On January 2, 2020, a drone strike, authorised by US President Donald Trump, hit a convoy near Baghdad International Airport, instantly killing Major General Qasem Soleimani, the 62-year-old commander of the elite Quds (Jerusalem) Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran, along with four other IRGC officers and five Iraqi Shia leaders. In the aftermath, various interpretations of, and justifications for, this event have emerged, in the process demonstrating diametrically opposite viewpoints of the current situation in Iran and Iraq that led to this action.
General Soleimani led the Quds Force since the late 1990s. In this role, he had coordinated the external activities of the IRGC through a group of Iranian “proxies” engaging in “asymmetric warfare” across the Middle East. These Shia proxy groups claim an ideological allegiance to the theocracy of Iran and operate in such countries as Iraq (Badr Organisation; Kata’ib Hezbollah; and other Shia militia organised as the Popular Mobilisation Forces), Syria (Liwa Abu Fadl al-Abbas, or LIWA), Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Yemen (Ansarullah, better known as the Houthis).
Soleimani’s death has been variously described as the justifiable execution of a super-terrorist “monster”, an extra-judicial political assassination, or an illegal act of “state-sponsored terrorism” leading to the death of a much-loved national hero. Following this event, harsh and uncompromising rhetoric, frenzied social media activity and mutually incompatible viewpoints have fuelled an atmosphere in which threats have continued to escalate, creating a situation that the rest of the world can only witness with bated breath.
Any conflict must have a beginning. In the case of Iran, this beginning is not a single discrete event, but the culmination of many separate events widely separated in time. Underlying all these events are Iran’s considerable oil reserves and its strategic location, close to the Arabian Peninsula, which gives it a major degree of control over the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that connects the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea and is used to convey around a fifth of the world’s oil tanker traffic.
Iran was a relatively poor agricultural nation, far removed from the one-time glories of the ancient Persian Empire, when a sixty-year exclusive concession to prospect for petroleum in southern Iran was granted to William D’ Arcy Knox in 1901. Oil was eventually struck on May 16 1908. This find led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in London in April 1909. Over time, Iran became a major oil producing nation, of considerable strategic importance. Accordingly, a Treaty of Alliance was signed by Britain, the Soviet Union and Iran on January 29 1942, allowing the Allies to use Iran’s petroleum, other natural and human resources, and transport infrastructure for the Allied line of supply to the Soviet Union.
In 1950, General Hajj Ali Razmara, Prime Minister, made an unsuccessful bid for a 50-50 revenue -sharing deal with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Following his assassination, Dr Muhammad Mossadegh took over as prime minister and nationalised the Iranian oil fields in 1951. In August 1953, he refused to stand down after his dismissal by the Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah thereafter fled abroad, having appointed General Fazlullah Zahedi as prime minister in the meantime. Zahedi went on to overthrow Mossadegh in a CIA-engineered coup, masterminded by Kermit Roosevelt, head of the CIA’s Middle East Department, and the process of nationalisation was duly reversed.
The Shah of Iran thereafter consolidated his hold over the nation, until the Revolution of 1979, aided by a well-equipped professional army and by a ruthless and much-feared secret police force, also known as SAVAK. This was a period of increasingly close ties with the US, leading the Shah to be considered by some to be an American puppet. Modernisation was driven through. Attempts at improving literacy and women’s rights met with some success. In the 1950s, under the Atoms for Peace programme, the US helped initiate Iran’s nuclear industry. But a decadent and self-enriching monarchy, a Westernised elite and an emancipated middle class were driven increasingly apart from a poor, largely rural, mainly conservative and overwhelmingly Shia population. Changes to the structure of education and to family law were particularly opposed by the clerics. The cause of the supposedly alienated and dispossessed Iranian masses was taken up, in particular, by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was promptly exiled to Iraq in 1964. The 1970s increasingly saw many public protests against the regime, culminating in the imposition of martial law in 1978. Eventually, the Shah was forced out of Iran, and the Ayatollah returned to widespread jubilation in 1979.
The current political landscape in Iran is the direct result of the formation of a theocratic Islamic republic, which has introduced the concept of Velayat-e Faqih (Regency of the Jurist), under the Vali-e Faqih, or spiritual Supreme Leader, who is assisted by a Council of Guardians. The state and the “church” have became one and the same, and the political establishment is composed of clerics and politicians supported by those clerics. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Sepah-e-Pasdaran) were formed specifically to protect the Islamic principles underpinning Iranian statehood. From the very beginning, confrontation with the US was on the agenda. This hostility was further exacerbated by the “hostage crisis”, during which 52 employees of the US Embassy in Tehran were held illegally, in a siege, by a group of militant students for 444 days, from November 4 1979 to January 20 1981.
The fight for Iran’s oil reserves inevitably led to the Iraq-Iran War of September 1980 to August 1988, in which Saddam Hussein, with Western support, invaded western Iran, seeking to take control of the oil-producing province of Khuzestan . This protracted dispute was damaging for both nations and led to considerable loss of life and destruction of property. During this period, the Irangate scandal came to light in 1986. The illegal American sale of arms to the Islamic government was undertaken cynically, in exchange for the return of American hostages in Iran and the profits were used to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. When it comes to self-interest, allegiances can easily be blurred.
Since then, low-level conflict between the US and Iran has been punctuated by several terrorist attacks on American assets and troops in the Middle East. The conflict has been driven by an overwhelming Iranian opposition to American hegemony, which has been triggered by the occupation of Iraq, a country with a Shia majority, in 2003. Specific American, along with wider Western, concerns have arisen from Iran’s ongoing nuclear energy programme, a stated intention to annihilate the state of Israel, strict state-controlled censorship of the media and the Internet, as well as to internal human rights issues, involving the treatment of women, political dissidents, certain minority religious groups such as the Bahais, the criminalisation of homosexuals, and the continuing use of the death sentence for a variety of reasons such as apostasy (renouncing Islam).
Iran and the US have been engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of cynical tit-for-tat moves for decades, with multiple and blurred lines of engagement, and unclear long-term objectives, that has led to a mess that is going to take much time and effort to clear up. In the meantime, continuing action in this sorry saga, which is being framed as a dispute between American colonial expansionism and Iranian state-sponsored terrorism seems inevitable. The dispute has cost Iran heavily, as economic and other sanctions against the nation have bitten hard and yet continued to be strengthened by the US and its allies. All of this is yet another manifestation of seemingly irreconcilable differences between nations, in which the concept of constructive dialogue has been conveniently put on the backburner.
Ashis Banerjee