Soleimani in SOTU… and the US Legacy in Iran Polity

H-Peace Soleimani in SOTU… and The US Legacy in Iran Polity

Blog Post published by Philip Olayoku on Thursday, March 5, 2020

In recent months, we have seen proud Iranians raise their voices against their oppressive rulers. The Iranian regime must abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop spreading terror, death, and destruction, and start working for the good of its own people. Because of our powerful sanctions, the Iranian economy is doing very poorly. We can help them make it very good in a short period of time, but perhaps they are too proud or too foolish to ask for that help. We are here. Let’s see which road they choose. It is totally up to them.

President Donald J. Trump, State of the Union, February 4, 2020.

Whereas the impeachment trial, which demonstrated the heightened tensions in the increasingly divisive partisan politics in the United States, overshadowed the State of the Union address that was punctuated by the dramatic shredding of Ms Nancy Pelosi’s copy. The speech substantially highlighted the United States’ security apparatus, which boasts of an investment of $2.2trn; as well as its policy direction in terms of the global fight against terrorism, especially in the Middle East. While responding to the controversy that surrounded the killing of the Iranian Quds Force commander, General Qasem Soleimani, who was hit by a lethal drone deployed by the US on January 3 in Baghdad, the President made sure to document the stance of his administration on the killing of the man he labeled ‘the world’s top terrorist’. He maintained that Soleimani was responsible for the killing of several American service men in Iraq, and thus qualifies to be in the same bracket as the late ISIS leader, Abubakar al Baghdadi. The killing had been perceived differently in the General’s home country as Iran’s Supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, threatened ‘severe revenge’ against the United States, and thousands trooped out to honor their heroe with the ‘death to America’ chants at his burial. As captured in the introductory quote from President Trump’s address, the relations between the United States and the Iran had been further strained since the Islamic revolution with the Iranian polity grappling with instability, as its economy remains under the siege of several American sanctions. With the recent demonstrations against the government of the country, it is important to tease out the historical and regional implications of the current US-Iran relations in understanding the US President’s offer to improve relations by helping Iran out of its present economic quagmire.

The Iranian polity had been refocused with the Islamic revolution that took place over four decades ago, with the replacement of the ‘monarchical democracy’ by a ‘theocratic democracy’ hinged on the Islamic ideology under the direction of a Supreme Leader. This new governance direction also redefined the relationship of Iran with its neighbors, including allies of the United States. Some analysts have described the eclectic protest movement of the revolution (which grew to about 9 million people at its peak) as largely nonviolent, with the transfer of power from the exiled Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The Shah had initially had his position threatened after an initial fallout with the then Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, but relied on the CIA-MI6 allies to sponsor a reinstatement coup, even though he maintained a topsy turvy relationship with them. His uncertainty about the support of the United States led him to an exilic medical sojourn with Ayatollah Ruholla

Citation: Philip Olayoku. Soleimani in SOTU… and The US Legacy in Iran Polity. H-Peace. 03-05-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19206/blog/conflict-anatomy/5966911/soleimani-sotu%E2%80%A6-and-us-legacy-iran-polity Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Peace

Khomeini, a former lecturer in Najaf and Qom seminaries, taking over as the leader of the new Islamic Republic. Khomeini himself had been in exile for 15 years due to his major criticisms of the of the Shah’s government, and recordings of his preaching, smuggled into the country, reportedly played a very important role in mobilizing support against the government during the revolution. The gains of the revolution remain far-fetched as Ayatollah’s 10-year reign has severally been described as an authoritarian, Islamic far right regime.

Some analysts maintain that the Islamic Revolution was an inevitable consequence of the modernization drive highlighted by the 1963 White Revolution which entailed a gentrification that further accentuated class distinction through the alienation of the Iranian middle-class and Islamic leaders. It was an era of the embrace of foreigners (predominantly Americans) as technocrats within the security and economic sector, and the adoption of their culture by the Iranian elites. In terms of its security architecture, Iran boasted of the second most dominant and sophisticated military in the Gulf Region, just behind Israel, by the time of the revolution. The discontent within the polity got to its peak with the economic crises of the mid-70s. The Prime Minister of the provisional government, Mehdi Bazargan, installed by Ayatollah Khomeini in his role as commander-in-chief, was forced to resign based on the allegation that he was courting the US for reconciliation. This led to further strains in the Iranian-US relations, and the US terminated the sale of arms and spare parts to Iran after a Khomeini-endorsed occupation of the US embassy in November, 1979. As a precaution, the Ayatollah -led regime laid the foundation for building defences against regime change through the installation of several layers of security apparatuses hinged around the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The corps is responsible for defending Iran’s sovereignty against both internal and external aggression, while ensuring that fatalities were minimized during internal security operations to foreclose mob action. To preserve loyalty, the regime deployed religion and class in the IRGC setup through Islamic ideological training for recruits, usually drawn from the economically disadvantaged class.

While the Iranian national ideological project may have sounded discordant tunes of hostilities against the United States interests in the country, perhaps what has remained more threatening in the past four decades is the Islamic government’s ambition to increase its regional influence by exporting the ‘Islamic revolutionary ideology’ to contiguous countries, leveraging on the significant Shia presence. The influence of General Soleimani in the region, especially within Iraq, could be better understood within this ambition, especially with his control of IRGC. It is also instructive that the Shia are the majority population in Southern Iraq, and in fact, constituted about 55% of the population of the country at the time of the revolution. They were also a formidable opposition against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. In exerting this regional influence, there have been continuous tensions between Iran and some US allies in the region. The latest confrontations gaining media traction have being with Saudi Arabia, precisely the attacks on its oil facilities, and seems an extension of their persistent proxy war in Yemen. Thus, tensions between US and Iran in recent times have been aggravated with the latter tightening its economic sanctions on the former in support of its allies.

The killing of General Soleimani thus happened at a time when the Iranian polity was ruffled by a wave of protests against economic hardship, largely due the US sanctions -partly as a bait for a renegotiation of the nuclear deal, and the allegations of corruption against the government. Perhaps, the miscued January 8 revenge attacks, which led to the death of 176 civilians aboard the Boeing

737-800 Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, has further led to delegitimizing the regime among Iranians, alongside the use of live ammunitions against protesters in December 2019. The circumstances of its controlled attacks on the US military base in Iraq has however reflected a more diplomatic turn, resulting in the eventual de-escalation of tensions, as the Islamic regime seeks to rebuild its legitimacy. The discontent with the regime, however, does not necessarily imply that the Iranians have suddenly redirected their loyalty to the United States in a manner of causality implied by President Trump in his SOTU address. The indication is that the majority of Iranians are aggrieved that they have to bear the brunt of sanctions, as they hardly ever affect those in government. If anything, the targeted killing of General Soleimani has apparently helped in strengthening the regime by flagging the enthusiasm for reformation and alliance with the West, mainly because the Iranians do not want their nation to be weakened and vulnerable to the US and its regional allies.

Outside of Iran, there have been discourses around the violation of Iraq’s sovereignty with the killing of an Iranian general (alongside the Iraqi Paramilitary Chief, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis) in Baghdad. The Iraqi parliament subsequently passed a resolution in the parliament for the evacuation of US military from their country, a move that was supported by some Iraqi protesters. In terms of historical relations, the memory of the massacre of Iraqi soldiers retreating from Kuwait on the Highway(s) of Death - after the announcement of a ceasefire prompted by the UN Resolution 660 during the First Gulf War - has not particularly served the interest of building trust with the US as an ally; some analysts point out that the massacre violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The resolution may have prompted a reaction from the American President who mentioned in his SOTU address that there is an ongoing attempt to end America’s war in the Middle East and bring the US troops back home. His reasoning was that the war had been concluded and law enforcement remains the primary responsibility of national governments in the region. Some diplomats have questioned the legal and moral justification of the targeted killing of a high-ranking state official on official assignment to a sovereign state by a third-party state. Such action, they contended, signals the propensity for impunity, as well as an illicit appropriation of the right to arbitrarily label individuals as terrorists. This argument aligns with the position that the Executive Order 11905 signed by President Gerard Ford in 1976 post-Vietnam (and subsequently endorsed by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan), which placed a ban on political assassination and the conspiracy to engage in it anywhere in the world, may have been violated with General Soleimani’s killing. Some others have argued that the violation is not unique to this context as there had been targeted political assassinations in each of the last three preceding US administrations. While the overt confrontation between Iran and the United States may have receded after the retaliatory attacks against the US Base in Iraq, the political tensions remain in the recent allegations and counter allegations on transparency and misinformation regarding the management of Covid-19 that has affected both countries.

Beyond this, the massive prioritizing of defence budgeting, and the March 2018 public announcement of the creation of an arm of the Department of Air Force labeled the Space Force by the US President is foreshadowing the future of both conventional and asymmetric warfare. As it were, the show of force has assumed the significant role of determining the strength of a nation, and by implication its wealth. What has become more worrisome are the conspiracy theories making the rounds on the evidence of some fatal viruses being developed and tested to evaluate their potency in Biowarfare. The indication is that man’s romance with war technology is yielding unprecedented abilities for massive decimation of populations, even in defiance of the spatio-temporal. The ambition to plant an

American Flag in Mars also signals man’s insatiable quest to dominate the universe, and perhaps save himself from the possibility of total extinction should his curiosity lead to the earth’s ruin. Perhaps it is time to reinvent the invisible hand through a moral consciousness of curtailing technology to the service of humankind, and not subsume humanity under technology’s manipulative ventures. The true wealth of nations would then be the value placed on sustaining life, and not its destruction.

Selected References

Eisenstadt, Michael. 2011. Iran’s Islamic Revolution: Lessons for the Arab Spring of 2011?. Strategic Forum, April 2011. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/128573/SF267.pdf

Iran: Exporting the Revolution. A 1980 Assessment by the CIA released on April 27, 2006

Kangarlou, Tara. 2020. Despair, defiance in Iran after US killing of Qassem Soleimani. AlJazeera, February 4, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/despair-defiance-iran-month-killing-soleimani-20020...

Nunan, Timothy. 2020. Visions of World Order in the "Medina of Muslims": New Avenues for Research on Iran, Afghanistan, and the Legacies of 1979. Sources and Methods. February 6, 2020. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/visions-world-order-medina-muslims-new-avenues-rese...

Patowary, Kaushik. 2016. The Highway of Death. Amusing Planet, May 04, 2016 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/05/the-highway-of-death.html

Winston, George. 2016. The Highway of Death – First Gulf War. War History Online. February 7, 2016, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/the-kuwait-highway-of-death.html

Yousif, Elias. 2020. What it cost to kill Soleimani. The Hill, February 9, 2020. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/482187-what-it-cost-to-kill-soleimani

Zunes, Stephen. 2009. The Iranian Revolution (1977-79). Washington: ICNC

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