Perfect storm engulfs Iranian moderates as conflict fears escalate
Donald Trump’s coup illustrates just how split the US and Europe are over handling rogue states
THE bearded young man looks stoically into the camera, his impassive expression betraying no fear as his captor prepares to commit a televised murder.
It is a scene horrifically familiar to anyone who was shocked by the Jihadi John videos – and Mohsen Hojaji’s murder had no less of an impact in his home country of Iran when he was murdered by Isil terrorists last year.
But for many Iranians, the 25-yearold from Isfahan is more than just another victim of Isil. Hojaji was a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps fighting in Syria, and the government has used his bravery and his portrait to galvanise support for the country’s military embroilment that now threatens to spiral into an all-out war with Israel and the West.
“I want to send a message to all governments, to the United States and Saudi Arabia, and all of the governments who are in power, that there are a lot of Hojajis,” said a bullish man The Sunday Telegraph met in March, who was using a portrait of Hojaji to raise money for Yemeni and Syrian refugees. “That they will support the people in places like Syria and Yemen.”
While Iran says it is fighting a war on Islamist terrorist groups, Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia suggest it is really engaged in aggressive empire building.
Israel has bombed Iranian assets in Syria several times in recent weeks, and on Thursday tensions exploded when Iran allegedly fired rockets at Israeli army positions in the Golan Heights. At least 11 Iranians were killed in a series of air strikes Israel launched in response, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday. Iran has denied launching the rocket attack.
As the costs of the seven-year war in Syria mount, the strain on the home front is beginning to tell. Iran is reeling from high unemployment, inflation and a devaluing currency.
In December and January, the country was swept by violent protests as largely working class crowds took to the streets to decry ongoing economic stagnation. One of their demands was for the government to stop wasting money on foreign wars.
The US decision to rip up the Iran nuclear deal and re-impose sanctions threatens to reverse even the modest economic gains that president Hassan Rouhani’s reformist government had promised to justify the deal.
“My friends aren’t even talking about protests any more, they’re talking about emigrating,” said Mohammed, a student from Tehran who asked for his surname not to be used. “It seems hopeless now. Before we thought protests would do some good. Now we fear it will only bring the fall of Rouhani and bring back the hardliners into power.”
Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, yesterday began a whirlwind diplomatic tour to China, Russia and Brussels in a bid to hammer out an agreement to save the deal. He said he wanted guarantees that the trade and economic benefits brought by the nuclear deal would be protected.
Mr Zarif is part of the reformist milieu surrounding Mr Rouhani and has been called a traitor by hardliners for championing the nuclear deal. The collapse of the deal and the resulting economic hardship could fatally discredit the government – and for hawkish Iran critics in Jerusalem and Washington, that may be precisely the intention.
“Benjamin Netanyahu won’t mention regime change publicly, but in private he talks about how sanctions can exacerbate the already difficult situation of the Iranian economy and bring the regime in Tehran to its knees. Perhaps even to replace it,” said Anshel Pfeffer, a correspondent with the Israeli paper Haaretz and the author of Bibi, a biography of the Israeli prime minister.
Champions of that approach object to the idea that undermining Mr Rouhani will empower the hardliners who support the very nuclear programmes and military escapades the US and Israel say they want to end.
Ultimate power in Iran, they argue, lies not with the president but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.
It is he and Qassem Soleimani, the general who commands Iran’s elite Quds force, who are believed to have the ultimate say over the nuclear programme and its military activities in Syria. And it is far from clear that they have had enough of the costs of war.
Iran is estimated to have lent $4.6billion (£3.4billion) to the Assad regime and to have spent some $16billion on propping up allies across the region.
Israel is hoping that the prospects of mounting losses will convince Mr Khamenei and Mr Soleimani to back off from further confrontation. Thursday’s clash with Israel brought Iran closer to an all-out conventional conflict than at any time since the Iran-Iraq war.
Unlike that war, the conflict in Syria is comfortably distant and Iran’s casualties have been by comparison negligible. But in the minds of the hardliners, the sacrifices of that devastating conflict may be all the more reason to double down. “Iran is in a perpetual state of mourning about that war. They don’t want to be taken advantage of or found weak again,” said Holly Dagres, editor of the Iran Monitor website.
How do you cope with rogue states whose leaders defy international law and spread destruction? This is the most urgent foreign policy question of our time and the West seems incapable of formulating a unified response to it – which is scarcely surprising since the chief motivation of those lawless states is to destabilise Western alliances. Creating discord and division in what used to be called the “free world” is not an accidental byproduct of this aggression: it’s the whole point. So what does a country like Iran stand to gain from this? Domination of the region presumably, but at what price? Can its leaders or its people really expect to take on the opprobrium of the great global powers indefinitely?
A number of factors have probably inclined them to think so – including the rapprochement with the United States under Barack Obama and the enthusiastic support of an increasingly dauntless Russia. Because the problem with Iran is, of course, really the problem with Putin’s Russia, the facilitator of that Iranian bellicosity which Obama’s “peace deal” was designed to control if only in the very limited sense that it would prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons for a few years, after which all bets were off.
Nobody at the time – not even Mr Obama – described the deal itself as any sort of long-term (or even medium-term) solution. It did nothing to address the immediate problem of Iran as the chief sponsor of terror both in the region and the wider world, nor – as has been widely noted – did it do anything to prevent the development of ballistic missiles which might carry the nuclear warheads that the country would be free to create as soon as the nuclear moratorium was ended by the deal’s own sunset clause. Everyone knew from the off that the Iranian nuclear agreement would do nothing more than buy a little time, but time for what? What exactly was the plan? This is where the division between the US and Europe comes in. The American idea was, to put it at its most optimistic, that Iran’s young, educated and (remarkably) pro-Western population would make use of this period to propel their country into modern ways of thinking: the rise of a supposedly more moderate leadership, combined with a less threatening posture toward the world, could permit a gradual change of political culture. Add to this the greater prosperity that would come with the lifting of sanctions and the release of seized assets and – with one miraculous bound – Iran might enter the club of respectable trading nations to everybody’s benefit.
It didn’t work out that way. The money that poured into the Iranian government’s hands was not spent on improving the quality of its people’s lives or on spreading prosperity, but on arms and missiles which could be deployed in Syria and – to particularly horrible effect – in Yemen. Instead of liberalising and modernising social conditions within its borders, Iran concentrated its energies on increasing its military interventions and its terrorist sponsorship of Hamas and whichever proxy groups served its regional ambitions. So much for idealistic American hopes. But it is important to note that there was another raft of consequences to the Obama agreement which benefited Europe more directly and which now largely accounts for the rift between the Western allies over Trump’s aggressive stance: France, Germany and the UK have a huge stake in the trade possibilities that were suddenly made available with Iran. If the Trump administration does what it seems to be threatening to do and levies sanctions on any company (or country) that continues to trade with Iran, the economic effects could be devastating for Europe, laying waste to industrial sectors which were counting on contracts already negotiated as well as any future ones that might have been on the cards.
On this side of the Atlantic, the Obama deal was not so much a visionary model for peace in the Middle East as a stupendous business opportunity. Obama may have had a romantic dream of dramatically defusing hostilities in the Middle East but for Europe – which was deeply committed to economic globalisation and expanding trade – the philosophy had become rather more practical: “Make money, not war.” To be fair, this was not entirely a cynical selfinterested view: the possibility of transforming Iran from an outlaw state to a rule-following trading partner with Nato countries could certainly be seen as a gesture of genuine friendship towards its people who have become more and more discontent with their own isolation.
To return to the question then: what do you do with rogue states? Do you bankrupt them with sanctions and hope that pauperisation will cause their populations to rise up and demand change? Do you intimidate them with superior military force via proxies in the region? Or (the Obama and European favourite) do you attempt to bribe them with friendly trade agreements which offer the possibility of mass prosperity? The dividing lines are now unmistakeable: the Trump White House is going for the first of these options with unremitting gusto, and encouraging potential helpers like the Saudis to join with it on the second. Most (but not all) of the European governing class is still adamant in embracing the third.
In truth, none of this confronts the real dilemma: behind all this chaos and gratuitous mayhem are the endlessly inventive machinations of Putin’s Russia which, in the throes of its existential crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is determined to create a role for itself as the great manipulator. Everything – including the largely irrelevant Palestinian problem – is grist to that mill. And the more Donald Trump tries to drag America (which is, for quite different reasons, in the midst of its own collapse of confidence) back from involvement with the world, the greater the vacuum that will be left in which Putin can operate. Welcome to the new world order.
‘Russia is determined to create a role for itself as the great manipulator. Everything is grist to that mill’