Quietly Rooting Against Saddam

Iran’s attitude toward the war in Iraq reflects a similar dualism. Last month, I joined about 30 Europeans, Arabs, South Asians, and two other Americans here for a seminar on the Persian Gulf sponsored by the Iranian foreign ministry’s think tank. The meeting, predictably, was dominated by discussion of the coming war in Iraq and its consequences for the region. The Iranian analysts and foreign ministry officials I spoke to combined a clear-eyed assessment of the war’s dangers and regional impact with a bizarre sense of what drives American policy and how Iran might gain from the upcoming conflict.

It is noteworthy that Iran, unlike every other Middle Eastern nation, was not wracked by large antiwar demonstrations in the weeks before the fighting. Iranians hate Saddam with a passion, and fear him as well, leading them to view the American war as a way for Iran to get rid of a major headache without having to do the work itself. When asked at the public conference about the lack of street protests against the war, former diplomat Kazem Sajjadpour replied that Iranians were not inclined to show support for Saddam when Iranian veterans were still dying in hospitals from Iraqi chemical attacks suffered during the 1980-1989 war.

Indeed, at times Iranian officials were at pains to demonstrate that the Islamic Republic did not support a war, notwithstanding the government’s behavior. Iran declared early on its attitude of “active neutrality” (a step beyond the country’s “passive neutrality” in the 1991 Gulf War). Iran hosts the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the main Iraqi Shia opposition movement, and has encouraged SCIRI to participate in State Department-sponsored meetings of the Iraqi opposition. The Islamic Republic is also cooperating with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to aid fleeing Iraqis, and has set up new refugee camps along its border.

Yet the Iranian government also obscures any private glee over Saddam’s upcoming demise with regular condemnations of American policy. A comical example of this head-of-a-pin dance took place at the conference’s opening session, when Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi laid out Iran’s plan for a diplomatic solution to the standoff. Saddam, he said, should voluntarily open the political system to all communities and factions and hold a referendum on a shift to democracy. One of the first questions asked by the press, naturally, was whether Kharrazi had presented this new initiative to the Iraqi government. He admitted that he had not done so, nor did he have any immediate plans to. As we filed out of the lecture hall, the European diplomat next to me chuckled. The Iranians, he noted wryly, love to put forward initiatives that are dead on arrival.

Frustrated foreign ministry officials later told me that Kharrazi had discarded his staff-prepared text that morning and substituted this odd proposal after several phone conversations with the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The awkward diplomatic initiative apparently resulted from the leader’s need to square the obvious Iranian preference for regime change in Baghdad with the necessity of opposing American intervention in yet another next-door neighbor.

Iranian analysts clearly hope that the Iraq war might presage a new pragmatism and create possibilities for resolving longstanding U.S.-Iranian differences. One Iranian scholar noted U.S.-Iranian cooperation in the run-up to the war, and suggested that such tacit cooperation as was witnessed during the Afghanistan campaign, if repeated now, might bear fruit in repaired U.S.-Iranian ties. Judging from my experience, both Iranian civilians and the foreign ministry’s career diplomats yearn for rapprochement with the United States.

But any real improvement in relations would require addressing the issues at the core of American concerns: Iran’s support for terror groups and its alarming nuclear program. Continued Iranian support for Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, along with the newly exposed Iranian determination to master a full nuclear fuel cycle, are real and troubling issues for the United States, ones with even greater salience since September 11. And with respect to these core issues, Iranian thinking becomes almost delusional. The realism evident in Iranian attitudes toward the invasion of Iraq is matched by fantastical views about the sources of America’s Middle East policy and the prospects for U.S.-Iranian relations in the wake of the war.

Iran’s main worry, judging by the flood of queries I received on the subject, is whether, after the forcible regime change in Baghdad, Tehran is next on the target list. The United States would, of course, prefer a fully accountable, pluralistic Iranian government to the existing intolerant theocracy. But Iran’s political structure, truth be told, is not the feature of the Islamic Republic that ranks it among the Axis of Evil. And Iran’s foreign policy elite either cannot or will not face up to America’s chief concern: the sponsorship of terrorists avowedly hostile to the United States by a regime that spills bile about America as a “Great Satan,” while its centrifuges are busy enriching uranium.

These otherwise bright and savvy Iranian foreign policy experts, rather, sidestep the problem of Iran’s external behavior and the threat it poses to American interests by holding to the same conspiracy theories and ideological preconceptions that dominate Arab opinion of American foreign policy: that it is held hostage to a warmongering coalition of neoconservatives and southern evangelicals; that the United States’ determination to overthrow Saddam is a greed-driven imperial plot to control regional oil deposits and reestablish Anglo-American dominance of the Persian Gulf; and that the war in Iraq is a plot hatched in Tel Aviv to serve Israel’s security interests.

The Islamic Republic’s leaders are therefore convinced that the United States is out to get them, as well, and they are consequently seeking means of deterrence. They seem to think that the outcome of the Iraq war will give them strong cards to play in this regard. But ironically, and perhaps tragically, the Iranian government seems to see advantages in precisely those issues that give American policymakers the greatest concern.

One well-connected analyst I spoke to lamented the senior clerical leadership’s dogmatic support for Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups. He suggested that, rather than revolutionary ideology or aspirations for regional influence, the driving force behind this policy was the elite leadership’s concern for self-preservation. In his analysis, the small group at the top of the Islamic Republic believes that support for Hezbollah can be used as a bargaining chip against direct U.S. interference in domestic Iranian politics. In reality, this is exactly backwards, for the regime’s support of terrorism heightens American hostility and increases the likelihood of confrontation. Indeed, the United States has given no indication that it is willing to buy off state sponsors of terrorism. And if Iran attempts to wield such support as a playing card by, say, ratcheting up the violence in southern Lebanon, the country is likely to feel a quick and unpleasant backlash from an American administration determined to repay a “blood debt,” in Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s words, to Hezbollah.

The conflagration in Iraq will undoubtedly shift the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor. But whether that shift is ephemeral or longlasting will depend on how wisely Iran plays its cards. The odd misperceptions that seem to shape Iranian thinking–that its troublesome overseas engagements are a source of strength rather than a vulnerability, that the United States is of a mind to make bargains over support for international terrorism, and that the American government, while held hostage to Israeli interests and bent on regional transformation, is nonetheless likely to improve relations with an Iran unwilling to modify its behavior–suggest that the Islamic Republic is likely, as it has in the past, to overplay its hand.

Tamara Cofman Wittes is a Middle East specialist at the United States Institute of Peace. The views expressed here are her own.