Israeli-Inspired U.S. Pressure May Backfire in Iran

By Andrew I. Killgore

"Israel is attempting to convince the United States that Iranian-inspired extremism and Iran's rearmament drive have become a major threat to the stability of the Middle East and the interests of the West."

—David Hoffman, Washington Post, March 13, 1993

Barely two years after David Hoffman wrote the words quoted above, Israel did convince the United States that Iran was a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the interests of the West. Or rather President Bill Clinton appeared to be convinced when on April 30 he announced an American trade embargo against Iran, charging that Iran's goal is to acquire nuclear weapons.

There is ample reason to doubt whether Clinton acted out of honest conviction. Newspaper accounts of the president's last visit to Moscow show that while he was at pains to persuade Russian President Boris Yeltsin that selling a nuclear reactor to Iran would further that country's alleged plans to produce the "bomb," he was unable to provide Yeltsin with a satellite photograph of an Iranian nuclear headquarters from which a nuclear weapons program might be directed. This was because, a New York Times article explained, no such center existed.

A second reason was supplied by Gary Sick at a recent Washington seminar. Sick, head of the Middle East section of the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter, cited a press conference remark made on July 18, 1994 by Secretary of State Warren Christopher that Iran was behind the destruction earlier that year of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. When the surprised Argentine foreign minister asked Christopher if he had any new intelligence report on the outrage, however, Christopher conceded that he had nothing new.

Perhaps the strongest sign of skepticism about Clinton's action is that neither Japan nor any of our European allies joined the embargo. Or perhaps, just possibly, if any do believe Iran plans to produce nuclear weapons, they do not agree that a trade embargo is the best way to dissuade Tehran.

The simplest explanation of Washington's anti-Iranian policy is domestic politics. Bill Clinton believes that he cannot be re-elected without overwhelming media and financial support from the Israel lobby and those who take their cues from it. Thus he and Warren Christopher are ready to "buy" Israeli exaggerations of the dangers emanating from Iran, whether they really believe them or not.

Israel's maneuvers with respect to Iran aim at a restoration of the 1972-1978 "golden era" of de facto alliance between Jerusalem and Tehran. This was inaugurated on May 23, 1972 by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was told in Tehran that he could buy all the American weapons he wanted, other than nuclear arms.

The simplest explanation of Washington's anti-Iranian policy is domestic politics.

With Iran appointed the de facto American surrogate in the Persian Gulf, Israel won profitable contracts there and Iran surreptitiously sold petroleum to Israel in defiance of the Arab oil boycott. Only a few years earlier, Israel had captured large Arab territories. Now effectively allied with Iran, and counting on the latter's old animosities toward the Arabs, Israel no longer needed to fear the preponderance in Arab manpower. The alliance also held out an exciting prospect that Israel would play a critical role in the marketing of petroleum from the Arab/Persian Gulf area, site of about two-thirds of the world's total known reserves.

President Clinton's Israel-induced U.S. embargo on trade with Iran, and the president's veto of a huge project by the largely American-owned Conoco oil company to develop Iran's offshore Sirri oil field in the lower Gulf (a project which the Iranians now have awarded to a French company) were first steps. They were to signal to Tehran that it could not escape its deepening poverty except by restoring cordial relations with Washington, and that such cordial relations were not possible until the present Iranian regime is replaced by one ready to do business with Israel. In other words, Iranians are supposed to conclude that the key to good relations with the United States can be found only in Jerusalem.

Iranian government analysts will wonder at the arrogance of the U.S.-Israeli scheme, given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous consequences for Iran of the earlier 1972-1978 alliance with the U.S. and Israel. Washington and Tel Aviv clearly forget that while the present Iranian regime is Islamist, Persians are first and foremost proud possessors of an ancient culture and legacy of empire that long predates Islam. They don't like to be pushed around.

Iran's Russian Enemy

In fact the 1972-1978 alliance was a reaction to the menace of an aggressive Soviet Union along Iran's northern borders. Russia always had been Iran's enemy. Russia wrested Soviet Georgia from Iran in 1813 under the treaty of Golestan. Then it grabbed Iran's last possessions in the Caucasus—Erivan and Nakhichevan—under the treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828. Then it tried in 1946 to seize territory in Iranian Kurdistan and Azerbaijan. That territorial grab failed only because President Harry Truman threatened military action unless the U.S.S.R. pulled its troops out of Iran.

So the Shah was justified, by fear of Russia alone, in becoming America's surrogate in 1972-1978. The close Iranian connection with the United States during that period assured Iran of U.S. support against further Soviet incursions.

Analysts in Tehran also could understand, as Persians, how the Shah wanted to use his alliance with Israel-America to further his dream of a greater Iranian role in the world. Striving for greatness was in the Persian culture.

Great Persian empires of the past, beginning with that of Cyrus the Great, from the 6th to 4th centuries B.C., had not been built by a retiring people.

The Pahlavi dynasty had failed because the family became corrupt and gradually lost touch with reality. The Shah's ambitions had been excessive and he was in too great a hurry. That is when the U.S. and Israel let Iran down. Neither the Americans nor the Israelis warned the Shah that he was going too fast, suggesting more concern for their own immediate interests and little concern for the long-term welfare of Iran.

The earlier alliance had irresponsibly supported a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq from 1972 to 1974. As the price of ending Iran's support for the Kurds, the impulsive and unpredictable Iraqi President Saddam Hussain was forced to share with Iran joint control of the Shatt al-Arab River where it forms the border between the two countries.

Saddam's attempt to undo this untenable concession, made under pressure, whereby Iraq lost undivided control of its only outlet to the sea, was a major cause of the disastrous 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war, in which Iran lost more than half a million killed. In that war America's interests eventually became clear. The United States would not permit any one nation, including either a monarchist or an Islamist Iran, to dominate the Arab/Persian Gulf and its oil. No one in Tehran today can forget that as the Iran-Iraq war seemed to be reaching its climax, the United States intervened decisively (by putting its flag on Kuwaiti oil tankers and then protecting them as if they were its own) to demonstrate it would not tolerate an Iranian victory.

Meanwhile, contrary to official U.S. policy, Israel had surreptitiously tried to help Iran by implicating the U.S. in massive Israeli sales to Iran of U.S. weapons and spare parts during the Iran-Iraq war. When this "Irangate" affair became public knowledge in 1986 it provoked a major scandal in America that might have resulted in the impeachment of a less popular president than Ronald Reagan. The U.S. media and Congress helped shield Israel from the fallout, but the Iranians learned something not to be forgotten from the entire affair. They saw that Israel could manipulate the U.S. political system seemingly at will, but that when clear American national interests were at stake, Israel's hold on the levers of power turned out to be fragile. Whatever Israel's desire, the U.S. was not going to permit Iran to defeat Iraq.

Tehran also will remember that the Arab world stuck by Iraq during the 1980-1988 war. Few Arab leaders liked or trusted Saddam Hussain, but they provided Baghdad with billions of dollars in financial support and millions of laborers, particularly from Egypt, to replace Iraqi soldiers at the front. Like the United States, the Arabs, who sometimes find it hard to work productively together, had no trouble combining forces and resources to prevent Iran from dominating the Gulf. To Iranians, therefore, Realpolitik suggested Iranian-Arab cooperation within an Islamic framework as the way of the future.

What Washington and Jerusalem forget is that Russia no longer touches Iran's borders. A historic sea change has eliminated that ancient threat. In fact, although Russia's 145 million population today is more than twice Iran's 60 million, projections by the Population Reference Bureau of Washington, D.C. indicate that Iran's population will reach 152 million within 30 years, while Russia's will have declined slightly to only 142 million.

Given Russia's present reduced circumstances, the United States may be able to pressure it into cancelling a sale of a nuclear reactor to Iran. But China also is there. It always has been a friend of Iran and it is too big to be bluffed by anyone. So nuclear reactors can be obtained from Beijing.

Rafsanjani's Thinking

Particularly lucid insights into the current thinking of Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani were shared by retired French ambassador and journalist Eric Rouleau with an audience at Washington's Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine last June 21. Rouleau, who spoke last year with Rafsanjani, described the Iranian leader's irritation with the U.S. campaign to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear reactors. Rafsanjani claimed, correctly, that the United States had not objected when the Shah had talked of building 10 nuclear reactors. Rafsanjani argued that, now as then, Iran needs nuclear power to save its very large natural gas reserves for export.

In answer to other questions, the Iranian president told Rouleau that Iran supported the Hezbollah (Party of God) in south Lebanon, but only because it resists a brutal Israeli occupation. When the Israeli occupation ends, Rafsanjani said, so will Iran's assistance to Hezbollah militants. The Iranian president rejected claims that Iran was helping Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist party in the Gaza Strip. That organization, Rafsanjani claimed, received all the help it required from Arab sources, and did not need anything from Iran.

It seems that America's Western and Asian allies are unwilling to follow an Israel-inspired U.S. embargo on Iran. Similarly, in the absence of a threat from the north, Iran's leaders seem uninterested in repeating the Shah's strategy of collaborating with Israel against the Arabs in exchange for an ephemeral American connection. History has demonstrated that this connection is not necessarily there when an Iranian government needs it, but only when American, not Israeli, national interests are threatened.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.