Dr Marwan Kabalan
The whispers of Tehran can no long hide how determined the leadership is to seize a historical opportunity granted by a US president to reach a nuclear agreement. A deal that will break the siege and legitimise the regional role that Iran seeks.
However, in order to understand what is going on in the minds of Iranian decision-makers, one has to ignore the statements of the hawks in the Revolutionary Guards. Instead, we should focus on what the Supreme Guides in Washington say as they become aware of the importance of the political influence provided by the American system.
Hosted by the ‘Great Satan’
In Washington, a former Iranian official runs a public relations campaign that reflects Iran’s confused behaviour when talking about its efforts to fix relations with the West, and with the United States in particular.
Ambassador Sayed Hassan Mousavian — a professor at Princeton University who previously served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Iranian National Security Council and was a member of the Iranian delegation in nuclear negotiations between 2003 and 2005 led by President Hassan Rowhani when he was Secretary of the Board — has recently been lecturing and publishing articles in the Western media promising a new era of cooperation between Tehran and Washington if the Obama administration proceeds with a final nuclear agreement.
Mousavian’s articles were posted on the Monitor website and appeared in Guardian newspaper. He has stressed that the nuclear agreement will open the door to US-Iranian cooperation in terms of launching a war on the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. He warned that without such cooperation Washington will not be able to defeat IS, because Iran is the only regional power capable and willing to send troops to confront IS, especially since Washington is reluctant to deploy ground troops in the region.
Mousavian noted that at a time when the US is bombing IS sites in Iraq, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and affiliated Iraqi militias are fighting IS on the ground in Tikrit, Karma, Al Baghdadi and other areas of Iraq. All it needs is direct coordination to get the best results.
Mousavian, who is treated in Washington as if he still occupies a position of responsibility, given his closeness to the decision-makers in Tehran, and whose statements are direct messages from the Supreme Leader, stresses the need for Americans to understand the significance of fatwas (religious rulings) issued by the Supreme Leader on political or religious issues.
He says the Obama administration should seriously consider the fatwa issued by Ali Khamenei few years ago declaring that developing a nuclear weapon is unlawful, and warned that doubting the statement of the Supreme Leader in this regard is an insult and a sign of ignorance.
The Supreme Leader is the deputy of the Mahdi (the absent imam), Mousavian said. Hence, his fatwas influence Iran’s policies. The fatwas are not abrogated by his death, and nor do they become outdated by his departure, and the system remains committed to the fatwas, because the imam has the right to determine what is in public interest, and he may put the fatwas ahead of anything else, including Quranic texts.
Khomeini’s ‘fatwa’
Mousavian highlights the Iranian tendency to override any ideological and religious issues if they are not in the interest of the regime, in line with the famous fatwa issued by the founder of the republic and the commander of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini.
A few months before his death in 1989, Khomeini sent a letter to the president of the republic and to the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in which he said, “If there is a conflict between the regime’s interest and Quranic text, the imam has the right to support the former over the latter.”
Since the outbreak of the revolution, Iran’s relations with Washington have not been practical. Before his victorious return to Tehran, Khomeini received at his residence in Paris former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, who had been sent by then president Jimmy Carter.
Clark told Khomeini of Washington’s willingness to recognise the revolution and to resume shipment of US weapons that had been bought during the Shah’s rule, provided he maintained friendship with America.
The shipments were resumed and the level of communication between the two parties was also raised, which was clear from a meeting between Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the first Iranian president after the revolution, Mehdi Bazargan, in the Algerian capital. But this convergence was stalled after a conflict emerged between the different wings of the new system, which led to the storming of the US embassy in Tehran.
In his book Living by the Sword: America and Israel in the Middle East, Stephen Greene writes about the agreement reached between the team of US presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and the revolutionary government in Tehran.
The agreement said that Iran would delay the release of the American hostages until after the results of the presidential election, so Carter did not benefit from the momentum of his success in securing their release. That was in return for promises by Reagan to Tehran that he would resume, if he won, arms exports to Iran; and that is what happened later as weapons were sent over through Spain.
At the peak of the war with Iraq, Iran was in urgent need of spare parts for its American weapons. For more than three years Iran had been getting weapons from the US via Israel in exchange for aiding the release of American hostages in Lebanon.
US arms shipments to Tehran did not stop until the Irangate scandal rocked the Reagan administration in 1986. All communication between Tehran and Washington was cut until 1990, when Iran announced that it would be neutral in the war to liberate Kuwait, although it could not hide its joy on seeing the Americans destroy the Iraqi army that had forced Iran to “drink the cup of poison” in August 1988.
In 1993, Iran-US contacts were renewed because of the war in Bosnia, where American aircraft transferred Iranian aid and volunteers via Turkey to help Bosnian Muslims in the face of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs. But this communication stopped with the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995. Afterwards, the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 caused a setback in emerging communications between the two countries, with Washington accusing Iran of being behind the attack.
Khatami’s move
Mohammad Khatami came to power in 1997 and, in August 1998, gave an interview to CNN in which he expressed his admiration for the American people.
The Clinton administration replied, with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issuing a statement that sounded like an apology “for the suffering that Iranians were subjected to for reasons that could be related to the policy of the United States of America.”
It seemed that relations between the two countries would return to normal, but strong resistance from conservatives in Tehran and Clinton’s preoccupation with the Monica Lewinsky scandal prevented that.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Iran was one of the first countries to condemned the attacks and offer help to Washington in fighting terrorism. When President George W Bush decided to invade Afghanistan, Iran provided logistical assistance, including allowing US aircraft to use its airspace and transfer weapons to the Northern Alliance, which opposed the Taliban regime.
Iran contributed to the Berlin conference on Afghanistan in 2002, which laid down the formula for the current regime in Kabul. Similarly, Iran decided to assist in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime when it allowed tens of thousands of Badr Corps fighters, who follow the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and fighters of the Dawah Party to enter Iraqi territory and help the coalition forces control Baghdad.
Tehran also played an important role in preventing any resistance to American expansion in areas under its influence.
In 2003, after a few months of US occupation of Iraq, Tehran offered Washington a comprehensive deal to settle all regional and bilateral issues between the two countries. The details of the Iranian proposal were published in the New York Times in October 2005.
However, the Bush administration, ecstatic after its rapid victory in Iraq, turned down the offer, and “rewarded” Tehran for its “valuable assistance” in Iraq and Afghanistan by including it among the “axis of evil” countries.
Thanks to the military efforts of Washington, Tehran got rid of its main enemies on its eastern and western borders. In the meantime, the US project in Iraq and Afghanistan was faltering, which contributed to the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
However, Ahmadinejad pushed hostility to Washington to an extreme, which harmed Tehran with regard to the nuclear issue and regional and international politics. The Iranian leadership realised this late, and decided to let Rowhani and his team manage the rudder, with less excitement and ideology and more pragmatism.
This new behaviour is apparent in the way the nuclear talks have been managed, and promoted in Washington by a university professor and diplomat who is aware of the tools of American political influence and is armed with the commandment of the imam on the primacy of national interest.
The author is a columnist and academic researcher
