- Bored As Fuck
- Jan 1, 2006
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Fun Shoe
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I have it saved on my phone. Formatted it the best I could, as it was saved in plain text.
Iran - US relations 1989 to now
Polyakov posted:
So I sat down and this unintentionally swelled from a couple paragraphs to a midsize essay over the course of a few hours, but its done now and as a result you all get to see it.
Iran and US relations post war
HW Bush
Iran US relations are a bit of a mess just constantly. One of the big pushing factors to Iran-Contra was in part a desire to build relations with Iran in order to get them to make Hezbollah release the hostages they had been taking like candy in Lebanon. (Along with the desire to generate off the books cash to arm the Contras). This was the apex of the utter clown parade that was US attempts to talk with Iran during the war itself, with Iran and the US and Israel all being taken to the cleaners by a conman claiming to have contacts with the US government and moderate elements of the Iranian government for weapons. Just after the end of Iran-Iraq, HW got a call from Tehran from a man claiming to be Rafsanjani (The president of the time). Who said, they wanted to improve relations in return for releasing US hostages in Lebanon held by Hezbollah. It came to light later after he asked the CIA to check, that it was a political opponent of Rafsanjani who was trying to embarass him by having him implicated with the US. Trying to normalise relations had the added hurdle of not even being able to find the right person to talk to. The concept of just essentially some guy being able to ring up the president of the USA and pretend to be the president of Iran is utterly boggling.
Clinton
Both sides have at various times since then attempted to bridge the gap, but utter farce or internal politics got in the way on both sides.
Rafsanjani was actually interested in rapprochement and had the hostages released in 1992 along with the bodies of the two that Hezbollah had murdered, however the US didn’t reciprocate in letting Iran back into the international community. While this was going on there were more murders of Iranian exiles and an attempt to start an uprising in Iraq after Gulf 1, which the hawk elements of the US government took as an excuse to renege after the hostages were home. Rafsanjanis political opponents would take that as an excuse to harden their own stance and stepped up their support for Hamas and Hezbollah and was aggressively trying to derail the Arab-Israeli peace process at the time. (A time when it looked anything other than vanishingly unlikely). Iran for their part saw what happened to Iraq, saw the increased permanent US deployments in the gulf and the continued sanctions against them as proof of US duplicity. This was in danger of low key starting a war in the mid 90's. A US military exercise set the Iranians on edge as they saw it as a precursor to them invading the islands they controlled in the Persian gulf, and they started threatening the gulf with a build-up on their positions on the central islands of Abu Musa and Abu Tunb (and others), this was not an idle threat of their ability to really badly gently caress with world oil supplies which they had shown a willingness to do before.
Here we get Rafsanjani really trying to make peace with the US and just cool everyone off, they gave a huge oil contract to a US company to develop an offshore oil field, the government and the CIA pushed for this to happen as they really wanted to try and break the ice. But then the republicans won Congress and the Israeli lobby and those who just plain hated Bill Clinton and they put up even harsher economic sanctions. This is the point that Newt Gingrich really starts yelling about overthrowing Iran. He pushed through a very public 18 million dollars for the CIA's budget for Iranian operations. This would accomplish bugger all, you can’t run a spy ring in a coffee shop for 18 million. It completely tanked any chance of the CIA really developing any meaningful Iranian intelligence network (Which they had lost in its entirety 6 years prior). What the CIA actually did was stuff like smuggling books into Iran. The one thing this really achieved was in convincing Iran that America was essentially declaring full scale covert war against them, so Iran countered by actually declaring covert war. They attempted to start a riot in Bahrain and then blew up Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, a building that housed a bunch of USAF personnel of whom they killed 20 and injured a further 400. The revolutionary guard navy harassed boats in the gulf leading to concerns about suicide boat attacks.
At this point however as the US is genuinely considering bombing Iran in retaliation a new president took over from Rafsanjani. President Khatami stopped the Rev. Guards from killing dissidents in other nations, had the leader of the intelligence services sacked for conducting these operations without notifying the supreme leader. He started making all sorts of noises about condemning terrorism, not killing Salman Rushdie and apologising for the US embassy siege as well as restraining the revolutionary guards from messing with people in the gulf. Clinton reciprocates by making noises about apologising for US actions in the past, not quite going as far as to do so but certainly moving in that direction and eased some restrictions on Iran. However Khatami couldn’t get the Iranian government to move forward to respond to US overtures. Clinton made a significant effort to meet Khatami when both were scheduled to speak at the UN before he left office, however Khatami who lacked the Supreme Leaders authorization to conduct talks slid out a side door to avoid him.
GW Bush
Then we get Dubya entering office. The state department and the joint chiefs of staff both pushed for continuing Clintons attempts to connect with Iran. However, they were obsessed with Iraq and just didn’t care all that much about Iran by comparison. The only person who cared and took an active interest in what to do with Iran was John Bolton, and I hardly need to articulate what his views were, but nobody cared enough to support his views to Dubya. Iran during this are hoping that they might be able to get on Dubyas good side by his links to oil industries in the US. They probably correctly divined that pressure from corporate interests could make Dubya take an interest in them.
Then we get 9/11.
Iran had been fighting the Taliban for quite some time and after 9/11 they seize the moment and invite the US in for talks, for the first time since 1986. Its been 15 years since the two countries have been able to even be in the same room together (The Germans and Italians are nominally there so it doesn’t look like it’s just the Iranians but their delegations tended to take very long lunches, like 5 hours long). It took some wrangling but the US agrees over the objections of Bolton, Wolfowitz and Luti (the assistant secretary of defence for near eastern affairs, who had served as Gingriches military aid before entering the administration). Iran gives the US significant intelligence about where the Taliban are in Afghanistan and are really pushing commonalities, the US are a bit leery but take their information and it develops into regular talks.
However at this point the Israelis intercept a shipment of weapons to Palestine from Iran, it seems unlikely this was an official government action but it still puts a bit of a spanner in the works. Then we get possibly the most ill-considered speech, the Axis of Evil speech. Which is notable because it didn’t come out of US government policy on Iran, because the US government had no policy on Iran at all, it was a lyrical flourish. This really hacks off Iran who withdraw from the talks, release a major Taliban commander and start undermining the government the US is trying to install in Afghanistan.
Then the US really decides to bollock everything up. Iran is interested in cooperating on Iraq, they want a say in selecting the new form of governance for that nation. Some effort is made on that front by both Iran and elements of the US government, but they get told to get stuffed and shut them out of Iraq entirely. So, Iran decided to be difficult, they were utterly convinced that the US was going to come and overthrow them, the lack of a clear US policy had reinforced this worry that had festered for 20 years, they took precisely the approach they had taken in Lebanon. They sought to create as much of a pig’s ear of a situation that the US would be too busy dealing with that to threaten them. And eventually they would come out on top. They would send thousands of fighters into Iraq to just get ready to create a mess due to the disintegration of the border, and it worked very well.
Both sides attempted via gestures to get the other to open up, the US sent significant aid to Iran after an earthquake hit a city, Iran sent a message via Switzerland which contained a plausible solution to normalising relations. Unfortunately, it was taken as a hoax and ignored because they had no easy way to validate its provenance, it turns out to have been from the highest level of Iranian government, so nothing came of either effort.
The US would move to supporting pro liberalising elements in Iran. Liberalising in this context meaning freedom of speech, human rights (as we in the west would understand them), labour rights, dismantling of the Revolutionary Guard’s chokehold over much of the economy, and freedom within the political process to choose who is on the ballot. Iran would react rather poorly to this, viewing it largely correctly as an attempt to overthrow them using soft power. That was not the only reason the US were attempting this but it was a major part of it.
At the end of all this muddled process in 2006 we get the Iran nuclear deal, or the start thereof. This was a major push from Condoleezza Rice, who took the view that you needed to engage with Iran to try and get them to cooperate. Because she was so close to Bush she circumvented all the Neo-Cons who gatekept the president, particularly Cheney and Rumsfeld at this point. She managed to get approval for using China and Russia to reach an agreement with Iran. It was offered to Iran that in return for halting their nuclear program they would get aid from Europe to modernise their oil and gas industry, they would get a light water reactor for nuclear power generation and a gradual reduction of sanctions. This was backed by Iran’s friends in Russia and the PRC as well. They prevaricated and were accused of stalling by the US which got their backs up and they eventually rejected it. They were probably going to reject it even without that particular wrinkle.
So that really brings us to the current state of sanctions on Iran, they were found in contravention of nuclear proliferation by the IAEA and there were significant international pushes for sanctions and inspection of cargo to stop Iran achieving nuclear weapons. This failure essentially kicks off Iran really escalating their activities, supplying Iraqi militias aggressively and paying them to attack US forces, we have reached the state of pretty much undeclared war that would rage for years.
Obama
Obama then turned up and he is explicit about using diplomacy to engage with Iran. He goes on Arab TV and talked this up for the middle-east at large. This was received very positively in much of Iran, but their own hardliners torpedoed every attempt of the moderate elements in Iran to actually do something about it. Not getting anywhere he would however try again, writing directly to Supreme Leader Khameini on two occasions and getting polite but non-committal replies. Unfortunately, then Ahmadinejad would get re-elected in Iran in 2009. He was one of only 4 candidates approved by the Religious Guardian Council to stand (of 476 applicants). There was pretty much certainly fraud in that election but its impossible to prove, he won by huge margins in every province bar two, even ones that he had lost in 2005. This sparks massive protests, after some indulgence from the Supreme Leader they eventually get told to stop but don’t, the Basijj militia go out attacking protesters and the police shoot a fair few, including the nephew of the second place candidate Mousavi. Iran blames the west for this, expels a number of British diplomats and all western journalists. There has been no reliable evidence that was the case. However, this set back relations further and the protests would continue but to no ultimate effect.
After about a year in 2010, the US would try again, they exposed a secret Iranian enrichment reactor and threatened further sanctions. They presented a deal for Iran to send its uranium to Russia, who would refine it into fuel grade uranium for their power reactors. This actually seemed to be getting somewhere, as Iran accepted the deal in principle and Ahmadinejad was in favour of it publically. Unfortunately, Irans internal politics derailed it, the Supreme leader didn’t particularly like Ahmadinejad or the West, his own political opponents in the government were determined to derail it to embarrass the president. Iran could not get a political consensus to agree to it themselves and so they rejected it and continued enriching uranium. As a result they got hit with the really big sanctions stick by the UN, we also get Stuxnet at this point which buggers about a third of Iran’s enrichment centrifuges. Israel, while probably not acting in concert with the US on this though its no way to be sure funds Sunni terrorists in Iran who conduct a series of bombings against the revolutionary guard, killing north of 50 of their officers, including a major general and dozens of civillians. There were also several assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists almost certainly conducted by Mossad. To explain why that’s important when we are discussing the US, the view of the hardliners in Iran is that of a global Zionist conspiracy which ties Israeli and US actions together. This really boosted Iran’s paranoia, though whether it was paranoia when there were people out to get them is of course an open question.
Iran then steps up its activities in the gulf, again, and start bombing campaigns in Iraq in an attempt to mess with the US attempts at withdrawal, killing at least 15 American soldiers, the US bombs Iranian backed militias in Iraq and warns Iran very strongly through Russia, Iranian boats charged a US task group openly threatening to blow them up and dropping fake mines in the water ahead of them. The commander had not been in the gulf that long and didn’t realise that it was the Revolutionary guard up to their usual tricks. Fortunately, when he asked permission to open fire he was told not to and we managed to avoid a shooting war starting right then and there. They did something similar to a British ship who fired warning shots at the revolutionary guard who fortunately thought better of their activities and left.
This behaviour continues with another round of sanctions over the nuclear enrichment program resolution in the UN in 2012 which shut the Iranian central bank out of much of the world’s financial system, followed by the EU implementing the same sanctions. Iran responded by threatening to close the states of Hormuz. These sanctions are really started to hurt Iran at this stage. It was at this stage that Obama goes into his second term and manages to thrash out the deal that would eventually be signed.
Conclusions
This is essentially the very very short version of Iranian relations with the US since 1989. I hope it has illuminated why making a deal with Iran is quite so drat difficult. They are a completely fractured nation with an uneasy balance of power between moderates and radicals. There is only really one person who can actually impart order, and that is the Supreme Leader Khameini. The supreme religious lot in charge are all really loving old, they have been there for decades and have seen everything come to nought and still in my view cling to this idea of Iranian regional hegemon as a greater Shia state that Khomeini explicitly stated was the goal of the Islamic revolution back in 1979.
The second is that Iran is pretty much as to blame for this as the US is, precisely how much is open to personal interpretation, there is no denying the huge scale of the damage that Dubyas administration did to ever finding an actual solution. But Iran has nobody but itself to blame for the fact that nobody likes them given their constant and repeated actions. It’s a revolutionary state that never learned to stop fighting, and really its been fighting for nigh on 40 years now. The Axis of Evil speech was poorly judged and deeply bloody unhelpful in terms of international diplomacy, but it really wasn’t inaccurate given Iran’s creation and support of two of the nastier international terrorist groups of recent years.
Iran and America now just fundamentally cannot trust each other, Iranian overtures historically have largely been met by either disbelief or a demand for complete capitulation by the US. And US overtures have been met with either silence or another campaign of bombings by Iran. The fact that the Obama deal got signed at all is an absolute miracle given the legacy of distrust that it had to overcome. Hardliners on both sides want war, its very difficult for them not to get it at this stage.
I’m avoiding discussion of the recent abrogation by Trump because dear god I don’t really wanna poke that beehive of modern political clownery, also my knowledge on the subject is much more limited.
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Jan 5, 2020 00:19
