Iran’s Mullahs: Masking Weakness with Terror

Few Americans have followed Iran and the Iranian resistance more devotedly than Michael Ledeen. In books and articles he has explained the confrontation between Iran and the United States – and the coming crisis of the mullah regime. In his important and urgent new book, Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West, he deploys a lifetime of insight and experience to illuminate one of the modern world’s most dangerous crises.  Over the next days, we’ll post here some short extracts from the book – but no extract can do justice to Michael’s work. Read the whole thing, and read it as soon as you can.

Click here for part one of this series.

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The Israeli invasion of Gaza in early 2009 threw Iran’s various problems into clear focus. After years of refusing to see Iran’s aggressive intentions, most sensible observers of things Middle Eastern now recognize that the most important terrorist organizations, from Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah and Hamas, are essentially Iranian proxies. Le Figaro carried a story bluntly headlined IRAN BEHIND HAMAS’ GRAD MISSILES, and flatly stated that Hamas military commanders had been trained in Iran and Syria to use the deadliest missiles in their inventory. The battle of Gaza was therefore the second between Israel and Iran in two and a half years, the first being the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah.

The mullahs knew they could lose this battle, and defeat would be very dangerous to a regime like Tehran’s, which claims divine sanction for its actions, and proclaims the imminent arrival of its messiah and of the triumph of global jihad. If Allah is responsible for victory, what can be said about humiliating defeat? The mullahs were well aware of the stakes, and it was evident in their behavior.

For some time, the regime in Tehran had shown signs of urgency, sometimes verging on panic. The mullahs organized raucous demonstrations in front of numerous embassies, including those of Egypt (with chants of “Death to Mubarak”), Jordan, Turkey, Great Britain, Germany, and France. These demonstrations were not mere gestures; the regime’s seriousness was underlined on Sunday, January 4, when it offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who killed Mubarak (the Iranians called it a “revolutionary execution”). Significantly, the announcement came at a rally of the Basij, the most radical security force in the country, at which the Revolutionary Guards official Forooz Rejaii spoke. The Egyptians took it seriously; they went on alert of late, looking for the possibility of a Mumbai-type operation in Cairo or elsewhere, and there was a suicide bombing in the capital on February 22.

At the same time, the regime intensified its murderous assault against its own people, most notably hanging nine people on Christmas Eve, and assaulting the headquarters of Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi.

This intense tempo of activity bespoke alarm in Tehran, which was fully justified by a number of setbacks. First of all, the dramatic drop in oil prices was devastating to the mullahs, who had planned to be able to fund terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Suddenly their bottom line was tinged with red, and this carried over onto their domestic balance sheets, which were already demonstrably shaky (they were forced to cancel proposed new taxes when the merchant class staged nationwide protests). No wonder they seized on any international event to call for petroleum export reductions.

No doubt, the Iranians believed the fall in oil prices was the result of satanic will rather than the shock to demand produced by the runup to $140 per barrel. Not for them the subtleties of the free market; given the way they view the world, they must have been convinced that the same strategy that beggared the Soviet Union—Saudi cooperation with America to hold down prices—was now deployed against them. This belief was no doubt reinforced when the official OPEC cut in petroleum production did not lead to markedly higher prices.

Second, their terror strategy had not been working as well as they wished and expected. Most American and European analysts have not appreciated the effect of the defeat of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iraq, but you can be sure that the high and mighty in Arab capitals took full notice. The Iranians not only lost a considerable number of skilled and experienced terror leaders—Imad Mughniyah, the long-time operational chieftain of Hezbollah, was the most important, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was close behind, having created al Qaeda in Iraq alongside a network throughout Europe—but also several of their own Revolutionary Guards officers. Some of these were captured, others have defected, and most all have provided details of the Iranian network. This sort of thing is bad for operations, bad for recruiting, and weakened the Iranians’ efforts to bully their neighbors into appeasement or more active cooperation.

Third, despite all the efforts to crush any sign of internal rebellion, many Iranians continued to publicly oppose the mullahs. A few weeks before the Israeli strike against Hamas, students at universities all over the country demonstrated in significant numbers, and as one Iranian now living in Europe put it to me, “they were surprised that the regime was unable to stop the protests, even though everyone knew they were planned.” This is the background for the new wave of repression, accompanied by an intensification of jamming on the Internet, and an ongoing reshuffle of the instruments of repression; Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have no confidence in the efficacy or blind loyalty of the army or of large segments of the Revolutionary Guards. Most public actions are carried out by the Basij, who are judged more reliable, and repression is less in the hands of the traditional ministries than in the new groups freshly minted in the Supreme Leader’s office.

In short, the regime was very concerned about its future, and was not very comfortable with its friends, allies, and proxies. The mullahs know that most Iranians would like to see their leaders treated the same way as the nine executed on Christmas Eve, and like all tyrants, the Iranian despots tried to demonstrate that they dominated both their own country and the region. No surprise, then, that Saeed Jalili, the very important secretary of the “Supreme National Security Council,” hit the airwaves of Al-Manar TV to call on “the Arab and Islamic countries and other countries that have an independent will” to fight for a Hamas victory in Gaza and deliver a forceful blow to “the Zionist entity.”

But, significantly, when he was asked to get down to brass tacks, Jalili had nothing concrete to say. The Al-Manar interviewer asked him what Iran could do in the Gaza fighting. Jalili’s words:

We believe that the great popular solidarity with the Palestinian people as expressed all over the world should reflect on the will of the Arab and Islamic countries and other countries that have an independent will so that these will move in a concerted, cooperative, and cohesive manner to draft a collective initiative that can achieve two main things as an inevitable first step. These are putting an immediate end to aggression and second breaking the siege and quickly securing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

In other words, the head of the Supreme Council wanted to hold some meetings. It was clear that, when push came to shove, the mullahs could not do anything for their Hamas proxy. The Iranians didn’t promise much of anything to the embattled Hamas forces, unless you consider that their “threat” to send boatloads of humanitarian supplies was a serious menace. Indeed, no less a personage than the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad-Ali Ja’fari, blithely said that “Hamas has enough weapons . . . the people in Gaza [do] not need the help of other armies, and [are] capable of dealing with the steps taken by the Zionist regime.” In simple English, General Ja’fari told Hamas, “You get ‘em, big boy, we’re right behind you.”

To be sure, there were the occasional calls to Iranians to sacrifice themselves for the cause, but even these lacked all conviction. One Mahdi Kalhar, an adviser to President Ahmadinejad, told a group of students that “Iran must take action. . . we must send [Hamas] aid [in the form of] boatloads of [fighters] on a one-way ticket. . . . An Israeli attack on the boats is nothing to be afraid of—for how else are we to become martyrs?”

No Iranian students gobbled up those one-way tickets; the Iranians never had any intention of sending “fighters” to Gaza. That’s not their way. They send others, preferably Arabs, to martyr themselves. Not Iranians.

Many worried that if Israel invaded Gaza, there would be a wave of terrorism against Iran’s enemies, and almost surely an assault in northern Israel courtesy of Hezbollah. Aside from a few sparse launchings, it did not happen, and the Hezbollah dog-that-did-not-bark went hand-in-mailed-glove with the Iranians’ sudden preference for conferences rather than suicidal assaults. And as for Iran’s Syrian allies, there too the silence was deafening. Syria and Hezbollah may have declared themselves the “winners” of the 2006 battle with Israel, but they didn’t seem to be itching for a rematch.

Finally, there was the humiliation of Iraq’s Status of Forces Agreement with the United States, against which the Iranians had lobbied for months. Ayatollah Khamenei personally urged Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to reject any long-term agreement with the Americans, but Maliki signed it anyway.

In short, the weakness of the Iranian strategy was exposed in early 2009, and no matter how many times the mullahs proclaimed that Hamas had won a signal victory against the satanic forces in Gaza, the actual events no doubt encouraged the tens of millions of Iranians who dream of the day when the regime comes down.

Courtesy of St. Martin’s Press