It is only now, almost 16 years since Obama first entered the White House, that his Iran policy is bearing its rotten fruit. It had two different faces: one perfectly reasonable, and one perfectly delusional.
The delusional part stemmed from the mistaken belief that the US could persuade the Tehran regime to abandon its “death to America” hostility. Perhaps because he relied on his law-school buddy Robert Malley (whose intense hostility towards Israel did not make him an Iran expert), Obama failed to see that, by the time he set out to win it over, the regime’s blend of oppression and institutional corruption had lost it the support of most Iranians. Unmoored from popular opinion, it had instead become entirely dependent on the professional extremist wing of the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, and its most politicised clerics.
This is why all attempts at mutual reconciliation under Obama were doomed to fail, even in spite of two successive nuclear accords and the wholesale lifting of sanctions. These olive branches were tossed aside by the Iranian leadership, which had no choice but to embrace an extremist approach and continued with its symbolic displays of hostility.
Partly because Obama compelled Biden to take on Malley as his own Iran coordinator, the Biden Administration moved very fast to repudiate Trump’s hostility to the Ayatollah’s regime, going overboard in its own attempt at reconciliation. One example is sufficient: the Houthi militia that is Iran’s proxy in Yemen, which the US Navy is now battling in the Red Sea, was unilaterally removed from the terrorist list in exchange for nothing at all, except to signal to Tehran that the Obama courtship of the regime was being renewed after the Trump interval.
By contrast, the reasonable part of Obama’s policy was to disabuse Washington of the illusion that Iran could be knocked off the board as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, with a quick march to Tehran by a couple of US divisions. Not only is it a much bigger country (almost four times as large, and with twice the population), but the real difference lies in the fact that Iran’s statecraft is derived from the country’s remote pre-Islamic past, not its contemporary geopolitics. These principles are now so deeply ingrained in the country’s political culture that even the ruling religious fanatics are high-functioning imperial administrators when it comes to diplomacy and war.
They know how to manipulate foreign perceptions of Iran to suit their aims: they simulate a warm conviviality with the US negotiators they privately resent, while in confrontations they know how to go right to the edge, without falling into the abyss. Consider how Iran Air still operates out of London several times a week, despite the route being used by Tehran’s goons to fly in and attack dissidents. Knowing that the UK Foreign Office is desperate to keep its embassy and its diplomats in Tehran, the regime perpetrates all manner of abuses secure in the knowledge there will be no retaliation.
Most significantly, Iran’s leaders were given the space and time to recruit the network of militias now holding the Middle East to ransom. Ever since the fall of the Shah in 1979 — for which Khomeini successfully obtained support in some corners of the West — Iran’s campaign to dominate the region has been underway. And this involved partially overturning the deepest schism in the Islamic world: persuading Sunni Arabs that the Sunni-Shia divide was less important than their collective hatred for Zionism. Over time, the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has spread, turning Arabic-speaking recruits into valuable assets for Iran’s aggrandisement. And hiding behind such proxies is attractive to Tehran — after all, these recruits are abundant, cheap and, above all, not Persians but only expendable Arab molokh khor (“lizard-eaters” or “desert-dwellers”).
But however successful Iran’s recruitment policy was, it couldn’t reverse the direction of travel across the Arab world. Even as Iran was situating its militias across the region, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan that had fought Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars began to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly. And while the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 garnered no additional goodwill for Israel or the Jews, Israel’s response proved that it has the strength to resist Iran’s imperial ambitions. Thus when an Israeli air strike hit Iran’s consular building in Damascus, not a word of criticism was heard in the Sunni Arab world.
Iran’s response was soon to come, in a swarm of hundreds of missiles and drones. But this expensive attack failed miserably, wounding just one Israeli, a seven-year-old Bedouin, and inflicting some trivial damage to the non-functional edge of a runway. And with the exception of Algeria that is absorbed in its own traumas, Libya that has never recovered from its civil war, and Kuwait that borders southern Iran, every Sunni state in the Middle East welcomed this outcome. In other words, the status quo is far preferable to all-out war.
As for Iran’s military chiefs, their standard of success is so low that, in the immediate aftermath of the failed aerial offensive, Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, declared that Iran “has achieved all of its goals”. He then unwisely added a vainglorious threat: “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behaviour, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response.” It was the sort of comment that gives effrontery a bad name. For even in the bowels of Tehran, the strategists know that if they come close to assembling a nuclear weapon, Israel won’t hesitate to strike first. Despite all of Obama’s delusions and fantasies, Iran knows that it is yet to gain the upper hand.
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Author: Edward Luttwak
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