Iran's Deadly Ambition (3 page)

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.”
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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 (Sep
h-e P
sd
r
n-e Enqel
b-e Esl
mi), 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.