviation. But the revolutionaries in Iran, particularly Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the IRGC, were not predisposed to conciliation. Lastly, they could increase adversarial activity against the United States, Europe, and Gulf states while violating the terms of the agreement to extort the United States and others to relieve sanctions.
Their choice became obvious on June 12. Prime Minister Abe was the first Japanese leader to visit Tehran in four decades. He met with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in Sa’dabad Palace. Japan wanted to avoid an interruption of or reduction in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf because, of all the industrialized nations, it had the weakest domestic production relative to its needs. After the sharp reduction in nuclear power generation following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan’s need for cheap oil grew. After reviewing a military honor guard, Abe and Rouhani sat on gold-framed furniture in a private meeting room decorated with flowers and the Iranian and Japanese flags. “If we witness some tensions, the root is the U.S. economic war against the Iranian nation. Any time this war stops, we will witness very positive developments in the region and the world,” Mr. Rouhani said. It was the beginning of an attempt at extortion. During the subsequent meeting with the Supreme Leader, Abe delivered a message from President Trump. Khamenei refused to respond.17
As Rouhani and Khamenei hosted Abe, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy was tracking the movement of the Japanese oil tanker Kokuka Courageous in the Gulf of Oman on its way to the Indian Ocean. Just hours before Abe was to meet with Supreme Leader Khamenei, IRGC speedboats approached the tanker under cover of darkness and affixed limpet mines to it. After the boats sped away, an explosion ripped through the starboard side of the tanker, sending a shock wave toward the bridge and blowing a 1.5-meter-wide hole in the aft. Oil spilled from the hull into the ocean, but the ship’s compartments limited the damage. Realizing that not all the mines exploded, the speedboats returned. By then, the crew of Kokuka Courageous had evacuated and the U.S. Navy had the tanker under surveillance, and a navy aircraft recorded IRGC operatives removing the unexploded mines.18 The Japanese tanker was the second ship attacked that morning, as a limpet mine had damaged the Norwegian tanker Front Altair just an hour earlier. The IRGC clearly had timed the operations as an affront not only to Prime Minister Abe, but also to anyone who intended to bring a message of conciliation to the Islamic Republic. The attacks served as yet another corrective to those who preferred to separate negotiations with Iran from the nature of the regime and the ideology that drives its aggressive behavior.
As it became clear that Iran had chosen to escalate, the United States announced the deployment of additional military forces to the region. Less than a week after the tanker attacks, an Iranian missile shot down a remotely piloted U.S. surveillance aircraft over international waters. The United States was on the brink of retaliation until President Trump halted the planned strikes due to the estimated loss of Iranian life and his belief that such a response would be disproportionate to the provocation. While some applauded the decision as a way to play a longer game of diplomatic, economic, and financial pressure in which the United States had the advantage, the lack of a response emboldened Iranian leaders. It seemed as if President Trump were trying to give the Iranians an out. Trump told reporters that he found “it hard to believe it was intentional if you want to know the truth . . . I have a feeling . . . that it was a mistake by somebody.”19 The president’s comments may have been well meaning but they were symptomatic of the tendency of American leaders to view the latest act of aggression in isolation, rather than in the context of a four-decade-long proxy war Iran continues to wage against us.
U.S. POLICY toward Iran across six U.S. administrations has suffered from a lack of strategic empathy and a failure to understand how historical memory, emotion, and ideology drive the Iranian regime’s behavior. An effective Iran strategy requires strategic empathy, and that means rejecting both the flawed assumptions that underpinned a bad nuclear agreement and the ineffective, inconsistent strategies we have been employing to counter Iranian hostility since 1979.
Similar to the long-standing assumption that China’s prosperity would lead to liberalization of its economy and government, President Obama hoped that “seeing the benefits of sanctions relief” would convince Iran to focus “more on the economy and its people.” Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, who promoted the deal to the American people based on a false choice between the JCPOA and war, suggested that the deal would cause “an evolution in Iranian behavior” as Iran became “more engaged with the international community.”20 The JCPOA was not the first case of American leaders believing that conciliatory actions, such as sanctions relief, would moderate Iranian leaders’ behavior or cause them to prioritize interests over passion and ideology. Hope for warming relations led some to disregard the tendency of Iranian leaders, since the 1979 revolution, to engage with the United States when fearful or under duress. Such engagements used a veneer of sincerity to mask the leaders’ true intentions of either avoiding consequences for terrorist acts or garnering more resources to fund their destructive operations.
In 1979, for example, President Jimmy Carter’s administration did not recognize how deeply anti-Western sentiment drove the revolutionaries in Iran. Hoping to develop a relationship with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and preserve Iran as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union, Carter administration officials closed their ears to the anti-American cheers of the revolution and averted their eyes from the reign of terror that the Ayatollah was inflicting on his people. While visiting Algiers on November 1, 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sought out Iranian prime minister Mehdi Bazargan at a reception to tell him that the United States was open to a relationship with the new Islamic Republic. Iranian newspapers published photos of the two men shaking hands, which appeared alongside news that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah, had been admitted to the United States for medical treatment. Iranian revolutionaries put the two pieces of news together and assumed that the CIA and U.S. military were preparing to return the Shah to power. The Iranians in Algiers immediately ended the talks as outraged students in Tehran seized the U.S. embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage. It was the beginning of a 444-day crisis that would dominate the rest of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, the Iranian government released the hostages, a supposed conciliatory action of goodwill.21 As a first-year cadet at West Point, I was part of a cordon of cheering cadets who lined Thayer Road to welcome the hostages back to American soil as six green-and-white army buses took them through the campus on the way to a three-day respite with their families at the Hotel Thayer.
The regime had released the hostages under duress. Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980 had increased the cost of Iran’s diplomatic and economic isolation. The first stages of the destructive war depleted Iranian weapons and munitions stocks. Because the United States built the Iranian military when the two nations were allies, Iranian officials had no option but to turn for assistance to the nation they called “the Great Satan.”
During Ronald Reagan’s second term as president, and just two years after the October 1983 Iranian-sponsored attack against a marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 servicemen, U.S. officials offered missiles in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages taken in Lebanon. After the Iranians got the munitions they wanted, an Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon took three more Americans hostage. Radical revolutionaries in Iran exposed the embarrassing arms-for-hostages scandal, miring the Reagan administration in controversy for its final two years. 22
Despite having been tarnished by this scandal as vice president, President George H. W. Bush had high hopes for engaging Iran and, in particular, for gaining the release of nine American hostages held in Lebanon. The new U.S. president offered an olive branch in his inaugural address, and stated that Iranian assistance in releasing the hostages could transform the relationship: “Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.”23 The Bush administration requested that a UN intermediary travel to Tehran to test Iranian willingness to engage.
The cycle of rising expectations and dashed hopes continued. In 1989, after Ayatollah Khomeini died, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became Supreme Leader and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had negotiated the arms-for-hostages deal, became President. Rafsanjani, who was a businessman and politician as well as a cleric, forged a strong relationship with the bazaar, or Iranian mercantile class. The war had made a shambles of the Iranian economy. Infrastructure was damaged and dilapidated. Oil production suffered. The Bush administration offered more than words to explore improved relations, releasing the $567 million frozen by Washington after the Tehran embassy attack in 1979.24 But Rafsanjani had neither the power nor the inclination to dispense goodwill. He and the merchant class were far weaker than Khamenei and his conservative clerics, security service, and IRGC allies.
All the while, the IRGC was supplying terrorist cells in Europe with weapons to attack their political enemies and Western interests. In 1989, Iranian agents murdered prominent Kurdish-Iranian resistance leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna; that same year, Khomeini issued a fatwa (a judgment rendered by an Islamic jurist) directing the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses contained passages that the Supreme Leader deemed blasphemous; the next year, Iranian “diplomats” shot Kazem Rajavi, brother of People’s Mujahedin of Iran cofounder Massoud Rajavi, in Geneva; in 1991, Iranian assassins killed the Shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, in Paris after failing a decade earlier; and in 1992, Iranian agents murdered three prominent Kurdish Iranian leaders and their interpreter in a Greek restaurant in Berlin.25
As President Bush offered his olive branch and Europe expanded economic relations with Iran, the Iranian-supported Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah was going global. Worldwide attacks included a 1989 failed bombing in London in an attempt to assassinate Rushdie, a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina that killed twenty-nine people, a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina that killed eighty-five people,26 and the bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 on its way from Colón to Panama City, Panama, that killed all twenty-one of its passengers. In 1996, Hezbollah bombed the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel. Rafsanjani’s successor, Mohammed Khatami, categorically denied, as Iranian leaders always do, that Iran supports terrorist operations overseas. He held out hope for reform in Iran, describing an internal political competition in which “one political tendency” that “firmly believes in the prevalence of logic and the rule of law” grapples with “another tendency that believes it is entitled to go beyond the law.”27 Maybe this new Iranian president who called for a “dialogue between civilizations” could end Iran’s use of terrorism. Once Iran’s responsibility for the Khobar Towers bombing became clear, the possibility of improved relations convinced Bill Clinton to forgo retaliation.
Strategic narcissism endured, in the form of continuing reluctance to confront Iranian aggression. As the George W. Bush administration commenced at the beginning of 2001, there was still hope for improved relations based on the perceived strength of moderates and reformers inside the Islamic Republic. The tragedy of the 9/11 attacks seemed to present an opportunity to work together against common enemies such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iranian and U.S. diplomats discussed the formation of the new Afghan government, but that cooperation was limited and short-lived.28 In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush included Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil.” The Iranians suspended diplomatic contacts. Even more significant than the offense Iran took from the speech, the combination of Iranian economic weakness, growing international awareness of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and Iran’s intensification of its proxy wars would shape the next phase of the contentious U.S.-Iranian relationship.
So-called moderates in Iran were moderate mainly in American and Western imaginations, but rarely at home. In December 2001, former president Rafsanjani, the man who had served as the vessel for Western dreams of Iranian moderation prior to Khatami, spoke from the podium at Tehran University to deliver the government’s official weekly sermon. He declared, “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” In August 2002, an Iranian exile group revealed the existence of a secret facility in Natanz capable of enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons as well as civilian nuclear power reactors.29 The Iranian bomb was meant to be the ultimate weapon in the Islamic Republic’s proxy wars to push the United States out of the Middle East, dominate its Arab neighbors, and destroy Israel.
Even as it initiated programs to encourage a change in the nature of the Iranian regime through Persian-language broadcasts and support to civil society groups, the Bush administration pursued cooperation with Iran against Al-Qaeda, an organization that seemed to hate Iranian Shia Muslims as much as American Christians and Jews. In 2003, after the United States and British militaries accomplished in weeks what the Iranian military could not accomplish in eight years, deposing Saddam, the Iranians engaged in discussions, fearful that they might be next on the Bush administration’s regime change agenda. But instead of cooperating with the United States against what seemed to be a common enemy, the IRGC and Iran’s security apparatus gave Al-Qaeda leaders safe haven and helped them target the United States and Arab monarchies.30 Iran also used Al-Qaeda to jump-start a sectarian civil war in Iraq that allowed Iran to settle old scores with former Baathists, build powerful proxy forces, and infiltrate its agents into Iraqi institutions. The U.S. post-invasion failure to consolidate gains in Iraq opened the door for the IRGC and the MOIS, the Islamic Republic’s domestic and foreign spy service, comprising many of the Shah’s former SAVAK secret police). Iranian operatives and intelligence agents moved freely across unguarded borders. As the United States and Coalition forces struggled with a growing insurgency, Iranian fear of America’s conventional military prowess dissipated. The IRGC and their allied militias in Iraq added American soldiers to their list of targets as they intensified their proxy war against the United States.
These militias began killing and maiming American servicemen and women with Iranian-manufactured roadside bombs called explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). EFPs are as lethal as they are simple. A metal or PVC pipe packed with explosives and capped with a curved copper or steel disc is detonated. The explosion transforms the disc into a high-velocity molten slug capable of penetrating vehicles’ armor protection.31 EFPs required precision manufacturing in Iran. To transport them to battlefields abroad, the regime developed complex and innovative smuggling networks and techniques.
But Washington was slow to respond to Iran’s escalation of the war, despite the urging of some civilian and military officials to confront Iranian aggression. Similar to the Obama and Trump administrations’ self-delusion that the Taliban was separate from Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bush administration indulged an implausible theory that Iran’s leaders might simply be unaware that their agents in Iraq were killing hundreds of American soldiers. When asked about the irrefutable evidence that the deadly EFPs were coming from Iran, President Bush said, “What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Qods [Quds] Force to do what they did.”32 Two days earlier, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace stated that the weapons shipments from Iran did not mean that “the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this.” I read those statements when I was in Iraq as commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. It was not ambiguous to me or to our troopers; the preponderance of our casualties in the area south of Baghdad was due to Iranian-made EFPs provided through a network run by the Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. Those who conducted the attacks were trained and directed by the IRGC Quds Force. It was implausible that Iranian leaders were not responsible for killing more than six hundred U.S. soldiers, over 17 percent of all U.S. deaths in Iraq from 2003 to 2011.33 Conciliatory action, even to the point of developing and promoting a cover story for Teheran, led neither to a reduction in Iran’s destructive activity nor to a stronger position for reformers. Instead, the lack of a strong response emboldened the revolutionaries.
The years 2005 to 2013 were ones of confrontation under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He and the conservatives were ascendant, as were oil revenues, and the regime intensified not only rhetoric, but also actions against Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and ignited a war that went far beyond what Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah expected. Twelve hundred Lebanese, including more than 270 Hezbollah fighters, died along with 158 Israelis. In the wake of the war, Ahmadinejad vastly increased support for Hezbollah and for the Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On January 20, 2007, Tehran’s proxies in Iraq became more audacious in direct action against U.S. forces. Qais al-Khazali led the militant group Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq in an attack on the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala. The militants wore U.S. uniforms to sneak past Iraqi guards. They killed one U.S. soldier and took four more hostage, all of whom were later murdered in cold blood. The Quds Force even planned a bold assassination and terrorist attack in the United States. On October 11, 2011, U.S. government officials foiled an assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. Their planned attack at the ambassador’s favorite restaurant in Washington would have killed many bystanders. A month and a half later, on November 29, 2011, Iranian protestors stormed and overwhelmed the British embassy in Tehran, chanting “Death to England” and ransacking the premises and its sensitive contents. This unrest came after Great Britain announced new sanctions on the Iranian regime, and the movements appeared to have been state sponsored.34
But Iran was paying a price for the intensification of its proxy wars and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In Iraq, despite the reluctance in Washington to attribute attacks to leaders in Teheran, the U.S. military responded to the mounting violence from Shia militias. In January 2007, U.S. special operations forces raided the Iranian consulate in Erbil, which the United States suspected of being an IRGC base. Two months later, in March, Coalition special operations forces also attacked a terrorist cell in Basra that had been responsible for the deaths of the five U.S. soldiers in the January attack in Karbala. Among the captured were al-Khazali, the leader of that attack; his brother; and Mullah Ali Mussa Daqduq, a Lebanese Hezbollah advisor who had been working with the Iranians to create an Iraqi version of Lebanese Hezbollah. The Coalition also supported Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s 2007 “Charge of the Knights” offensive against the Mahdi Army in southern Iraq after Maliki uncovered a plot to replace him with someone who would be completely beholden to Iran, such as Ibrahim al-Jaafari or Ahmed Chalabi. The U.S. military’s heightened response caught the Shia militias and the IRGC by surprise. Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani was particularly concerned with the capture of five Quds Force officers from the Erbil consulate, and fearing similar future incidents, he scaled back IRGC operations and personnel in Iraq.35
Beginning in 2005, the Bush administration and European allies increased pressure on Iran in the form of economic sanctions and reportedly clandestine operations in response to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.36 Pressure continued in the Obama administration, and beginning in 2012, the Iranian economy contracted severely. Then, in 2014, oil prices fell, compounding the effect of tightening sanctions and bringing Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse.37 Iran was losing externally as well as internally. Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad seemed to be a dead man walking in Syria.
Iran needed a way out. In 2013, new leaders President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif began a charm offensive, even feigning a friendlier approach to Israel. In contrast to President Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust, Foreign Minister Zarif described the Nazi genocidal campaign against the Jews as a “horrifying tragedy” and even suggested that if Israel and the Palestinians reached a peace agreement, Tehran might recognize Israel.38 Once again, Western leaders were ready to believe that Iran might really, this time, moderate its behavior in response to a conciliatory gesture.
But Iran was intensifying its proxy wars with increased support for the Syrian regime, Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and the Houthi militia in Yemen. In February 2014, for example, Iran sent hundreds of “military specialists,” Quds Force commanders, and IRGC troops to Syria to boost the Assad regime. The Fatemiyoun Division, an Afghan Shia militia established and commanded by the IRGC, grew to an estimated twenty thousand fighters. Over the course of 2014, Iran also quietly increased its support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, both materially and through manpower.39 Meanwhile, the mullahs were advancing the nuclear program. As Iranian leaders negotiated with Western diplomats, Supreme Leader Khamenei announced that Iran would pursue 190,000 centrifuges rather than the 10,000 that negotiators were discussing. Nonetheless, the Obama administration, like those before it, chose to alleviate the pressure on the Iranian regime based on hopes of what conciliation might bring. When Iranian protesters reached out to Western democracies during the 2009 Green Movement, the administration issued a tepid statement to avoid upsetting the regime and foreclosing on the possibility of improved relations. The decision not to enforce the “red line” in Syria against the use of chemical weapons to murder civilians was, in part, a concession to Tehran. The administration even portrayed the Islamic Republic of Iran as a partner in the effort to remove chemical weapons from the Syrian regime’s arsenal.40
The administration’s high hopes for the nascent Iranian Nuclear Deal led it to scale back what had been a promising effort to constrain Iran’s aggression. From 2008 to 2016, Project Cassandra disrupted Iran’s ability to fund its proxies abroad, including Lebanese Hezbollah’s international terrorist network. But as Treasury official Katherine Bauer later recalled, “the investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”41
And once the deal went into effect, the Obama administration was determined to avoid confrontations that might undo the agreement. As American money flowed into Iran and Iranian exports tripled, funding for terrorist organizations and IRGC operations across the region soared. Hezbollah received an additional $700 million per year; another $100 million went to various Palestinian militant and terrorist groups. The JCPOA strengthened the Iranian regime psychologically as well as financially. In contrast to the language in the deal’s preamble stipulating that signatories would “implement this JCPOA in good faith and in a constructive atmosphere” and “refrain from any action inconsistent with the letter, spirit, intent” of the agreement, the IRGC intensified operations in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and eastern Saudi Arabia. For example, in October 2015, only months after the signing of the JCPOA, hundreds of Iranian troops arrived in Syria over a ten-day period to bolster offensive operations in Idlib and Hama. The IRGC also continued a series of ballistic missile tests in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, testing fourteen missiles from the signing of the agreement to February 2017, including a long-range ballistic missile under the guise of a satellite launch. Although a number of those launches failed, the Iranians were improving. In response to a June 2017 terrorist attack in Tehran, and to demonstrate its new capabilities, Iran launched six missiles from its territory over Iraq to strike an ISIS-controlled area in Dayr al-Zawr, Syria.42
The Obama administration took conciliation with Iran to a new level. Just prior to Iran signing the agreement in the summer of 2015, the U.S. State Department flew pallets of euros and Swiss francs into Geneva, where trams loaded them onto Iranian cargo planes headed for Tehran. That same day, Iran released four Americans who had been, in effect, hostages. It was an operation reminiscent of the arms-for-hostages arrangement under the Reagan administration. Iran’s leaders regarded the thinly veiled cash-for-hostages payment as a sign of weakness rather than the metaphorical “outstretched hand” of conciliation that President Obama offered in his June 2009 speech in Cairo. The lie that the cash payment and the hostage release were disconnected encouraged Iran’s long practice of using hostages for coercion to extort favorable terms, and the revolutionaries in Tehran portrayed the ransom payment as an admission of American guilt and weakness. Hossein Nejat, deputy intelligence director of the IRGC, stated that ransom payments demonstrated that “the Americans themselves say they have no power to attack Iran.”43 In the months that followed the payoff, in addition to multiple missile launches, the regime boasted about its nuclear stockpiles, awarded a medal to an IRGC commander with American blood on his hands, and seized two U.S. Navy vessels, arresting ten sailors and parading them in front of cameras before releasing them fifteen hours later. Iran even failed to refrain from hostage taking, detaining Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in 2016 while he was conducting research on the Qajar dynasty and learning Farsi for a PhD in Eurasian history. As in the past, conciliation had led to Iranian escalation, not moderation.
DESPITE THE United States’ repeated hopes for moderate leaders and reformist government, Iran’s internal political dynamics make real reform highly unlikely. Modest efforts over the years to liberalize the press, boost the economy, and reduce extrajudicial killings have typically been stifled by a coalition of conservatives and Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Despite their veneer of piety, the conservative mullahs who dominate the Guardian Council and exert influence across the government maintain their power through moral and financial corruption. Much of this is done through the use of bonyads, religious foundations that provide cover for extensive patronage networks from which the ayatollahs and government officials profit. Bonyads control businesses, receive government contracts, launder money, operate without any external audits, and pay no taxes. The Supreme Leader appoints the heads of the bonyads. Many are children of influential mullahs. The regime’s largest bonyad, Astan Quds Razavi, controls more than one hundred businesses in diverse fields ranging from car manufacturing to agriculture to oil and gas to financial services.
Corruption extends beyond the clerical order into the security services and Revolutionary Guard. The IRGC profits from smuggling contraband and trafficking drugs. Corrupt networks also stifle political reforms to maintain their control of the government and the economy. For example, the constitutionally mandated Guardian Council, a body of clerics and lawyers, rigged the Majlis parliamentary elections in 2004 and marginalized reformers to ensure that the populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defeated former president Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential election.44 The most notorious theft of an election was the presidential election in 2009. Most often, the Guardian Council simply excluded reformist candidates from elections as it did in February 2020 when it denied over seven thousand potential Majlis candidates the opportunity to run for office.45
Paradoxically, the West’s conciliatory policies have often reinforced the revolutionaries’ efforts to stifle reform. For example, in 2004 and 2005, European Union negotiators overlooked the election irregularities that led to conservative victories in the Majlis and Ahmadinejad’s election. Avoiding confrontation, they thought, might lead to cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, Ahmadinejad ushered in a period of aggression abroad while the revolutionaries continued to consolidate power internally.
Aggressive actions abroad derive from and depend on the revolutionaries’ strong grip on power domestically. High oil revenues allowed Ahmadinejad to empower and enrich the IRGC expeditionary organization responsible for carrying out terrorist operations abroad, the Quds Force. To show their gratitude, the increasingly powerful combination of the IRGC and the MOIS stole the 2009 election when Ahmadinejad faced a popular reform candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi’s Green Movement threatened to morph into a Green Revolution to overturn the corrupt clerical order. When people took to the streets in the largest protests since 1979, the IRGC and the Basij, a paramilitary organization mobilized for security, brutally suppressed them.46
The JCPOA has proved a windfall for Supreme Leader Khamenei, the bonyads, and the IRGC, allowing them to extend their patronage networks and intensify proxy wars in the region. Integrating Iran into the global economy was, in theory, supposed to strengthen the private sector, loosen the government’s grip on the commercial sector, empower moderates, and, over time, produce a less hostile Iranian government. But rather than opening up the Iranian market and liberalizing the country, the sanctions relief strengthened the revolutionaries, especially the bonyads and the IRGC. Like the bonyads, the IRGC is central to Iran’s economic system. It gained a high degree of economic influence during the Iran-Iraq War and controls 20 to 40 percent of the Iranian economy. In the first eighteen months after the JCPOA payment of $1.7 billion, at least 90 of the 110 commercial agreements and approximately $80 billion in outside investment went to state-controlled companies.47
THE BELIEF that sanctions relief would change not only the behavior but also the very nature of the regime was based on the narcissistic assumption that U.S. actions were the principal source of Iranian attitudes and behaviors. The Iranian political structure was not well understood or was ignored. Wendy Sherman, the lead negotiator for the Iran Nuclear Deal, suggested that “to make a meaningful deal, we need to see our adversaries not as eternal enemies or as dispensable ones, but as virtual partners.”48 The counterproductive Iran policy was the result of self-delusion, a lack of Iran expertise, and the associated misunderstanding of history and underappreciation for the emotions and ideology of Iranian leaders.
A superficial understanding of history is often more misleading than complete ignorance. The Obama administration accepted the founding myth of the Iranian Revolution—that the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and consolidated the rule of the Shah was externally planned and executed. For the Iranian revolutionaries, the coup myth reinforced their meta-narrative of victimization at the hands of Western colonialists. For the Obama administration, the story reinforced its tendency to see the United States as the key determinant of Iran’s actions. Never mind that the Shah had the legal right to dismiss his prime minister and that Mosaddeq’s rejection of that dismissal was in fact unconstitutional and illegal. Although the prime minister, lionized by the revolutionaries in Iran and New Left historians in the United States, was indeed an honorable patriot, the Mosaddeq myth overlooked its protagonist’s obstinance and how his inflexibility crippled the Iranian economy, opening the door for radicals on both sides of the political spectrum. Never mind that the monarchy and the Shah were still popular and that Mosaddeq was a monarchist. Although British and U.S. intelligence agencies did conspire against Mosaddeq, a trove of documents released in 2017 demonstrated that their efforts would have failed without the support of domestic actors. In the end, the Shah’s coalition proved stronger than Mosaddeq’s narrow coalition of unhappy intellectuals and leftist politicians.49
But the simplistic history of the coup appealed to those sympathetic to the New Left’s interpretation of history, in which the modern ills of the world are attributed mainly to capitalist imperialism and an overly powerful United States. The standard interpretation of the coup in U.S. universities is, in part, a late by-product of opposition to the Vietnam War.
The flawed interpretation of the Mosaddeq coup contributed to a predisposition toward atonement for America’s alleged sins as the first step toward improved relations. In 2019, the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas National Security Review, for example, released an issue examining why the Eisenhower administration chose to overthrow the Mosaddeq government, taking as a foregone conclusion that it had actually done so. Or consider the February 2019 headline on NPR’s website that read, “How the CIA Overthrew Iran’s Democracy in 4 Days.” In 2009, during the Cairo speech on American relations with the Muslim world, President Obama noted that, “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”50 Although he went on to remind his audience that Iran had also committed its share of misdeeds against Americans, the oblique reference to the Mosaddeq coup was meant as an admission of guilt that might lead to better relations. Regardless of the reality in 1953, it is important to recognize the Mosaddeq myth as both a cause and a symptom of the deep resentment, sense of victimhood, and thirst for vengeance that drive and rationalize the Iranian revolutionaries’ most egregious acts.51 The United States, however, should not abet an abuse of history by a clerical order whose forebears were far more responsible for Mosaddeq’s demise than the CIA.
THE ASSUMPTION that the Islamic Republic, once welcomed into the international community, would evolve into a force for stability in the Middle East grew out of the narcissistic tendency to view outside actions as more important than internal dynamics in determining the regime’s behavior. Although the Iranian government was not hostile because of historical wrongs that sanctions relief could right, some actually welcomed Iranian regional hegemony as a potential source of peace and stability in the region reminiscent of the Persian empires of the sixth century BC through the nineteenth century AD. But this was an ahistorical fantasy.
Officials in the Obama administration focused on selling the deal rather than subjecting it to scrutiny. As a setup for the sales pitch, Ben Rhodes stated that those who were against the JCPOA were for the Iraq War. “Wrong then, wrong now became our mantra,” he recalled. The sales point not only was a red herring, but also demonstrated how opposition to the Iraq War dominated other policy initiatives of that administration whether relevant or not. The red herring of the Iraq War led to a false dilemma, an informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be in an “either/or” situation when, in fact, there is at least one additional option. Rhodes was proud of posing the false dilemma between either supporting the JCPOA or going to war with Iran. President Obama liked it, too, describing it as their “best argument” for the agreement.52 In this instance, the option omitted was to continue to pressure the regime with sanctions at a time when it was feeling the pressure. Long before the JCPOA, Iranian leaders, nervous about their corrupt regime’s ability to forestall opposition to their autocratic rule, began to talk about the “China model,” in which economic growth, jump-started by sanctions relief, would placate the unhappy Iranian population.53 Sanctions relief under the JCPOA gave the regime an injection of cash to arrest economic deterioration and devaluation. But by strengthening a repressive regime and the IRGC, the deal weakened rather than strengthened reformers. Even worse, the conciliatory atmosphere employed to pursue a flawed nuclear agreement and American assurances of the Iranian leadership’s trustworthiness actually disempowered the Iranian people as actors and potential forces for moderation. Rhodes gave instructions to make sure that the agreement was portrayed only as addressing the nuclear issue because “we don’t want to let the critics muddy the nuclear issue with the other issues.”54 By “other issues,” he meant the regime’s tyrannical repression of its own population, its support for terrorists, and the perpetuation of violence in the Middle East.
LATER, THOSE determined to preserve the JCPOA argued that pulling out was shortsighted. The JCPOA itself, however, was also shortsighted because it divorced Iran’s nuclear program from not only the regime’s behavior, but also its very nature. It produced a bad political outcome disguised as successful diplomacy by giving up on core American values, by siding with a repressive regime against its own people and the peoples of the region. However, the assumptions and illusions that underpinned the JCPOA were not unique to that agreement or the Obama administration. Across six administrations, goodwill never begot goodwill with Iran. Conciliation has never brought moderation or a shift in the regime’s permanent hostility to the United States, Israel, Europe, and the Arab monarchies. While the JCPOA was presented as a major turn in American policy, in fact it was consistent with a long history of errors and illusions. Rectifying failed policies of the past required a better understanding of the Iranian regime and, in particular, how ideology and emotions drive and constrain its behavior.