Shafaq News/ AT A FEB. 2021 meeting of the Munich Security Council, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “America is back.” The question is: America is back “to do what?”
For Iranians, the question is especially salient. “America is back” should mean respect for Iran’s sovereignty and an end to the fear mongering of past decades. Additionally, President Biden should clearly affirm what American and Israeli intelligence agencies have been saying for years—that Iran has never wanted to build a bomb and has never been a threat to the United States, Israel or its regional neighbors.
America’s “big stick” policies have not achieved the regime change many in the Washington establishment have been hoping for. Unfortunately, few among them question the efficacy, let alone the morality, of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran. What right, for example, does the United States have to overthrow governments, dictate, threaten, and assassinate leaders, bomb, invade, and destroy lives and eco-systems in a region it knows only in terms of the energy resources it provides?
America’s forever-sanctions-war has taken its toll on Iran, but it has not produced the changes Washington has desired. A major reason is that, unlike other countries in the Middle East, Iran is not the product of British or French colonial plans or a military coup. It is one of the world’s oldest, proudest and abiding civilizations, which has endured all manner of attack over its 7,000-year history.
To remedy its foreign policy failures, Washington must take account of its own history with and failed policies toward Iran and reevaluate its current alliances and strategic partnerships in the Middle East.
Such an accounting would reveal that U.S. interests have been poorly served by U.S. animus toward Iran, and that America has more in common with Iran than with most countries in Southwest Asia. Because of its regional stature, Iran could provide Washington with the meaningful assistance it needs in tackling its difficult impasses in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and in Palestine-Israel, as it did by providing valuable assistance on al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The ideals of Iran’s 1979 revolution have yet to be realized. The Islamic Republic has been under continued attack since its inception and yet it has survived despite all obstacles the U.S. and its allies in the region have thrown its way. After millennia of monarchy, Iran has formed a republic with a written constitution and regularly held parliamentary and presidential elections. Iran’s government is unprecedented in the Islamic world.
The Biden administration has thus far displayed the same imperial attitude and lack of historical insight that has brought about America’s disastrous history with Iran; a history that first derailed with an ill-fated decision in 1953, and continues to haunt both countries to this day.
With British urging, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. It set the stage for Washington’s future acts of trickery and malign behavior and for Iran’s continuing mistrust of the United States.
With the defeat of Mossadegh’s democratic government, CIA coup plotter, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., reported to Washington that the shah had been “safely installed” back on the Peacock Throne. Before leaving Tehran, Roosevelt met with the shah. Raising his glass in a toast to Roosevelt, the shah remarked, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!”
The prime minister was arrested and hauled before a military tribunal. There he uttered the words that resonated with Iranians then and now: “I have had only one objective, and that was for the people of Iran to control their own destiny and for the fate of the nation to be determined by nothing other than the will of the people...” He continued, “I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”
The shah loyally executed U.S. interests until 1979 when millions of Iranians brought down “America’s shah” to, in Mossadegh’s words, control their own destiny.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution—the most consequential of the 20th century—inspired hope for political transformation and has changed the balance of power in the region.
One of Washington’s greatest fears was the power of the ideology born of the revolution, particularly through the messages of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founding father of the Islamic Republic. His calls for Shi’a-Sunni unity with entreaties such as, “The Muslims must be a united, single fist, none can rise up against them,” echoed across the Islamic world, much to the consternation of Arab dictators in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The political and economic power of a unified Middle East, inherent in the Ayatollah’s rhetoric, much like Mossadegh’s 26 years earlier, was not lost on the United States.
America’s intense anti-Iran policy, already on the rise after the revolution, intensified with the seizure, by Iranian students, of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of 52 American hostages from November 1979 to January 1981.
The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) further deepened Iran’s distrust of the United States. Although Iraq started the war, President Ronald Reagan decided that it would be in America’s interests to help Saddam Hussain defeat Iran. The U.S. provided financial and military assistance to the Iraqi regime, including dual-use technology that allowed Iraq to make chemical weapons.
Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers was met with a muted response from Washington. Although Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces and civilians, Ayatollah Khomeini specifically prohibited the production or use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
In March 1984, the U.S. State Department issued the following statement:
“While condemning Iraq’s chemical weapons use…The United States finds the present Iranian regime’s intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations….” The statement was more condemnatory of Iran than Iraq. However, by 1991, Iraq had lost favor with Washington after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.
Containing Iran and Iraq became the official policy of President Bill Clinton. Using Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Clinton’s “dual containment” policy objective was to isolate both countries politically, economically and militarily. It was a policy underwritten and supported by Israel and its lobby groups, including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank funded by AIPAC and its supporters.
To garner international support for harsher additional sanctions, the U.S. and Israel accused Tehran of sponsoring terrorism, pursuing nuclear weapons and of being a “rogue state”—a narrative that has become uncontested doctrine.
Washington’s efforts to destabilize Iran have been ongoing. The U.S. Congress authorized millions of dollars for covert operations in the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1996 and the Iran Freedom Support Act of 2006.
U.S. perfidy was clearly reflected in President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address when he included Iran among his “axis of evil” countries. The slight was particularly confounding to Iranians because they had been working with the U.S. to help establish an interim government in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion of that country in October 2001.
In a 2003 proposal to Washington, which later came be known as the “grand bargain,” Iran offered to discuss several issues of concern to both countries, including willingness to accept full transparency of its nuclear program.
Iranians were stunned by Bush’s refusal to even reply to Tehran’s proposal. Instead, he launched an unprecedented financial war intended to drive Iran out of the global economy.
RAPPROCHEMENT MOVES
In 2015, it seemed that rapprochement was finally possible. President Barack Obama had managed to conclude a nuclear agreement despite the relentless machinations of war zealots in Congress, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Although it had no nuclear weapons, Iran agreed to the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which included more restrictions and intrusive monitoring than other states with nuclear programs or weapons.
The JCPOA was the most important pact between the United States and Iran since 1979. But in 2018, entrenched U.S. anti-Iran institutional forces proved more powerful than the word of President Obama. Israel and its American supporters applauded President Donald Trump’s unceremonious withdrawal from the agreement and his efforts to bring the Iranian economy to its knees.
For over five years, the U.S. has been punishing Iran for a nuclear weapons program that does not exist.
Despite Trump’s 1,000 crippling sanctions, Tehran abided by the terms of the agreement. That changed in January 2020 when Trump ordered the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani. When he boasted about his murder and conspired with Israel to assassinate yet another nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020, Iran ramped up its uranium enrichment level to 20 percent, where it was before the accord.
Iranians believe that a double standard exists for them. The world, for example, continues to be outraged by the brutal murder, in 2018, of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the orders of de facto Saudi ruler, Mohammad bin Salman.
The U.S. murders of Soleimani and Fakhrizadeh did not prompt the same outrage, although both were in violation of international law and could be considered an act of war.
For over 40 years, the U.S. has used Iran as a foil to maintain its primacy in the Middle East. The country has been under constant attack because of its refusal to acquiesce to U.S.-Israeli plans for the region. This, not Iran’s nuclear program, is the actual reason for America’s hostility toward Iran.
Israel has successfully hyped Iran as a nuclear danger to the Jewish state. However, if Iran were to at-tack Israel using nuclear weapons, it would not only kill Israelis but the Palestinians Iran supports. It would also obliterate Jerusalem and other sites sacred to Islam and Iran. This would be an illogical and inconceivable act by the Islamic Republic.
Like all nations, Iran has a right to defend itself. U.S. provocations and threats from regional neighbors have forced it to pursue a defensive security posture. Although Tehran has not drawn on nuclear weapons for security, it may have to decide that nuclear weapons would be a safeguard from the “axis of evil” it confronts at its doorstep—the U.S., Israel and Gulf Arab regimes. Furthermore, Iran deserves a guarantee that if it reenters the JCPOA no change of government in Washington will abrogate it.
America has spent enormous financial, political and military energy trying to eliminate the Islamic Republic, to no good end. Since it was President Trump who unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear agreement in 2018, the onus is on Washington to reenter it without preconditions. By reentering the JCPOA, President Biden could begin the process of undoing the damage that America’s adversarial policies have caused Iran over many decades.
The United States has yet to understand that if it wants to achieve any of its objectives in the region; it will need Iran as a strategic partner, not apartheid Israel or Arab strongmen. An equitable U.S.-Iran partnership could be the ballast America needs if it intends to play a more visionary role in the Middle East.
Source: Washington Report for Middle East Affairs