Iran and the United States: Foreign Policy during the Khomeini Years

Introduction

By: Matthew RJ Brodsky

            Iran and the United States share a relatively brief but troubled history. America’s involvement in Iran began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensified as the American-Soviet Cold War smoldered during the later half of the 20th Century. Iran never loomed large upon the horizon of the American public’s list of foreign concerns. For the United States, the defining moment in their relationship came on 4 November 1979, when on the heals of the Iranian Revolution, 66 Americans were seized from their embassy in Iran and held hostage for 444 days.1 Americans saw this as a blatant and undeserved attack and felt powerless as the hostage crisis dragged on. This left a terrible scar on the American psyche and has colored foreign policy decisions towards Iran ever since. Americans today, for the most part, remain cloaked in a shroud of ignorance, ever asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’
             For Iranians, America’s 1953 bloodless coup d’état that toppled Mosaddeq was a pivotal moment, creating a legacy etched into the Iranian consciousness. While Mosaddeq’s strategy for oil nationalization relied heavily upon American economic aid, in Iran he is remembered as the man who stood up to the West. The coup brought the Shah back. Iranians who looked to the United States to rid themselves of Britain’s yoke woke up to the new reality that they had merely replaced the British with the Americans. The Iranian sense that other nations have constantly meddled in their internal affairs has remained a driving force behind foreign policy decisions since the 1979 revolution.
A new generation of Iranian intellectuals emerged in the 1960s, reversing previously held convictions and espousing the view that the West was the cause of Iran’s problems.2 By 1977, Iran had become a tinderbox due to economic conditions, the Iranian people’s dissatisfaction with the Shah’s modernization efforts, and disenchantment with the influence of Western values penetrating the country. With nearly all segments of society rising to challenge the Shah, many sought to mold and control the revolutionary explosion.

Ultimately, the group that prevailed were the radical mullahs who held three distinct advantages:

  1. their network of mosques were instrumental in organizing a base of support and disseminating their message to the largest segment of Iranian society;
  2. the powerful identification among the population with Shi’a Islam;
  3. they had a man by the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini who would quickly become the most popular figure in Iran and leader of the revolution shortly after his return to Tehran on 1 February 1979. As Richard Cottam explains: “Khomeini had the ability to define the revolution, and the more perceptive of the other revolutionary leaders understood this well.”3
             Khomeini sold the Iranian people a dream. His popularity did not stem from his political philosophy of velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent) whereby the utopian Islamic state would be ruled by a man considered to be most learned in interpreting the Qur’an and Sharia law. Most Iranians didn’t support him because they wanted an Islamic republic; they supported him because the dream he was selling was that of a better future.
Bernard Lewis explains that the revolutionary’s goal was to “to sweep away all the alien and infidel accretions that had been imposed on Muslim lands and peoples in the era of alien domination and influence and to restore the true and divinely given Islamic order…The symbols and slogans of the revolution were Islamic because these alone had the power to mobilize the masses.”4 Three specific goals emerged:
  1. to gain and maintain power and stability;
  2. to implement their ideology as a means of improving the social, economic, political, and cultural problems facing the country;
  3. 3) to export the revolution across the world, beginning with the Middle East.
             As such, the government that emerged under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 was the exact opposite of the previous government under the Shah in almost every conceivable way. In the foreign policy arena, this meant that whereas Iran previously enjoyed a close relationship with the United States, the Americans were now perceived as absolute evil to such an obsessive degree that hating America became one of the most important and enduring symbols of the revolution.
The greatest of all accusations Khomeini leveled at America was that they were the ‘Great Satan (sheytan-e bozorg).’ This charge is very telling as it seeks not to speak to any specific American policy or specific wrong perpetrated by the West. Satan is not depicted in the Qur’an as an imperialist or exploiter; he is a seducer, as explained in the Qur’an (114:5) 5, “the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men.” Here one sees that it is a cultural and civilization-based hatred of America far beyond a political and policy-related hatred. It was one of the most important pillars of Khomeini’s revolutionary ideology.
According to Khomeini, the West was to blame for nearly everything. It was the West who divided the Muslim lands into fictitious states and implanted the idea of nationalism – an imperial plot against Islam.6 For Khomeini, the revolution was a long over-due response to the West in a war of Islam against the crusading infidels. Because of foreign domination of Iranian affairs, the foreign policy of the new Islamic Republic would lie in the slogan, ‘Neither East nor West.’
             Various historians have used similar phrases to describe the Iranian internal struggle for foreign policy orientation during the Khomeini years. It was a struggle between idealists and realists,7 hardliners and reformers,8 dogma and pragmatism,9 ideologues and pragmatists,10 and radicals and pragmatists.11
            The purpose of this paper is to examine the results of this Iranian struggle during the Khomeini years as it pertained to the United States, and to examine American foreign policy towards Iran during the same period. In so doing, this paper seeks to answer whether Iran’s foreign policy was guided by dogma or pragmatism, and whether Washington’s policy was offensive and deliberate, or defensive and reactive. This study focuses on the following events:
  1. The 1979-1981 hostage crisis;
  2. American-Iranian involvement in Lebanon;
  3. The Iran-Iraq war.
             The central thesis here is that Khomeini’s American policy was the product of the tug of war between the ideologues and pragmatists and that from an Iranian perspective, where the starting point was that America is the ‘Great Satan,’ the ideologues held sway through most of the 1980s; however, Khomeini gradually began tilting toward the pragmatists by the late 1980s.
             In Iran there has always existed a troubled but enduring co-existence between religion and nationalism. As Richard Cottam predicted over a decade before the revolution, “if a conflict of the two sets of values is likely anywhere it should occur in Iran.”12 The competition between the nationalist and pan-Islamic vision is not mutually exclusive. Elements of one have contributed to the forces of the other making one vision dominant at one time and recede at another. The dominance of one vision at a specific time does not mean the other has disappeared from either the discourse or the culture.13 In this sense, the nature of revolutionary Iran’s foreign policy was not linear, or left or right; it was “kaleidoscopic.”14
            The Khomeini years after the revolution until his death on 3 June 1989 were defining in that it left a legacy that both Iran and the West struggle with to this day. Khomeini was able to sculpt the new Islamic Republic of Iran in the manner he saw fit. An ongoing dilemma has been Iranian nationalism versus pan-Islamism. Ramazani suggests that during the Khomeini years, “An examination of Iran’s words and deeds and its theories and practices makes clear that Tehran’s foreign policy has been shaped largely by an acute interplay between its domestic situation, not merely factional politics, and its external environment, not merely superpower behavior.”15
            The two major foreign policy issues that rose to the top were the implementation of a ‘neither East nor West’ policy and the export of the ‘Islamic’ revolution. Iran’s course was set by Khomeini’s internal struggle between dogma and pragmatism and which Iranian political faction he would put his weight behind in any given situation, over any given issue. Dogma prevailed in the first years following his consolidation of power.
            The Reagan administration came to office wanting as little as possible to do with Iran. They wanted to focus on the Soviet Union, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and Libya, who appeared to be the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism. It was the height of the Cold War and Washington saw Iran’s ‘neither East nor West’ strategy as something that would keep Iran clear of the Soviet sphere of influence. Thus, Reagan hoped to put Iran on the backburner. Reality proved otherwise.
            When Reagan left office eight years later, America and Iran were in a virtual undeclared war. The United States managed to do this without an over-reaching or coherent policy – there was no clearly defined goal nor was there a strategy that would explain how they would reach that goal. This American lack of policy and direction was matched only by the previous Carter administration’s lack of preparedness and policy once the revolution began to take shape.16 Both administrations suffered from deep divisions among their advisors, secretaries, and cabinet, and both presidents tried to forge a path down the middle, vacillating left and right from time to time.
            Through the hostage crisis, their involvement in Lebanon, the Iran-contra affair, and the Iran-Iraq war, Washington learned that involvement with Iran, willingly or unwillingly, would eventually be regrettable. America’s Iran policy – if it could even be called that – was reactive and defensive to the tug of war between Iranian dogma and pragmatism, between pan-Islamism and nationalism, and between Iranian domestic interests.
 
1 54 of the 66 Americans seized would remain hostages for 444 days.
2 Menashri, David. Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power. London: Frank Cass, 2001. p. 184.
3 Cottam, Richard W. "Inside Revolutionary Iran." The Middle East Journal 43.2 (1989): 168-85. p. 169.
4 Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East : A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. New York: Scribner, 1995. p. 377.
5 Lewis. The Middle East. p. 321.
6 Menashri. Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran. pp. 185-187.
7 Ramazani, Rouhollah K. "Iran's Foreign Policy: Contending Orientations." The Middle East Journal 43.2 (1989): 202-17. p. 212.
8 Keddie, Nikki R., and Yann Richard. Modern Iran : Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003.
9 Menashri. Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran.
10 Lewis. The Middle East. p. 379.
11 Pollack, Kenneth M. The Persian Puzzle : The Conflict between Iran and America. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2004.
12 Cottam, Richard W. Nationalism in Iran. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979. p. 9.
13 Ram, Haggay. "Exporting Iran's Revolution: Steering a Path between Pan-Islam and Nationalism." Religious Radicalism in the Greater Middle East. Eds. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman and Efraim Inbar. Cass Series on Political Violence No. 4. London: Frank Cass & Co, 1997. 7-24. p. 21.
14 Ramazani. "Iran's Foreign Policy: Contending Orientations." p. 211.
15 ---. "Iran's Foreign Policy: Contending Orientations." p. 202.
16 Moens, Alexander. "President Carter's Advisors and the Fall of the Shah." Political Science Quarterly 106.2 (1991): 211-37. Misreading Iran became a bi-partisan issue in the United States.