Is Iran capitalising on Trump’s erratic policy decisions?
As a gush of reports and commentaries mark the 40th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, this week offers an opportunity to pause and reflect on its continuing repercussions and to see the regime in Tehran as it is, not as its international interlocutors wish it to be. Little did the people of Syria, for instance, know in 1979 that, one day in the distant future, their own hopes of toppling an authoritarian government would be ruthlessly crushed by forces unleashed by the Iranian revolution. Equally unaware were the people of Iraq of the disillusionment with multi-party political systems that would follow the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist dictatorship in 2003, thanks chiefly to the Iran’s meddling in its war-torn neighbour’s affairs.
From Lebanon to Yemen, a crescent-shaped region of the Middle East has seen Iran cynically exploit demographic shifts, political feuds and sectarian divisions of Arab countries to project influence far beyond its borders. That being said, the pain endured by their populations is of a piece with the agony of Iranians themselves, who see migration and exile as their only escape while unelected, unaccountable officials help themselves to the country’s oil money.
Efforts from time to time by Western leaders to gently nudge Iran’s rulers to change their revolutionary mentality and confrontational approach have produced few quantifiable results other than their agreement in 2015 to halt work on nuclear enrichment. Only time will tell whether the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal and re-impose sanctions targeting Iran’s oil sector and financial transactions will achieve more success.
Sporadic attempts by brave Iranians to bring about a soft regime change through the ballot box and peaceful protests have been foiled by hardliners, who can count on the brute force of militias raised to preserve the regime in perpetuity. For their part, the conservatives, who are bound by ties of loyalty to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have used the clerics-guided democratic system as a safety valve to let off public anger periodically while keeping control over the main levers of state power.
Names and faces have occasionally reached the headlines and the public consciousness, embodying the hopes and aspirations of a frustrated population, only to fade away from memory. Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi
Karroubi, two reformist candidates in that election, remain under house arrest, 10 years on. Reports from Tehran say they have been allowed to leave their houses once a week and visit a friend or a family member in recent months. Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer who took up pro bono cases of dissident figures, lives in exile in the UK, despite being the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the face of it, Iran has outgrown its habit of mounting terrorist operations abroad. The 1984-85 attacks in Paris, allegedly the handiwork of Iranian agents and Hezbollah, led to 20 deaths and 255 wounded. The 1991 assassination near Paris of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar was blamed on Iranian agents. In actual fact, the credit for fewer terrorist strikes with Iran’s fingerprints all over them in recent years probably goes to increased surveillance and intelligence sharing by foreign governments, not any change of heart in Tehran. As recently as June last year, a coordinated operation between French, German and Belgian services thwarted a planned bomb attack at a rally near Paris organised by an exiled Iranian opposition group.
By all accounts, Iran’s leaders are hoping to capitalise on President Donald Trump’s odd mix of hawkish rhetoric and erratic policy decisions, notably the Syria military withdrawal. In addition to their regional Shia allies and proxies, they also have powerful liberal-progressive friends in Europe and the US: former Secretary of State John Kerry, for one, has not denied suggestions he has advised the Iranians to wait out Trump until there is a Democratic president again.
By contrast, Ebadi does not want the West to wait out the rule by a supreme clerical leader. The omens, though, are not good. Having lasted 40 years, the Iranian regime probably sees itself as young by the standards of the rise and fall of nations. And if the Paris attack plot, the low-intensity conflict between Israel and Iran in Syrian skies, and the Houthi-led proxy war in Yemen prove anything, it is that Tehran’s political operatives exist in a parallel universe where the revolutionary past is never dead.
The credit for fewer terrorist strikes with iran’s fingerprints in recent years goes to intelligence sharing by foreign governments