Iran's Deadly Ambition. Ilan Berman
network as the ideological center of gravity for Islamic extremists worldwide. To that end, in June 2014, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, formally declared the creation of a new “Islamic caliphate” in Iraq and parts of Syria during a high-profile speech in Mosul, Iraq. In the same address, al-Baghdadi anointed himself as the new “caliph” and the “leader for Muslims everywhere.”5 As a result, there is now pitched ideological competition between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for primacy in the jihadist intellectual narrative, with the two groups trading barbs and proffering competing worldviews in their battle for Islamic “hearts and minds.”6
The Islamic State is “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” in terms of both its ambitions and its capabilities, the then defense secretary Chuck Hagel warned in August 2014.7 The statistics bear out his assessment. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that, as of fall 2014, the group could field as many as 31,000 men under arms, making it among the largest terrorist groups on record.8 (By way of comparison, the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau gauged that al-Qaeda’s core and its two most potent affiliates, AQAP and AQIM [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], number in the low thousands—although, when indirect affiliates such as Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah are factored in, that figure is considerably higher.9) The Islamic State is also believed to be one of the world’s richest groups, with assets valued at around $2 billion.10 Its rapid advance in both Iraq and Syria, more-over, left the group in control of vast territory. In mid-2014, experts estimated that it held and administered segments of northern Iraq and eastern Syria equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom.11
The Islamic State is not just a threat to the West. For Shiite Iran, the rise of the Sunni group poses a grave danger as well—as both a national security threat and a challenge to its ideological legitimacy. This is why the Islamic Republic began a major mobilization against the group. Iran provided both arms and advisors to the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas battling the Islamic State in northern Iraq.12 It also sent detachments of its Revolutionary Guards to fight against the Islamic State on Iraqi soil.13 And in a marked departure from normal policy, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly even gave Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force, the green light to coordinate military operations with the United States against the Islamic State.14
All this has nudged the United States and Iran into tactical alignment and has fostered the idea that cooperation in countering the Islamic State is, in fact, possible. Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, said publicly that he envisions a role for Iran in the broad coalition that Washington is erecting against the group.15 Others in the Obama administration have gone even further. In mid-October 2014, President Obama reportedly sent a secret letter to Iran’s supreme leader proffering joint coordination in the fight against the Islamic State, provided Iran could come to terms with the West over its nuclear program.16
The idea generated a firestorm of criticism in Washington. “It’s sometimes true that very different countries can cooperate against a common enemy, as the United States and Soviet Union did during World War II,” noted Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations in the Washington Post in the summer of 2014. “But the suggestion of a united U.S.-Iran front is more reminiscent of the wishful thinking among conservatives who argued in the 1930s that Britain and the United States shared a common interest with Nazi Germany in countering communism.”17
This skepticism is undoubtedly warranted, for Iran’s long and sordid history as a sponsor and instigator of international terrorism puts it squarely on the wrong side of today’s struggle against radical Islam.
BLOODY ROOTS
Chalk it up to the Islamic Republic’s roots in the radical, religious-based protests that coalesced against the secular rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the 1970s—or to Ayatollah Khomeini’s deep-seated belief that, once established, the ideology of his extremist state could become an export commodity and a way to reorder the prevailing geopolitics of the Muslim (and eventually the entire) world. Whatever the reason, since its inception in 1979, Iran’s current regime has harnessed terrorism as a key tool of strategic influence and foreign policy.
The formative years of Khomeini’s regime saw his government erect an elaborate domestic infrastructure to support and propagate terrorism, spanning multiple ministries and agencies, as well as invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the cause of global Islamic “resistance.”18 In the process, the Iranian regime created a massive terror machine dedicated to the exportation of its radical ideas.
The United States felt the results of this architecture first-hand in April 1983, when a truck bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people, and then again that October, when a similar explosive device targeted the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. Both attacks were definitively traced back to the Islamic Republic, which—working through proxies such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad Organization—sought to dislodge the American presence in the Levant.19 In response, the Reagan administration formally designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism the following year.
So the situation remains. Today, the Islamic Republic still ranks as the world’s foremost sponsor of international terrorism—a designation its leaders wear proudly in the name of resistance against the Great Satan (United States) and, more broadly, the West. If anything, the thirteen-plus years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent start of the war on terror have seen the Islamic Republic continue, and even deepen, its investment in global instability. It has done so through what some scholars have described as an “action network”: a web of official and proxy organizations that are “involved in crafting and implementing the covert elements of Iran’s foreign policy agenda, from terrorism, political, economic and social subversion; to illicit finance, weapons and narcotics trafficking; and nuclear procurement and proliferation.”20
The results are striking. In its most recent assessment of global terrorism trends, the U.S. State Department points out that Iran has
• maintained its “support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza,” as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, which it has helped rearm after the latter’s 2006 conflict with Israel;
• “increased its presence in Africa and attempted to smuggle arms to Houthi separatists in Yemen and Shia oppositionists in Bahrain,” and;
• used its terror vehicles and proxies to “provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East,” and has continued “to provide arms, financing, training, and the facilitation of Iraqi Shia fighters” to reinforce the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria against its opposition.21
The scope of Iran’s investment in terrorism is far broader than could be comfortably covered in these pages. But the challenge it poses to the United States and its allies is clear. As scholars Scott Modell and David Asher note, despite years of economic and political pressure, “Iran seems undeterred in its mission to confront the ‘enemies of Islam’ and create new centers of non-Western power around the world.”22 Today, one such potential center is emerging on Iran’s eastern border.
EASTERN PROMISES
For Iran, the start of the war on terror in 2001 was a significant existential challenge. The incursion of the Great Satan, the United States, and its coalition partners into Afghanistan on their eastern flank worried Iran’s ayatollahs, while the rapid way in which the United States and its allies dismembered the Taliban regime in Kabul raised concerns that the coalition might soon set its sights on the Islamic Republic. This sense of siege would only be amplified by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq two years later and the assumption of control over the country by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority thereafter.
In response, Iran adopted a two-pronged strategy toward its eastern neighbor. On the one hand, Tehran sought to expand its influence and political clout in post-Taliban Afghanistan, both as a way to prevent a possible tilt