Rene — Still Dreaming of Tehran
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on Rene — Still Dreaming of TehranStill Dreaming of Tehran
The Nation
April 12, 2004
BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & LAURA ROZEN
The Bush Administration’s hawks and their neoconservative allies at
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and The Weekly Standard are
engaged in a high-risk and high-stakes effort to restore their fading
power in Washington by pressing for a confrontation with Iran. It’s no
secret that the neocons’ star has fallen since the war with Iraq. The
intelligence scandal plaguing the White House and the ongoing crisis
in Iraq itself can both be laid at their doorstep, and it’s widely
believed that President Bush’s re-election team would dearly like to
extricate the President from the Iraqi tar baby.
But the neocons aren’t giving up, and they are trying to pull the
White House in even deeper. Not only are they undeterred by the chaos
in Iraq, but they are pressing ahead to advance their regional
strategy, one that calls for regime change in Iran, then Syria and
Saudi Arabia. Says Chas Freeman, who served as US Ambassador to Saudi
Arabia during the first Gulf War and a leading foe of the neocons, “It
shows that they possess a level of fanaticism, or depth of conviction,
that is truly awesome. There is no cognitive dissonance there.”
What makes the neocon strategy on Iran especially risky is that with
Iraq teetering on the brink of civil war, neighboring Iran has
significant clout inside Iraq, including ties to various Iraqi Shiite
factions and a growing paramilitary and intelligence presence. If Iran
chooses, it can help ease the daunting task that the United States
faces in trying to put together a sovereign Iraqi government. But if
it seeks confrontation, it can help spark an anti-US revolt in
southern Iraq, home to most of Iraq’s Shiite majority. In that case,
nearly all analysts agree, the American occupation could be
overwhelmed.
Leading the charge against Iran is AEI’s Michael Ledeen, perhaps best
known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the
mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra. Supporting Ledeen’s
position are two other AEI fellows: Richard Perle, the ringleader of
the neocons and a former member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy
Board, and David Frum, a Weekly Standard/ /contributing editor and the
former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase “axis of evil.”
In their new book,/ /An End to Evil, Perle and Frum call for a covert
operation to “overthrow the terrorist mullahs of Iran.” Speaking to
retired US intelligence officers in McLean, Virginia, in January,
Ledeen called Iran the “throbbing heart of terrorism” and urged the
Bush Administration to support revolutionary change. “Tehran,” he
said, “is a city just waiting for us.”
Ledeen is viewed skeptically by many experts, including at the State
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. “Ledeen doesn’t know
anything about Iran,” says Juan Cole, a professor at the University of
Michigan who is an expert on the Shiites of Iran and Iraq. “He doesn’t
speak Persian, and I believe he has never been there.” But Ledeen does
have connections in the Iranian exile community. For the past two
years, he has maintained a relationship with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the
Iranian wheeler-dealer who worked closely with him in
Iran/contra. Ledeen introduced Ghorbanifar to a key neoconservative
official, Harold Rhode, a longtime Pentagon staffer who speaks Arabic,
Farsi, Turkish and Hebrew and who until recently served in Iraq as a
liaison between the Defense Department and Ahmad Chalabi. Rhode and
another Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, have been talking to
Ghorbanifar about options for regime change in Tehran. “They were
looking at getting introduced to alleged sources inside Iran, who
could give them some inside information on the struggles in Iran,”
said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism
chief. Ghorbanifar, he said, was spinning tall tales about alleged
(but unsubstantiated) transfers of Iraqi uranium to Iran’s nuclear
weapons program.
Rhode and Franklin were critical players in the campaign for war
against Iraq. In 2002 they helped organize the Pentagon’s Office of
Special Plans, the Iraq war-planning unit whose intelligence staffers
are now under investigation by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence for allegedly manipulating evidence about Iraq’s
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism. Both
the OSP and the Rhode-Franklin effort on Iran were run out of the
office of Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and
a key neocon ally. Their initiative on Iran reportedly drew a sharp
protest from the State Department. Newsday quoted a US official who
said that the entire effort was designed to “antagonize Iran so that
they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy
against them.”
There is widespread disagreement about both Iran’s intentions in Iraq
and the extent of its capability to cause mischief there. But there is
a consensus that Iran can exercise significant power. It has close
ties to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose
Badr Brigade paramilitary force of about 10,000 was trained by Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard, and to the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, a
30-year-old Shiite firebrand. “There are thousands of Iranian
intelligence agents and operational agents inside Iraq today, and the
border is completely open,” says Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on
Iraq.
So far, analysts say, Iran has chosen to play a waiting game. Ken
Katzman of the Congressional Research Service says that Iran “views
its interest to play it low-key, to keep a low profile and continue to
promote a cohesive Shiite bloc in Iraq in order to be in a position to
become dominant once the United States leaves.”
The “realists” inside the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul
Bremer in Iraq, are well aware that Iran could deal a fatal blow to
the already faltering US efforts. Partly as a result, they’ve engaged
in a quiet dialogue with Tehran. According to the Financial Times,
last May Iran offered a “road map” for normalizing US-Iranian
relations. Since then, Powell and his allies have sent assistance
after the devastating earthquake in southeast Iran, and offered to
send a delegation led by Senator Elizabeth Dole. They’ve also
supported efforts by Germany, France and Britain to work a deal with
Iran over its nuclear weapons program. (Germany’s intelligence service
also brokered a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah, which
is close to Iran.) But of late, some of those conciliatory efforts
have stalled. A planned Congressional staff delegation to Tehran, the
first since the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in 1979, was
canceled by the Iranians, according to the office of Senator Arlen
Specter, whose staff was to participate. And after the initial
harmony, signs are emerging of a serious split between Washington and
Europe over Iran’s nuclear program, with echoes of the US-Europe split
over Iraqi WMD.
How the differing approaches–the neocons’ war cries and the realists’
more conciliatory strategy–are viewed by Iran’s leadership is
anybody’s guess. But there are at least several factors that might
push the Iranian ruling elite in the direction of the confrontation
the neocons want. First, the hard-line clergy are in the midst of a
crisis with the so-called reformists. In the past, the mullahs have
used anti-US rhetoric, and even militant actions, to trump liberal and
reformist rivals. Second, while Iran welcomes the rise of Shiite power
in Iraq, it is at the same time uneasy about losing influence to the
mullahs in Najaf and Karbala. According to several experts on Shiism,
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is now the leading Shiite cleric in the
world, which could make him a rival to Iran’s less prestigious
clerics. Though Sistani has foiled US policy in Iraq by insisting on
direct elections, he has refused to denounce the US occupation and may
cooperate with a UN-brokered compromise for creating an Iraqi
government. “Sistani is a double-edged sword for Iran,” says Juan
Cole. And third, there is the Bush factor. Some neoconservative
strategists argue that Iran will act decisively in order to prevent
Bush from being re-elected. Raymond Tanter, a scholar at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank,
predicts, “They are going to launch a political-military campaign in
an effort to defeat President Bush, because they believe that if Bush
is re-elected, he will do to them what he did to Iraq.”
It’s unclear that Iran would risk a confrontation with the United
States in Iraq even if the mullahs do believe that they are next on
Bush’s invasion list. But the mullahs are famous for misunderstanding
US politics, just as Americans have failed repeatedly to understand
Iran’s.
In a way, the neocons’ Iran project is very similar to the early phase
of their Iraq one. It includes a steady drumbeat of threats and
warnings, Washington lobbying, a media offensive and support for exile
groups–in Iran’s case a mishmash that combines supporters of
Khomeini’s grandson; Reza Pahlavi, the son of the fallen Shah, and the
Iranian monarchists; and the Mujaheddin e-Khalq (MEK), a 3,800-strong
exile force based in Iraq. In one of the strangest events ever to
occur at a Washington think tank, last September Khomeini’s
grandson–dressed in rough-hewn black and brown robes and crowned by a
turban, with dark brooding eyes like his grandfather’s–took the
podium at AEI, introduced by Michael Ledeen, to call for US assistance
to overthrow the Iranian government. He even welcomed an alliance with
the Pahlavi monarchists.
Many analysts view the prospects of a Pahlavi-Khomeini-MEK alliance
with exceeding skepticism. And they note that the neocons, having
bungled Iraq, don’t have a lot of credibility left on Middle East
policy. But it would be wrong to count them out. A former CIA officer
who took part in the debate over Iraq policy in the 1990s recalls how
the neocons ultimately prevailed. “The neocons had this idea of
working with the Iraqi opposition to arm and train them and to
overthrow Saddam Hussein, and people like me said, ‘That is really
stupid,'” he says. “But you get people to think about it, you get the
President engaged, then options expand and then when opportunities
come along, you seize them. That’s what they did. They got people to
buy in. Before September 11, people told them, ‘It’s never going to
happen.’ Come September 12, the rules changed.” An explosion in Iraq,
and some Iranian mischief there, and the rules could change again.
Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing editor of The Nation.
Laura Rozen is a journalist who covers national security issues from
Washington (lkrozen@yahoo.com ).
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i040412&s=dreyfuss