Iran's Deadly Ambition (10 page)

By all indications, the ploy worked. In the wake of the conflict, Hamas obtained a new lease on political life, proving to wealthy Gulf donors (like Qatar) that it remains an indispensable part of the resistance against the Jewish state. Perhaps most significantly, it also succeeded in mending fences with Iran.

Even prior to the Gaza war, relations between Hamas and Tehran had begun to move toward rapprochement. In the spring of 2014, negotiations between Hamas and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, while failing to bridge differences over Syria, did manage to establish a
modus vivendi
in which Hamas would again garner Iranian support. Thereafter, Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani announced that Tehran was poised to resume financial support for Hamas, and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, agreed to meet with Khaled Meshaal, the movement’s political chief, in Tehran.
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But the summer 2014 conflict brought the two sides closer still. Hamas had once again proved its worth as a core element of the “axis of resistance” arrayed against Israel. Iran, for its part, saw in a rejuvenated relationship with Hamas “an opportunity to improve its standing in the Islamic world, which had suffered—especially among Sunnis—thanks to its steadfast support of Assad.”
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As a result, the strategic partnership between Iran and Hamas is now back on track—and the likelihood of a future conflict between Israel and an unrepentant, strengthened Hamas is high.
⁴⁵

Iran’s stake in the Palestinian Territories is far larger than simply Hamas, however. It dates back to the early 1990s, when the Islamic Republic—championing resistance against the “Zionist entity” as an alternative to the Oslo Process then being pursued by the West—took on a leading political role in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
⁴⁶
It did so via two primary vehicles. The first was Hamas, with whom Tehran signed a formal accord codifying cooperation in 1992
⁴⁷
—an arrangement that would endure until the two sides fell out over Syria. The second was the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a smaller yet equally radical Palestinian group that was wholly beholden to Tehran for its existence, depending on the Islamic Republic for its entire budget (some $2 million annually).
⁴⁸

By a decade later, that influence gave Iran a major voice in Palestinian politics—and a deciding vote in violence against Israel. In the early 2000s, one Israeli analyst estimated that Iran (via Hezbollah) was responsible for “no less than 80 percent” of terrorism directed against the Jewish state in the Palestinian Second Intifada (2000–2005).
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Similarly, Israeli officials at the time judged that Iran had succeeded in assuming “control” of terrorism carried out by various Palestinian factions against Israel.
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Israeli officials attempted to stem the tide of this support, with some success. In October 2002, Israeli forces seized the ship
Karine A
in the Red Sea, interdicting 50 tons of Iranian arms destined for the Palestinian Authority’s dominant Fatah faction, ruled by Yasser Arafat. The incident was the most public of a series of Israeli military successes preventing Iran from playing more deeply in the Palestinian arena. But Arafat’s death in 2004 and the subsequent (and somewhat unexpected) parliamentary victory of Hamas in the winter of 2006 provided the Islamic Republic with greater strategic reach throughout the Palestinian Authority.

Yet Iran’s predilections clearly rested with the Palestinian Authority’s Islamist opposition. Although Tehran had been a historic backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), regime officials understood full well that Ramallah’s rulers balanced their support against the on-again, off-again Middle East peace process. Thus, when peace talks broke down, as they did in 2000, Arafat’s Fatah faction became more than eager for Iranian support in the form of both money and arms. But when peace negotiations resumed, as they did later that year, the Palestinian Authority’s relationship with the Islamic Republic cooled considerably. As a result, Iran devoted the lion’s share of its attention and support to building a “rejectionist front” of radical groups committed to violent struggle against the Jewish State.

It did so in three principal ways. The first is political support. Iranian officials agitated in favor of Palestinian violence as the most practical way by which to eliminate Israel. Therefore, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei backed “total armed resistance” to demolish the “Zionist regime,” and other regime representatives announced their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
⁵¹

The second is funding. Historically, the Iranian regime has been a major source of funding for Hamas. The exact figures remain a point of contention, but Western intelligence services and experts estimate that direct Iranian aid to Hamas ranged from $20 and $50 million annually during the 1990s and anywhere between $3 million and $18 million a year as of the mid-2000s.
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And while Tehran temporarily slashed its financial assistance to the terror group over Syria, those ties are now on an upswing. According to terrorism expert Avi Jorisch, “Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, which began in earnest in early July 2014, has brought Hamas and Iran closer and we are now witnessing a significant re-establishment of bilateral relations.”
⁵³

Finally, Iran helps arm disparate Palestinian factions, increasing their destructive and lethal potential, and thereby their threat to Israel. Not all of Iran’s shipments have gotten through defensive measures; for example, in March 2011, Israel’s military captured the German-owned vessel
Victoria
, and in March 2014, the Panamanian-flagged
Klos-C
was seized in the Red Sea.
⁵⁴
Nevertheless, at least some of the Israeli efforts to prevent Iranian arms from finding their way into Palestinian hands have been unsuccessful: the Israel-Gaza War in 2014 showcased a broad array of Hamas-wielded weaponry that had been either developed or delivered by the Islamic Republic.
⁵⁵

By these methods, Iran has consistently tried to terrorize, destabilize, and undermine the state of Israel. It is a goal shared broadly by Iran’s leaders. Former Iranian president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have generated a firestorm of controversy when, in 2005, he famously called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
⁵⁶
But Ahmadinejad’s pronouncement was of a piece with Ayatollah Khomeini’s original directive that “Israel must be annihilated,” and it tracked closely with similar sentiments expressed repeatedly by Iran’s current supreme leader. In other words, they were the norm rather than the exception. They reflect the enduring animus that Iran feels for Israel—a hatred that the Islamic Republic has nurtured and perpetuated via the Palestinian arena.

IRAQ’S NEW OWNER

Qassem Soleimani is a quiet, devout man—a humanitarian and populist with a warm smile and a shy demeanor. That, at least, is what the Iranian government would have the world believe. In October 2014, Iranian-regime media initiated, or at least tacitly approved, a social-media campaign aimed at demystifying and popularizing the man heading its campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group in Iraq.
⁵⁷

The truth is a good deal more sinister. Soleimani is the long-serving head of the Quds Force, the shadowy elite paramilitary unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Quds Force, with an estimated strength of 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers, functions as an asymmetric tool of Iranian influence and strategy. According to the U.S. military, the Iranian government uses the Quds Force “to clandestinely exert military, political, and economic power to advance Iranian national interests abroad.” It does so through a wide array of activities, including “gathering tactical intelligence; conducting covert diplomacy; providing training, arms, and financial support to surrogate groups and terrorist organizations; and facilitating some of Iran’s provision of humanitarian and economic support to Islamic causes.”
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All this makes Soleimani, in the words of scholar Michael Ledeen, one of Tehran’s top “terror masters.”

He is also the most powerful strategic operator in today’s Middle East. As the
New Yorker
’s Dexter Filkins detailed in a September 2013 expose, during the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Soleimani became the man in operational control of a vast covert campaign on behalf of the Iranian government aimed at co-opting Iraq’s various political factions and bleeding the U.S.-led coalition.
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So complete was Soleimani’s control that he reportedly put General David Petraeus, the incoming head of U.S. forces in Iraq, on formal notice that he controlled “the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.”
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Iran’s multipronged strategy, put into motion shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, was both extensive and intricate. It included, among other things, the co-optation of various Iraqi politicians; political and material support to both Sunni and Shiite militias; massive infiltration of Iranian paramilitary forces and proxies into Iraq; and provision of a wide spectrum of lethal weaponry (including improvised explosive devices) to Iraqi insurgents fighting the coalition.
⁶¹
The geopolitical goals of this effort were clear. “Iran has a robust program to exert influence in Iraq in order to limit American power-projection capability in the Middle East, ensure the Iraqi government does not pose a threat to Iran, and build a reliable platform for projecting influence further abroad,” a 2008 study by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point explained.
⁶²

This need was particularly acute several years ago, when, as a result of military action in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-led coalition was ensconced in countries both east and west of Iran. That pressure has abated somewhat in light of America’s 2013 withdrawal from Iraq and its unfolding exit from Afghanistan. However, the need for strategic breathing room—akin to the concept of
lebensraum
(“living space”) that animated Hitler’s Third Reich in its quest for European
territory—still animates Tehran’s political involvement in Iraq today.

Iran’s policy is likewise driven by another factor: spiritual legitimacy. The most important figure in Shia Islam is not Iran’s supreme leader, as Iranian officials would have the world believe. In 1989, Iran’s current head of state was nothing more than a midlevel ayatollah, and his meteoric rise to power was much more a function of bitter factional infighting between rival power circles in Tehran than of his religious authority.
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Unlike Ayatollah Khomeini, who wielded unquestioned authority as both Iran’s spiritual leader (
marja taqlid
) and its political head (
rahbar
), Khamenei is a leader with a great deal less legitimacy and power. Indeed, in terms of spiritual identification, he is eclipsed by a number of senior clerics within Iran itself. Most notably, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was known to have been a spiritual follower of Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, a radical cleric from the Iranian holy city of Qom, rather than of Khamenei.
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But no religious figure poses a greater challenge to the legitimacy of Khamenei specifically, and the Islamic Republic more broadly, than Ali al-Sistani, the 84-year-old cleric who serves as the grand marja of seminaries in Najaf, Iraq. Sistani, a grand ayatollah, is unquestionably Iraq’s most senior spiritual figure. He also adheres to the traditional, “quietist” worldview that sees Shiites as separate and abstaining from temporal politics. This is fundamentally at variance with the Iranian government’s activist political ethos, which views Shiism as an insurgent political strain of Islam and itself as a vanguard of the so-called Shia Revival.
⁶⁵
Therefore, Iran’s consistent attempts to co-opt and subvert the Iraqi state are, at least in part, an effort to weaken alternative religious narratives that might challenge its ideological primacy.

Today, Iran is closer to this goal than ever before. With
Iraq’s government in continuing disarray, despite an October 2014 parliamentary election and a change of political leadership, and amid signals from Washington that sustained U.S. boots on the ground are simply out of the question in the fight against the Islamic State, Iran has emerged as what is perhaps the best long-term guarantor of Iraq’s security. As a result, Iran is now approaching its desired end state in regard to its western neighbor: a compliant, fractured Iraq that poses no danger to Iran’s security and status in the Islamic world.

CHAPTER

IV

Iran’s European Enablers

A
few years ago, it seemed as if the United States could learn a thing or two from Europe. In the late 2000s, even as the fledgling Obama administration stuck doggedly to its engagement policy toward Tehran, European capitals were rapidly heading in the opposite direction.

In November 2009, in a move that caused nothing short of a political earthquake on the Old Continent, a majority of the Dutch parliament formally voted to place Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the European Union’s terror list. The decision was in part a reaction to the Islamic Republic’s brutal crackdown on grassroots protests that followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial reelection to the Iranian presidency that summer—a move that sparked outrage among foreign observers. But it was also a policy broadside aimed squarely at the Iranian government’s rogue behavior.

The “IRGC is increasingly functioning as the most important instrument of the present regime,” the Dutch resolution noted. “[T]his organization has played a leading role during the bloody suppression of the recent popular protests and . . . is increasingly active in facilitating international terrorism, [including] support to Hamas, Hizbullah and anti-Western
militias in Iraq.” In response, it urged the Dutch government “to advance that the European Union places the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the European list of terrorist organizations.”
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