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CHAPTER I

Iran’s Manifest Destiny

What makes Tehran tick? More than three and a half decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in Tehran on a wave of revolutionary fervor, transforming an erstwhile ally of the United States into a mortal enemy practically overnight, policy makers in Washington still understand precious little about the inner workings of his Islamic Republic. As a result, they consistently misjudge, misunderstand, and misinterpret what the Iranian regime says and does and what its leaders truly believe.

Today, this failure is seen most clearly in the Obama administration’s growing calls for normalization with the Iranian regime. During its time in office, the current White House has gravitated steadily toward the notion that Iran is a troublesome yet ultimately benign regional actor. Although President Obama has promised strong action against Iranian rogue behavior, his administration made repeated diplomatic overtures toward the Islamic Republic, propelled by the notion that with the proper mix of diplomatic dialogue and strategic incentives it will be possible to “domesticate” the Iranian regime.¹

To be fair, the Obama administration is hardly the only one to harbor this hope. More and more, Western observers have embraced the idea that Iran is a nation with which it is possible to do business. Thus, an extensive special report in a November 2014 edition of the prestigious Economist magazine loudly proclaimed that “the revolution is over” in Iran, and that the Islamic Republic is now decisively transitioning beyond “decades of messianic fervour.”² The unspoken message, reflecting the emerging political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, is crystal clear: there’s no reason to fear the Islamic Republic any longer.

The lure of this idea is undeniable. If it could somehow be rehabilitated, Iran would become a powerful Western ally in the Middle East and a lucrative trading partner for the world. Yet the notion is as misguided as it is appealing. Although the Iranian regime is currently engaged in diplomacy with the West over its nuclear program, there is no indication that it has abandoned the core ideological tenets of Khomeini’s revolution, which emphasize antagonism toward the West. Indeed, Iran—like Russia and China—is a revisionist power that actively seeks to remake its immediate region and the world beyond. Thus, as political scientist Walter Russell Mead astutely observed, “Iran wishes to replace the current order in the Middle East—led by Saudi Arabia and dominated by Sunni Arab states—with one centered on Tehran.”³ Iran, in other words, possesses a distinct manifest destiny. And today, even as the international community is preoccupied with its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic is forging ahead with its quest for global influence.

A REVOLUTIONARY PEDIGREE

Iran’s contemporary, confrontational worldview dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when Ayatollah Khomeini languished in exile, first in Iraq and then in France. It was during this time that he codified his ideas about the need for Shiite empowerment and global Islamic revolution. The result, a slender volume entitled Islamic Government, went on to serve as the template for Khomeini’s Islamic Republic following the successful 1979 revolution.⁴

In short order, after Khomeini’s partisans seized power in Tehran, the ideas about domestic governance contained in Islamic Government became the foundation for his new religion-based state. Khomeini himself became both the country’s political leader and its spiritual model. A sea change took place in foreign policy as well. Iran’s new clerical rulers believed fervently that their government marked the start of a global caliphate and that Iran’s revolution would augur the dominance of Islam “in all the countries of the world.”⁵ Accordingly, the country’s constitution proclaimed that the Islamic Republic’s armed forces “will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.”⁶ Iran’s radical vision of Islamic governance, in other words, was intended from the start to be an export commodity.

During the tumultuous decade of the 1980s, as Khomeini’s revolutionaries consolidated power at home, the principle of “exporting the revolution” became a cardinal regime priority. Its importance was demonstrated in the fact that, despite the expense of a bloody, grinding eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the fledgling Islamic Republic sunk colossal resources into becoming a hub of “global resistance.” In keeping with Khomeini’s declaration that “Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world,”⁷ the Iranian regime threw open its borders to a bevy of third-world radicals, from Palestinian resistance fighters to Latin American leftist revolutionaries. These disparate factions (many of which hailed from outside the Muslim world) gravitated to the Islamic Republic, where they obtained military, political, and economic support from an Iranian government eager to demonstrate its revolutionary bona fides and its commitment to a global Islamic order.⁸

Perhaps the most significant development during this period, however, was Iran’s creation of a proxy force in Lebanon to help spread its radical global vision. Forged from disparate Shiite militias fighting in Lebanon’s chaotic civil war, this “Army of God,” or Hezbollah in Arabic, became a powerful consolidated militia committed to Iran’s worldview. The group’s charter, published in 1985, pledged formal allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini himself and, more broadly, to the Velayat-e Faqih, the “rule of the jurisprudent” form of government he institutionalized in Iran.⁹

Ever since, Hezbollah has served as a key prong of Iranian policy. At times working in tandem with—and at others, independent from—Iran’s formal revolutionaries in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Lebanese militia has sought to further the regime’s agenda of “resistance” against Israel and the West, most directly by targeting Israeli and Jewish victims. In exchange, it has been rewarded lavishly, with the Iranian regime bankrolling the militia to the tune of between $100 and $200 million annually for many years.¹⁰ This assistance has given the group global reach and has made it, in the words of former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, the “A-team of terrorists.”¹¹

The death of Khomeini in the late 1980s and a period of sustained economic and political stagnation in the 1990s led many in the West to believe that Iran had entered a “post-revolutionary era.”¹² That hope, however, turned out to be fleeting. Over the past dozen years, Iran’s revolutionary fervor has returned with a vengeance.

VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION

With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, no political actor is more important in shaping Iran’s contemporary politics and its place in the world than the regime’s feared clerical army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enqelāb-e Eslāmi), also known as the IRGC. Originally conceived by Ayatollah Khomeini as a revolutionary vanguard capable of spreading his political model beyond Iran’s borders,¹³ the IRGC is today far more than simply a national army.

Within Iran, it is nothing short of an economic powerhouse, in control of numerous companies and corporate entities that stretch across broad swathes of the Islamic Republic’s economy, from transportation to energy to construction. This power was on display in May 2004, when the Guards shut down Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport rather than allow a Turkish consortium to operate it.¹⁴ The message was unmistakable: the IRGC, rather than the government, was the ultimate arbiter of acceptable commerce within the Islamic Republic.

It was also a testament to the enormous financial power amassed by the IRGC in recent years. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times estimated that the Guards had accumulated in excess of $12 billion in business and construction interests and possessed links to more than one hundred companies.¹⁵ That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. The IRGC, for example, is believed to be in control of practically all of the Islamic Republic’s $12-billion-a-year smuggling industry.¹⁶ Its reach extends to virtually every sector of the Iranian economy, from energy to trade to defense-industrial development. But it is in construction where the influence of the Guards is deepest. Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC’s construction headquarters, is Iran’s biggest corporation: a massive, sprawling network of companies, comprising more than 800 affiliates, employing an estimated 40,000 workers, and in control of billions of dollars in assets.¹⁷ All told, the IRGC is believed to command as much as one-third of Iran’s entire economy.¹⁸

This web of activity has alternately been described as a “business conglomerate with guns,” a “huge investment company with a complex of business empires and trading companies,” and a “de facto foreign ministry” for Iran’s revolutionary forces.¹⁹ Yet these descriptions barely scratch the surface of the IRGC’s centrality in the Iranian economy and how much power it truly exerts over the Islamic Republic’s political direction. The full extent of the IRGC’s economic reach is simply not known outside of Iran, hidden as it is behind shell companies, middlemen, and cut-outs, as well as pervasive patronage networks and entrenched political interests. What is clear, however, is that the IRGC has become a state within a state in contemporary Iran.

The IRGC’s current prominence is largely the work of one man: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His ascendance to the Iranian presidency in 2005 ushered in a golden age of nearly unbridled influence for the Guards in Iranian politics. Ahmadinejad is himself a former Guardsman. He served a stint in the IRGC during the 1980s, working both as an army engineer and as part of the support team for a daring 1987 special forces operation in Kirkuk at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War.²⁰ Ahmadinejad maintained his contacts with the Guards following his active duty service, and Iranian military officials and families made up an integral part of his constituent base during his ascent to political power. And once Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency, he wasted no time rewarding his former comrades-in-arms richly.

Within a year, the IRGC racked up an estimated $10 billion in sweetheart deals and no-bid government contracts from the Iranian government.²¹ Within two, fully two-thirds of Iran’s twenty-one cabinet positions were occupied by members of the IRGC.²² By then, former Guardsmen and their sympathizers had taken over more than a fifth of the seats in the Majles, Iran’s unicameral parliament.²³ By 2010, the situation became even more of a monopoly, with Guardsmen staffing Ahmadinejad’s cabinet almost exclusively and occupying roughly a third of all parliamentary posts.²⁴ Observers likened this takeover to a “creeping coup d’etat,” in which Iran’s clerical elite slowly became overshadowed by its clerical army.²⁵

Over the past several years, Iran watchers have taken note of this trend.²⁶ So, belatedly, have administration officials. In September 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged the changing center of gravity within the Islamic Republic when, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, she described Iran as having transformed into “a military dictatorship with a . . . sort of religious-ideological veneer.”²⁷ But this realization did not contribute to greater clarity in Washington about how to respond to the Iranian regime’s rogue behavior.

That behavior, meanwhile, has intensified, commensurate with the IRGC’s power. The IRGC today is a global strategic force, and one that is currently active in virtually every region of the world.

The power of the Guards begins with its grip on the regime’s strategic capabilities. This includes the Islamic Republic’s arsenal of ballistic missiles—an arsenal which is growing rapidly. The centerpiece of that effort is the Shahab-3, a medium-range missile unveiled publicly more than a decade ago. In recent years, the Iranian regime has expanded the range, accuracy, and payload of the Shahab-3 and its variants, and today this class of missiles is estimated to be nuclear-capable and possess a range of between 900 and 1,200 miles, putting all of Israel, the north of India, and parts of Eastern Europe within striking distance. Indeed, Iran is now the most formidable missile power in the Middle East, according to U.S. intelligence-community assessments.²⁸ And these capabilities are just part of a much larger picture.

In 2005, Iran became the first space-faring nation in the Muslim world when it successfully launched a surveillance satellite into orbit from the missile base in Plesetsk, Russia. Since then, the Iranian regime has racked up a number of additional successful space launches. While these efforts appear to be civilian in nature, the potential military applications cannot be ignored, because the same rocket booster used to place a payload into low Earth orbit can be married to a two-stage ballistic missile to create one of intercontinental range. Iran, in other words, is building the capability to shift rapidly from being a regional missile power to being a global one, with the power to hold at risk Western Europe and beyond.

The control exercised by Iran’s clerical army extends to the regime’s nuclear program as well. When Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, he rolled back Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s ambitious plan—sketched out during the 1970s—to make Iran a nuclear power, citing it as un-Islamic in nature. But the Islamic Republic’s devastating loss to regional rival Iraq during the subsequent eight-year Iran-Iraq War—and international assistance to the Iraqi war effort during that conflict—helped convince Iran’s ayatollahs of the need to revive the country’s nascent atomic drive. As a result, by the late 1980s, Iran’s nuclear plans were back on track, with the IRGC firmly in charge of their progress.²⁹

So it has remained. Today, it is believed that if hostilities arose, the IRGC would “have custody over potentially deployed nuclear weapons, most or all other chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons,” and the ability “to operate Iran’s nuclear-armed missile forces if they are deployed.”³⁰ That means, as a practical matter, that no nuclear deal is possible which does not meet with the IRGC’s approval—something that represents a complicating, and perhaps insurmountable, obstacle to the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West.

Iran’s clerical army is also a significant naval power. Over the past several years, in keeping with its vision of itself as a global player, the Iranian regime has bolstered its ability to project military power abroad. This has included major upgrades to both its conventional navy, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN), and its clerical counterpart, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), with significant results.³¹ According to intelligence analyst Steven O’Hern, the IRGCN now totals some 18,000 men, making it a “force equal in size to the Iranian Navy,” and this force is in operational control of “all of Iran’s missile boats and land-based anti-ship missiles.”³²

A decade ago, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was able to shut off tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical naval waterway through which one-fifth of global oil transits, for brief periods of time.³³ Since then, concerted investments by the Iranian regime have made its maritime forces even more capable. They have also made Iran’s clerical army more adventurous on the high seas, something that was demonstrated in dramatic fashion in March 2007, when the IRGCN captured fifteen British sailors off the coast of Iraq. The Iranian regime claimed that the sailors had strayed into Iran’s territorial waters—a charge that the British government disputed. But Iran’s seizure also put members of the U.S.-led coalition on notice that the Islamic Republic was assuming an increasingly aggressive naval profile in the Persian Gulf, a reality the United States and its allies will inevitably face in the years ahead.

This fact was hammered home in March 2014, when CNN reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was in the process of constructing a large-scale replica of a U.S. naval carrier. Regime officials at first dismissed the construction as simply a movie prop, but the true objective quickly became clear. In a subsequent interview with the official FARS News Agency, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, the commander of the IRGCN, confirmed that the mock-up was in fact a military target, and that it was necessary “because sinking and destroying US warships has, is and will be on our agenda.”³⁴

The IRGC’s most visible, and potent, presence, however, is that of its elite paramilitary wing, known as the Quds Force (IRGC-QF). While the larger Guards are preoccupied with everything from territorial defense to economic expansion, the IRGC-QF has been dedicated to a singular aim since its formation in 1990: carrying out the “extra-regional operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”³⁵ In other words, the IRGC-QF is the vanguard of terrorism and insurgency in the name of the Islamic Republic. And while the size of the force is small—just 10,000 to 15,000 men, less than 10 percent of the IRGC’s total forces of more than 125,000³⁶—it would be hard to overstate its contributions to global instability. The Quds Force is, quite simply, the purest expression of the Islamic Republic’s belief that it “plays a key role in world affairs as the standard bearer of revolutionary Islam and the guardian of oppressed Muslims (and even non-Muslims) everywhere.”³⁷

PIVOT POINTS

In September 1980, less than two years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fledgling regime found itself at war. The cause was an invasion by the neighboring regime of Baathist dictator Saddam Hussein, which sought to seize the advantage and strike an early blow against what it saw as an emerging ideological adversary. The resulting conflict lasted for most of the ensuing decade, and when it finally drew to a close in the late summer of 1988, the toll on Iran was enormous.

Officially, Iranian authorities estimated that they suffered close to 300,000 casualties as a result of the hostilities.³⁸ Western sources, however, put the figure at significantly higher: half a million souls, or more.³⁹ More than 500,000 others were physically or mentally disabled either during the war or in its aftermath.⁴⁰ In all, the conflict may have cost Iran as much as $1 trillion—a devastating economic loss to the fledgling regime in Tehran.⁴¹

Nearly as significant was the war’s psychological impact. Khomeini’s revolution gained popularity because its virulent version of insurgent Islam was a compelling alternative to the Shah’s secular and stale authoritarianism. Yet in their first military outing, Iran’s holy warriors were bested by a secular adversary. The conflict left the Islamic Republic deeply traumatized, but it also helped instill a sense of unity among Iran’s populace. Iraq’s aggression and the West’s support of Saddam Hussein during the conflict bred in Tehran the sense that it was alone against the world.⁴²

Nearly in tandem, the Islamic Republic suffered a major ideological crisis. Less than a year after the end of hostilities with Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini unexpectedly died of a heart attack, throwing his regime into partisan chaos. The resulting political tug-of-war led to the rise of a consensus candidate, the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also led many in the West to conclude that Iran’s revolutionary fervor had run its course, or that it soon would.⁴³ For much of the following decade, Western analysis was colored by this vision of a post-revolutionary Iran, one in which practical concerns and economic priorities trumped revolutionary zeal.⁴⁴

The message from Tehran, however, could not have been more different. In the aftermath of Khomeini’s passing, Iranian officials took pains to emphasize that the core tenets of Khomeini’s revolution—chief among them the ideal of “exporting the revolution”—remained in effect.⁴⁵ This priority, however, would be achieved more subtly than it had been in the past. Whereas the heady early days of the Islamic Republic saw the Iranian regime become a locus of global insurgent activities, following the Iran-Iraq War the Iranian regime gravitated toward a new way of war, one characterized by the use of proxies, an economy of violence, and an exceedingly long view of global competition.⁴⁶ This remains the strategy pursued by Iran’s leaders today.

MISREADING IRAN

Amazingly, most of this context is lost in contemporary political discourse over Iran. Precious few analysts of Iranian politics have bothered to read the formative texts that helped shape the behavior of the Islamic Republic. Fewer still are familiar with the history and strategic culture that continues to animate the Iranian state. As a result, the Beltway policy community is consistently caught off guard by the Iranian regime’s foreign adventurism and bankrolling of global terror, as well as by the scope of its international ambitions.

To be fair, not all branches of the U.S. government have been taken by surprise. In its inaugural report to Congress on Iran’s military capabilities, released publicly in the spring of 2010, the Pentagon noted that Iran simultaneously is seeking to ensure “the survival of the regime” and to “become the strongest and most influential country in the Middle East and to influence world affairs.” The Pentagon also pointed out that the Iranian leadership’s long-term “ideological goal is to be able to export its theocratic form of government, its version of Shia Islam, and stand up for the ‘oppressed’ according to their religious interpretations of the law.”⁴⁷

The Pentagon’s subsequent 2012 report on the subject said much the same thing. “Iran continues to seek to increase its stature by countering U.S. influence and expanding ties with regional actors while advocating Islamic solidarity,” it noted. “Iran also desires to expand economic and security agreements with other nations, particularly members of the Nonaligned Movement in Latin America and Africa.”⁴⁸

Yet, as U.S. policy moved steadily toward engagement with Iran’s ayatollahs, this assessment was progressively watered down. Thus, in keeping with the Obama administration’s change in policy focus, the 2014 edition of the Pentagon’s report on Iran’s military capabilities was minimalist in nature and said nothing at all about the Islamic Republic’s ideological objectives.⁴⁹ In that regard, it represents a more or less faithful reflection of the dominant view held by administration officials and supporters—these days, Iran is concerned above all simply with “regime survival.”⁵⁰

Iranian leaders, however, are thinking considerably bigger. That was the message Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sought to convey to officials in his government as recently as September 2014. In a meeting with members of the Assembly of Experts, the Islamic Republic’s premier religious supervisory body, Khamenei asserted that the existing international system is “in the process of change” and a “new order is being formed.” These changes, he made clear, are a mortal blow to the West and a boon to Iran. “The power of the West on their two foundations—values and thoughts and the political and military—have become shaky” and can be subverted, Khamenei insisted.⁵¹

Iran, in other words, is still revolutionary after all these years. And today, very much in line with Khomeini’s famous 1980 dictum that his regime must “strive to export our revolution throughout the world,”⁵² the Islamic Republic is pursuing a truly global agenda, one that is built around three primary fronts.

The first, and most immediate, is sectarian in nature. The Iranian regime views itself as the vanguard of the so-called Shia Crescent in the Middle East and the ideological champion of the interests of the beleaguered Shia minority in the Sunni-dominated Muslim world.⁵³ This outlook informs Iran’s ongoing sponsorship of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, its primary—and most important—terrorist proxy, as well as its backing of assorted Shiite insurgent groups in neighboring Iraq and Shia insurgents in Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere.

The second front is pan-Islamist. Iran’s leaders believe fervently that their regime is the natural ideological leader of the Islamic world and the rightful inheritor of the mantle of the Prophet Mohammed.⁵⁴ This conviction underlies Iran’s long-standing strategic rivalry with Saudi Arabia, Sunni Islam’s most important player—a contest Iran’s leaders see as one not only for strategic position, but also for ideological primacy. It is also what animates Iran’s repeated efforts over the past decade to goad the countries of the Middle East into a security condominium of its own fashioning, thereby becoming the region’s geopolitical center of gravity.

Finally, the Iranian regime has embraced the language of third-world populism, using it in its efforts to enlist countries in Latin America and Africa in a shared revisionist agenda on the global stage. The crux of this message was encapsulated in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September 2012 address before the United Nations General Assembly, in which the Iranian president called for the formation of a “new world order” as a substitute for the current domination of the “bullying” West.⁵⁵ It is a call that has resonated in many corners of the third world.

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger once famously remarked that Iran faces a choice of being “a nation or a cause.”⁵⁶ Today, Iran’s leaders believe that their regime can be both. Even as they engage in a dialogue with the West over their nuclear program, they are acting out that conviction.