A Real Alarm: Iran Is a Dangerous Failure

The dusk masquerade is over. The clandestine war is snowballing (although it’s unclear who wages it) — however, the Iranians, unlike the Syrians, won’t reconcile with this.

Somewhere in the West — in Britain, the United States and probably in Israel, too, someone studied this week the footage of the breach of the British Embassy in Tehran. People leaned over computer screens and scrutinized the faces popping up on the display, their clothes, the slogans put on their signs. Intelligence reports have been compiled about the background of the incident and about those standing behind it, the Basij militias — the same units that brutally suppressed the green uprising in the wake of the elections in 2009. And it stands to reason that in these summaries, written or not, there repeatedly emerged one very meaningful name: General Qassem Suleimani.

One didn’t have to be a brilliant intelligence officer in order to grasp his connection to the happening; The demonstrators carried placards with his name on a part of them. The conclusions were immediate and harsh — in London, and in Washington, too. The event in Tehran has been a preplanned escalation under the direction of the Revolutionary Guards; their man for escalating is Suleimani. He is the head of the Quds force, an elite arm of the Army of the Guardians, or alternatively, the international terrorist organization of Iran. For the loyalists of the regime, he is a hero, in our terminology — the squad commander of the most exclusive commando unit. In the last years, he moved out of the relative obscurity of unofficial activities for the “export of the revolution” (code name for military and intelligence operations overseas), to prominence in Iranian politics.

Particularly impressive are pictures of him marching along with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei. These images testify to the mounting tension at the Iranian top — tension that commentators in the West find more and more difficult to analyze. According to one approach, the Revolutionary Guards and the spiritual leader are trying at the moment to neutralize Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and his proponents, who are regarded (surprisingly) as more pragmatic. The accepted interpretation identifies the Iranian president with the Revolutionary Guards, while more moderate elements (let’s say, the parliament speaker Ali Larijani) are attempting to bring about a blatant and direct contention between him and the spiritual leader. One thing is clear: The relationship between the supreme leader and the president is very stressed, to the point that Khamenei openly spoke this year of the cancellation of the president’s post.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the internal Iranian power struggle. In recent months, Hillary Clinton frankly divulged what was whispered so far: The West has no clue any longer who is at the helm in Iran, who makes the decisions. Inside this atmosphere of uncertainty, confrontation with the West — in the normal days, not a natural Iranian interest — might turn into a decisive political card. It’s not hard to assess that the Revolutionary Guards will [have] influence and perchance even determine who the winner is.

Suleimani is a classic figure of the Revolutionary Guards. He was born in Qum in 1957, apparently. His ascent began in the Iran-Iraq war, seemingly, because of his specialization in operations behind the enemy lines. If the revolution has a son, it’s Suleimani. His deep involvement in international terrorist acts led to the imposition of personal sanctions on him as early as 2007 — a very dubious honor. Suleimani was one of the key liaisons with Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s [top] ops officer liquidated in Syria, and he was also the one dispatched by the government in Tehran to help out Damascus in suppressing the protests against the Assad regime.

Maybe, in order to understand who Suleimani is, it’s worthwhile to relay a short story about his relations, or his war, with General David Petraeus in Iraq. During one of Petraeus’ first weeks in Iraq, in 2008, while struggling to stabilize the torn and bleeding country, he met with a high-ranking Iraqi of Shia origin. “I’ve got a message for you,” broke the Iraqi to the American general, “and the message is from Qassem Suleimani.” The Iraqi higher-up did not quote the communiqué. He pulled out the cell phone. On the screen, shares Petraeus, there appeared the following text: "General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who's going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”

The former national security adviser of Iraq commented in 2010 to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, “He is the most powerful man in Iraq without question. Nothing gets done without him.” And there’s only one person Suleimani is accountable to: the spiritual leader.

Six days ago the leadership of Basij, the militia, gathered to listen to the Quds boss, a great honor. The Iranian media covered the party. Suleimani’s words represent the prevailing spirit in the Revolutionary Guards. In one word: euphoria.

“The Islamic awakening is a voice that you cannot hear,” stated the general, and turned to the Americans. “You should know that today the U.S. is no longer faced with one Iran. Dozens of Irans have emerged in the region and the nations have woken up to U.S. (plots). You have not yet been able to make a correct analysis in this regard. But you should know that Egypt is the second Iran and another Iran has been born in the region. Bahrain, Libya and Yemen are other Irans.” He ridiculed the Western assassination attempts. “The U.S. and the West, even after lots of analysis, still do not know that every Basiji longs for the bliss (of martyrdom).” It’s been a speech outstanding in its belligerence — a hallmark of these days.

Over the past weeks, the twilight masquerade wrapping the showdown between Iran and the West is coming to an end. The consensual lies and pretenses are vacating the room for a startling sincerity, a very violent one. The IAEA report was the first, remarkable moment of the new epoch. It was IAEA, after all — the big fan of negotiation and diplomacy — that thoroughly eliminated the Iranian arguments. From the hour this large dam was breached, the topics considered taboo became a public, global discussion.

In Israel, this has been expressed in an extensive — and very persistent — public discourse about the need, or lack thereof, of a close Israeli attack, and primarily, about its possible costs. In the international community, the awareness is growing of a lack of action demonstrated by the UN institutions vis-à-vis Iran’s burly defenders, the Russians and the Chinese. The expressions and the measures are steadily intensifying, from Berlin and Washington.

No more general chat about an additional round of talks, but instead, a total disconnection of financial ties with Iran, as Britain did several weeks ago. Whereas Iran, as one can see from Suleimani’s citations, is increasingly embracing a provocative and unequivocal stance — and this is not a rhetorical matter. When the Iranians concoct the murder of the Saudi ambassador on United States soil, they are in fact conveying that every restraint is loosened, every [border] line is crossed and has yet to be crossed.

The escalation is already here. The war is already here. This is still a restricted warfare, but the flames are spreading. When Iran’s important missile base undergoes a sinister explosion that kills dozens [of people], including high-ranking officers, this isn’t still a surgical manipulation of intelligence agencies. And when indeed a considerable damage has been caused to the nuclear facility near Isfahan, two weeks later, the conclusion is that the offensive on the nuclear program leaped a stage — it could be a few. There’s only one detail: No one is sure at all who’s performing these maneuvers. Don’t get impressed by winks. A lengthy list of factors outside Iran, and within it as well, are interested in harming the regime. The implicit assumption that this is the work of a Western intelligence organization is not axiomatically true. On the other hand, perhaps there is someone over here interested in publicizing such news reports; a fact — the stuff about rocking Isfahan emanated from the “Times” reporter in Jerusalem.

The confrontation is drifting from clandestine fights and targeted assassinations toward strategically hitting Iranian military installations. Hits of this sort may have strategic significances. They are not just a way of “delaying” the Iranian nuclear program; even the planting of a sophisticated computer virus. The struggle between Iran and the West is moving toward the “casus belli” — reason for war. Facing these kinds of tactics, the Iranian regime is embarking on, and will embark on, a series of [counter] actions of its own. Some in the West argue that seizing the British Embassy was designed to distract the public attention in Iran from the assaults on its military facilities.

Destruction of the embassy may be read as a strategic Iranian hint to the West and to the world: Pay attention, you hurt us — but we can also hurt you. Iran and the Revolutionary Guards have enough convenient and instant targets to hit, whether we’re talking the Persian Gulf or Iran itself. Contrary to the Syrians, after the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Dir a-Zur, the Iranian regime practically gave a notice: We won’t show complete restraint in response to a serious injury of the strategic bases. We can rejoin. We will rejoin. Now, when the oil prices are surging, and the situation is exuding the smell of violence, a number of international bodies will endeavor to quench this fire. Weather permitting, we’ll enter again a long period of relative calm. After the last couple of weeks, the probability of this looks limited.

Few are those who estimated that this is how the conflict with Iran would develop. The leading scenario was a surprise airborne attack, a massive one — and before it, conceivably, a wave of assassination attempts and cases of sabotage. The reality taking shape is a far cry from that, and much more resembles a war of attrition. Unknown agents blow up a valuable base of the Iranians. The Iranians react in another spot on the globe, or by the termination of their relationship with Britain. One can guess it would not be the end. History teaches that soon, we’ll hear about a high alert in the Israeli and Jewish institutions around the world.

Irrespective of the sharp controversy attributed to the Israeli senior echelons around the option of a strike, the present government deviates in its public declarations from the classic Israeli line on the subject matter of the Iranian nuke. This course was at first formulated by Rabin, and later on adopted in the governments of Sharon and Olmert. All these governments carried out necessary measures, some of them very courageous, for ensuring Israeli security interests. But the diplomatic line they took was absolutely different from the rhetoric of Netanyahu and Barak.

The basic assertion has been always selfsame: The issue of Iranian nuclear capacity is not an Israeli problem, but rather a global one. Israel does not claim to spearhead in the broad daylight, tackling the trouble. Off the record, things have been said explicitly: Israel not only doesn’t claim — it doesn’t want to. The national interests of Israel dictate a worldwide coalition against Iran; forging a deep identity bond between the battle with Iran and Jerusalem is likely to lead to the opposite result. This talk about diplomacy clouded quintessence. If and when an accident occurred in Iran, no Israeli official would necessarily hurry to brief a foreign correspondent on the nature of the happening.

When the leaders of Israel were asked publicly, they avoided a wink. Everybody understands winks. Sharon and Olmert preferred for Israel to remain behind the scenes. Netanyahu came, and suddenly Iran is Germany and we are in 1938, and there’s an urge to mobilize the world media and so on and so forth. The current Israeli captains will say: The information at our disposal is unlike and more worrisome than that our predecessors had. We have to proceed this way. Not everybody agrees; the evidence to that is the interview the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan gave to Ilana Dayan in “Uvda” this week. We can be confident that he is pretty much updated.

Putting us in the spotlight is very tempting. But we are not the center. Moreover, what looks like an Iranian buildup is an illusion as well. The big losers, whether they would admit that or indulge in nationalist mantras, are the Iranians themselves. In front of a weakening Iraq and the American folding-up in Afghanistan, in the full swing of the surge of revolutions in the Arab world, Iran could have become a regional leader even without a military nuclear program. The scope of population, level of education, oil revenues and political state of affairs — all these could have driven it to a decennium of diplomatic and economic blossoming.

Nonetheless, the Islamic Revolution that to this day has not managed to recreate the standard of living in Iran under the Shah Pahlavi’s rule now is back to square one. For decades Iran tried in its cumbersome way to achieve global recognition. Tremendous efforts were invested in the creation of business and even political foundations of relations with the countries in Europe, Asia and South America. Now, in the fourth decade of the debacle, the Iranians find themselves exactly where they started. The Western world watched them with concern and contempt then, and it returned to stare at them with the same look today, more than 30 years afterward.

The Iranians can tell themselves that the whole region is transforming into Iran — but in Tehran, there are still initiated electricity outages due to shortage of energy. And this is in one of the world’s leading oil producers. Iran has no independent refining capability, its industry is old-fashioned and the economy is faltering, corrupt and closed in. The people’s support for the coup d'état switched to an overt rebellion that has been repressed by the most ferocious means.

Its military heads are victims of assassinations, and its bases suffer incursions and mysterious blasts. Iran is a hated, isolated country, one that evokes an agitated backlash of revulsion even from the cold-tempered British. In 1979, the Iranians took over the American Embassy; in 2011 they ruined the British one. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a failure. A dangerous failure.