Mideast Wars Trilogy: Iran

Mideast Wars Episode IV:  No Hope

The true conflict between the US and Iran can be traced back to the post-WW2 era.  At the time, Iran’s government was a monarchy led by Mohammed Reza Palavi (the Shah), the second and final ruler in the Palavi dynasty.  As with most monarchies, the people were happy, especially if your definition of ‘the people’ consists of those close to the monarchy and foreign governments that held economic interests in the natural resources of Iran.  The British held a concession which granted them permission to drill for oil in Iran.  The concession was held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which would go on to become BP.

The oil concession to the British was an increasing source of contention within Iran.  Under the concession, Iran received 20% of profits from oil drilling activities within the country.  The weakness of the Iranian deal with the British was highlighted in 1950, when Iran’s neighbors and long-time frenemy, Saudi Arabia, received a concession from the US guaranteeing a 50/50 split of oil profits.

The inferiority of Iran’s deal led to the election of Mohammed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister on a nationalist platform in the Iranian Majilis (Parliament).  Up until that point, the Majilis and Prime Minister did not have real power and were subject to the discretion of the Shah.  Mosaddegh, used his popularity to transform the power of the Prime Minister.  Under Mossadegh, the Iranian government transformed from monarchy with a toothless parliament to constitutional democracy with a toothless monarchy, subordinating the Shah to more of a figurehead role.  With the British unwilling to renegotiate their oil concession, Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil in 1951, which reduced the British stake from 80% to 0%.
Britain, fresh-off nationalizing its own banking (1946), coal (1947), railway (1948) and steel (1949) industries, could not sit idly by while Iran nationalized their oil.

Mideast Wars Episode V:  The Empire Strikes Back, or Again

Rather than reacting with their world famous ‘stiff upper lip,’ the British got mad.  As will become a theme in international relations with Iran, they reacted like a high school ‘mean girl’ saying you can’t do business with me or any of my friends, as their friends looked on sheepishly agreeing.  Britain embargoed Iranian oil exports and barred allies with the technical skills on oil extraction from traveling to the country.  As a result, Iran was unable to extract oil, and the economy did poorly.  The British went further and tried to recruit the US to get involved.

When the British complained to President Truman, he suggested that they go back to Iran and renegotiate a 50/50 split on the oil concession.  So, like an angsty teen that is told no by one parent, they waited for their other parent to arrive home to ask the same question, hoping to get a different response.  When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, the British came back with the same complaints, but this time, also used the ‘C word’ that made all men of that era blush… Communism.

Eisenhower enlisted the help of his Secretary of State and Director of CIA, brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles, both of shitty airport and shitty person notoriety.  They brought on Kermit (the) Roosevelt, Grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, to overthrow the Iranian Democratic government and reinstall the Shah’s dictatorship.

As can be seen by the pictures above, these men were likely chosen for their ability to fill out the diversity quotas of ~0.0% in the Eisenhower administration.

Kermit led the operations for the CIA on the ground in Iran.  Being an international spy was significantly less rigorous back then.  Kermit spoke no Persian (Farsi) and almost blew his cover several times by yelling his own name after missing shots while playing tennis at the Turkish Embassy in Tehran.¹

With the economy falling apart from the lack of oil revenue, the CIA was able to throw together a misfit group of street performers and street thugs, led by a guy named Shaban ‘the Brainless’, to overthrow the Mosaddegh government and reinstall the Shah.²  After the coup initially failed, the Shah and his wife flew themselves out of the country to Iraq.  But, Kermit rallied back a few days later and successfully overthrew the government.

The Shah triumphantly returned after running away, and his government was reinstalled.  While one might guess that he was totally cool about being ousted from power by Mosaddegh, he wasn’t.  The next 25 years of his rule was an awkward combination of forced liberalization and westernization of culture, dubbed the ‘White Revolution’, mixed with an increasingly authoritarian rule.  This was made possible by training provided to the Shahs secret police (SAVAK) by the US CIA.

The Shah used oil to fund a grandiose vision of Iran as a Western country with a large modern military.  From 1950-1976, Iran spent $110bn on weapons from the US.  This equates to ~$1.0 trillion in current dollars or ~25% of Iranian annual GDP at the time³.  For context, NATO requires members to spend 2.0% of GDP on defense, which most nations fall short of.  In-order to fund this, Iran helped triple the price of oil that the US and other importers paid between 1972 and 1976.  With Iran jacking up the price of oil that it sold to the US in-order to fund its military purchases from the US, this fed into the inflationary clusterfuck which was the 1970s.

When the Shah was deposed in 1979, it was driven by a motley crew from four segments of the population: student activists, merchants, Marxists, and clerics.  The White Revolution alienated students, who naturally rebelled against its increasing authoritarian nature, the merchant class, whose businesses struggled to keep up with inflation and taxes from its high spending, Clerics who felt displaced by its secular focus, and Marxists who disliked the increasing opulence in society.  Within this group, student activists, merchants, and Marxists are groups that are normally natural enemies with each other.  Their basic ideals run counter to each other, especially for merchants and Marxists.  Their only common bond was hatred of the Shah.⁴  Clerics were the only group that were not natural enemies of the other groups and were the best internally coordinated and organized.  Therefore, clerics consolidated power in the revolution and emerged as the dominant group.

Mideast Wars Episode VI:  Return from the Jeddah / Getting Back to the Fundamentals(ist)

(Note:  The Ayatollah was not in exile in Jeddah, a city in Saudi Arabia, he was mostly in Iraq…  but I very much wanted to use this title)
Ruhollah Khomeini was a popular cleric, exiled during the Shah’s rule for speaking out against the Iranian relationship with the US.  As backlash for the westernization that had occurred under the Shah, Iranians welcomed Khomeini back and adopted his vision of government, called Vali-ye Faqi.  Under Vali-ye Faqi, the government would be overseen by a religious authority.  As a lucky coincidence, Khomeini just happened to be qualified for this role and became Supreme Leader and Ayatollah of Iran.

Under Vali-ye Faqih, the Ayatollah installed full-on Sharia Law, which had strict and literal adherence to Shia Islam.  As with literal interpretations of most religions, this had negative consequences for homosexuals (capital crime), dissidents (capital crime) and women (lost the right to vote, divorce and had to cover their hair)⁵.

Following the Ayatollah’s rise to power, the bloodletting that occurred was massive.  There are no reliable statistics on how many dissidents and political prisoners were killed, but estimates range from thousands to tens of thousands.

After the Shah was deposed, he traveled to the US for cancer treatment.  The Iranian Government demanded the US extradite the Shah to stand trial and execution in Iran.  Iranians, aware of the American involvement in the coup of Mossadegh and the CIA training of SAVAK, thought the US was planning to reinstall the Shah.  When the US refused to extradite the Shah, a group of militant Iranian students broke into the US embassy in Tehran and took 66 diplomatic and civilian staff members hostage for 444 days.  While no hostages were killed, they were treated poorly, physically abused and mentally tortured by the student guards.  The US public would not have known about US involvement in Iran until the 1990s and thought they were being singled out because Iranians hated them.

The Iranian Government was initially not involved in the hostage crisis but soon took a more active role because they enjoyed making President Carter look impotent.  Carter’s inability to get the hostages home was the final nail in the coffin of his four-year presidency.  Iran returned the hostages on Reagan’s first day in office.  After the hostage crisis, the US and Iran officially broke diplomatic ties, which ultimately meant that both countries had one less asshole using diplomatic license plates to triple park in the streets.

Sensing turmoil after the revolution, Saddam Hussain launched a military offensive into Iran in 1980.  What ensued was 8 years of trench-like warfare in the style of WW1, with an estimated ~500k Iranian and Iraqi soldiers killed.  While the war started out as an Iraqi offensive excursion into Iran, Iraq’s attempt at a ceasefire in 1982 was rebuffed by Iran, leading to another 6 years of bloody stalemate until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1988.  Saddam, at the time, was not the kindhearted benevolent dictator we have all come to know and love.  He fought the war using chemical weapons (for real this time) and targeted civilian populations in cities.  In response, Iranians started attacking Iraqi oil exports, including Kuwaiti ships they suspected of carrying Iraqi oil.

The US began to intervene on the side of Iraq with logistical and intelligence support.  While it might seem like an odd choice, given we chose Saddam’s side, keep in mind that at the time, Iran was still holding US hostages, and the US government didn’t want to tell the US public why Iran hated us, so it would have been politically infeasible to side with Iran.  Also, there was a military conflict going on in the world, so it wasn’t like the US could just not pick sides or get entangled in some way.

Concerned that Iran would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint in the Persian Gulf in which 25% of the world’s oil supply must pass, and Iran’s most effective tool to irritate the entire world, the US increased its naval presence in the Persian Gulf.  With an increased naval presence in the region, in 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook Iran commercial Air Flight 655 for a potential military aircraft on the attack and shot it down, killing all 290 civilians on board.  To fully make up for this tragedy, the US apologized in 1996, 8 years later.  It also wasn’t a heartfelt apology, more like a sorry for the inconvenience or miscommunication type of one.

However, a half-hearted apology is better than none at all, because even though it might lack proper attrition for a transgression, there is at least an inherent admission of responsibility.  Iran, for their transgressions, have taken a different approach: ‘deny till you die.’  Iran has conducted their transgressions in the same way the rich avoid taxes, through offshore subsidiaries that obfuscate their true ownership.  Iran’s preferred organization for this is a group named Islamic Jihad, the former military arm of Hezbollah⁶.

Islamic Jihad, who are surprisingly not as friendly and approachable as their name would indicate, came to prominence after the US sided with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war.  In 1983, Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a pair of suicide attacks on the barracks of US and French peace keeping forces in Lebanon that killed 305 victims.⁷

In 1994, Islamic Jihad blew up a Jewish community center in Argentina, killing 85 civilian victims.  While Iran has denied responsibility, Argentinian investigators believe it was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a former Hezbollah leader, which also killed his wife, son and four others in his motorcade.  Argentina was also targeted because they pulled out of a nuclear technology transfer agreement with Iran in 1992, after Islamic Jihad bombed the Israeli Embassy in Argentina killing 29 civilians.

Iran’s nuclear aspirations have been at the heart of conflict with the West since the late 1990s.  While the US has had bilateral sanctions on Iran since 1995, the EU joined in on Iranian sanctions in 2010, in response to Iran’s expanding nuclear program.  These sanctions were eased in 2015, when the US, UK, France, Russia, China, Germany, and Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) under which Iran would fall into compliance with nuclear regulations, in return for the easing of sanctions.  The JCPOA signed under Obama was ripped up by Trump in 2018.  Similar to the British in 1950, Trump played the role of high school ‘mean girl’, reimposing sanctions on Iran, saying you can’t do business with me or any of my friends, this time with the British and EU looking on sheepishly.

The current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who has been in the position since the Ayatollah’s death in 1989, has the same power as the Ayatollah on paper.  But, as time has passed and revolutionary fervor has faded, he must be more careful about how he uses his authority.  Unlike the Ayatollah, Khamenei cannot claim to have been installed under popular mandate of the people.  If he circumvents the will of the people or what is left of the democratic process too much, there are enough pockets of power within the population and government to overthrow him.

While the Military, Judiciary, Legislative, and Executive branches of the government report to the Supreme Leader, Iran does still have presidential elections.  To say that Iranian elections are rigged is a misdiagnosis.  While the system is rigged, because the Supreme Leader disqualifies candidates that are not favorable enough to the conservative religious establishment, elections of the remaining candidates have been relatively straightforward with high voter turnout.  The major exception to this was the 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the holocaust-denying ultra-conservative president from 2005-2013, whose reelection was widely viewed as rigged.  Reactions to the fraudulent election sparked the Green Revolution, which almost toppled Khamenei’s government.  In the 6 elections that have occurred since 1997, the candidate favored by the Supreme leader has only won two times (33%), including the rigged 2009 election.

The Supreme Leader has learned from his mistakes in 2019.  In the upcoming election, instead of rigging the vote, Khamenei has disqualified more candidates than ever, including all the top reformist.  The result is that the Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s hard liner Chief Justice, is leading in the polls by 60% and voter turnout is set to drop to 36%.⁸

Conclusion:

By clearing the way for Raisi to the Presidency at the same time as reengaging with the West in sanctions relief negotiations, the Supreme Leader’s actions indicate not only that he wants Raisi in office, but also that he wants to set Raisi’s presidency up for success by improving the economy.  At the same time, the Supreme Leader is 82 and it is widely believed that he underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 2014.  It is logical that Khamenei is setting Raisi up for success to groom him to become the next Supreme Leader.

Raisi’s prior experience was as one of the main judges who sentenced political prisoners to death following the revolution.  He lacks the charisma of the Ayatollah and the revolutionary pedigree of Khamanie.  The low voter turnout shows how he is being force fed to Iranians.

Post WW2 colonialism set the stage for Iranian’s current difficulties, but domestic forces have filled the vacuum of leadership that is indifferent to the people’s well-being.  Shortly after the revolution, the Ayatollah responded to a question about the economy by saying, “Economics is for donkeys, the revolution was carried out for Islam, not so our people can eat melon.”⁹  What is telling about this Iranian ‘let them eat cake (melon)’ quote is that the Supreme Leader doesn’t really care about the secular well-being of the people.  In fact, the Supreme Leader is incentivized to keep Iranian’s poor, not poor enough to revolt, but poor.

Since sanctions have been reimposed, GDP has declined ~4%-6% annually while inflation runs at ~30%.  If this continues, the Supreme Leader faces a likely uprising.  At the same time, religious oversight of government does not mesh well with broad economic prosperity.  When people are prosperous, they want increased freedom to spend their money, often-times in non-religious ways.  The likely goal of the Supreme Leader is to keep the Iranian people in a Goldilocks zone of poverty.  Therefore, if sanctions are removed, Iran will adhere to a deal only long enough for the people to get some economic relief.  However, once the economy levels off to a better place, the Supreme Leader will get sanctions reimposed, likely by restarting the nuclear weapons program.

The juxtaposition of the hope from sanctions relief and the bitterness of an increasingly rigged election serves as a reminder that domestic and international forces are playing a game of whack-a-mole with Iranian’s hopes.

Sources:
The above article did not rely on first-hand sources.  It was written using common knowledge about events as well as anecdotes, not conclusions unless footnoted, from historical accounts:
“The Oil Kings” by Andrew Scott Cooper
“All the Shahs Men” by Stephen Kizner
“The Brothers:  John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War” by Stephen Kinzer
“Iran Rising” by Michael Axworthy
“The Black Wave” by Kin Ghattas
“Revolutionary Iran” by Michael Axworthy”