PREVIEW： Realpolitik #2 ｜ The Geopolitics of Iran
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Summary
In this episode of RealPolitik, I talk about the history of U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11, and why Iran and Israel have been enemies for a long time. I also talk about Iran's relationship with Israel and its relationship with the Soviet Union.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Modad.
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Today, I'm going to be talking about the geopolitics of Iran and trying to help us understand this country a little bit better.
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First, I want to start with a little bit of context here, and I'm going to start with a favorite video of mine of General Wesley Clark,
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a former NATO commander, describing what the U.S. policy for the Middle East has been since 2001.
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About 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
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I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me,
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and one of the generals called me in. He said, sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second.
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I said, well, you're too busy. He said, no, no. He says, we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
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This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, we're going to war with Iraq. Why?
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He said, I don't know. He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
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So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?
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He said, no, no. He says, there's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go
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to war with Iraq. He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists,
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but we've got a good military and we can take down governments. And he said, I guess if the
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only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail. So I came back to see
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him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, are we still going
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to war with Iraq? And he said, oh, it's worse than that. He said, he reached over on his desk.
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He picked up a piece of paper. He said, I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs,
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meeting the secretary of defense's office today. And he said, this is a memo that describes how
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we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon,
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Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. I said, is it classified? He said, yes, sir.
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I said, I said, well, don't show it to me. So for the neoconservatives, the plan was always to
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at some point get rid of Iran and to deal with the Islamic revolution and terminate it essentially
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in order to give Israel security. But why are Iran and Israel enemies? It doesn't necessarily make
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sense. They're not exactly neighbors or anything. And the answer is that they weren't always enemies.
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Biblically speaking, Cyrus the Great was a great friend of the Jewish people. He allowed them to
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return to Jerusalem and to the kingdom of Judah after the Babylonian exile. And there's praise of
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him in the Bible. Previously in the days of the Shah, the former ruler of Iran, who was overthrown by the
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Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran and Israel had a pretty good relationship. Israel built a lot of Iranian
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infrastructure. I believe it included sewage systems, the airport in Tahrani, a bunch of other infrastructure
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in the country. There was a robust oil trade between the two sides. There was a lot of Israeli middlemen
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working as intermediaries for the sale of Iranian oil. So the relationship wasn't always bad. And it's not
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really based on geography that there's this enmity. If you look at a map of Iran, which is always where
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I like to start, Iran is over here. Then you've got Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and then here you have Israel.
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And so just from a geographic perspective, it makes some sense for Iran and Israel to be friends in
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order to contain the Arabs between them and to hold the threat from the Arabs. Remember in the
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mid-20th century, Arab nationalism was on the rise. The Arabs of Iraq, for example, wanted to be able to
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take this part of Iran, Khuzestan or Ahwaz, which is majority Arab. So there is reason for them to cooperate.
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But this all changed with the Islamic Revolution. And in 1979, after, you know, disturbances in 1953, where the CIA
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and the British and Iranian military officers helped remove an increasingly unpopular prime minister of Iran by the
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name of Mossaddiq. In 1963, there were big protests against the Shah. These kept on escalating as a result of the
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Shah's policy of trying to modernize Iran too quickly. And that modernization was seen as un-Islamic. And what led to
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the overthrow of the Shah and this change in relationship was an alliance between the far-left communists of the
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Tudah party, the Reds, and the black turbans, the religious groups led by, among others, Khomeini and his
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mentors, which culminated in the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in, I think it was January 1979, that the
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Shah decides that he's going on vacation in order to avoid the consequences of the protests. And then in February
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of 1979, Imam Khomeini returns. And he returns, and there is this expectation on the part of the Carter
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administration that Khomeini might be some kind of just figurehead, rather than an absolute autocratic
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ruler of Iran. That turns out not to be the case. Khomeini drafts a new constitution and a new policy.
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In November of 1979, a bunch of students that are associated with the Islamic Republic's regime
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end up taking over the American embassy. And after the takeover of the American embassy,
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new supreme leader of Iran, Khomeini, declares America as the great Satan, and the Soviet Union as
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the lesser Satan, and Israel as the small Satan, I suppose. And this was the way in which the Islamist
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rulers of Iran wanted to make it clear that they were charting a new pathway that focused on Iran's
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Islamic identity, as opposed to the secularizing and modernizing efforts of the Shah. So this is the
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context in which we have the Islamic revolution. I don't want to bore you with a long historical
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discourse, but the idea for the new authorities in Iran under the 1979 Islamic regime was for them to be
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able to have a strongly Islamist identity and a strongly Islamic identity in order to make Iran into a leader
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of the Muslim world. This was always a bit of a tall order, because as this graphic will show you in a
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moment, firstly, big percentages of Muslims don't even recognize the Shia as Muslims. So big percentage
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of Sunni Muslims, you have here examples of, you know, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia. Incidentally,
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the Palestinian territories, 40% of Palestinians don't even recognize that the Shia are Muslims.
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Yet Iran under Khomeini wanted to claim leadership of the entire Muslim world. So that was a little bit
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of a problem. The Shia, you have to remember, are a small minority of Muslims, maybe 15%, maybe 10 to 20%,
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something in that range. So them trying to claim the mantle of leadership of the Muslim world was always
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going to be a little bit of a challenge, shall we say. It wasn't really going to work very well. And yet,
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the Iranians decided that they wanted to do this. Intellectually speaking, Khomeini, the leader of the
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Islamic revolution, had translated the work of a man named Sayyid Qutb. I think we'll do an episode of the
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Muslim Brotherhood at some point. Sayyid Qutb was a key figure in the Muslim Brotherhood who articulated
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the need for jihad in order to re-Islamize society. And Khomeini, having seen the secularizing
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influence of the Shah, wanted to do something similar. And so he was really aiming for this
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kind of leadership role in order to become the key power in the region that was around him and in
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order to become the key power in the broader Muslim world. So this kind of ambition really played a role.
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So for Iran to try to lead the Muslim world when it's, you know, a majority Shia was always going
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to be a total order. In front of you here is a map of the Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East region.
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Blue are the Shia, red are the Sunnis. And really, this is an excellent map, firstly. But what it shows
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you is that Iran and southern Iraq are the only really majority Shia areas. There is a Shia population
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in Syria. These are the Alawites. Technically, they're heretical, and they're not included
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among mainstream Shia Islam. That's another conversation that I won't get into. The Alawites
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are an offshoot, if you will, of Shia Islam, just as the Druze in Israel and Lebanon and Syria.
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And in Lebanon, you see a decent chunk of Shia population. You see Shia in the eastern province
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of Saudi Arabia. This is where the oil sits. And you have Shia in Kuwait, again, a very oil-rich
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country. And then some here in northern Yemen and in southern Saudi Arabia. Again, these are not
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exactly the right kind of Shia. These are Zaidi Shia. So the way to summarize it is that mainstream
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Shia Islam believes that there were 12 imams, religious leaders, who were all descended from
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the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad. And these 12 imams are infallible. The Zaidis, the ones that you see
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in Yemen here, these guys stop at five imams. And the Ismailis, they stop at seven imams. Whereas
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mainstream Shia Islam continues down for all 12. So this is quickly a map of the Shia world.
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And it shows you why Iran has influence in Yemen, why Iran has influence in Iraq, Syria,
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and in Lebanon. This influence of the Iranians is primarily Shia-driven. But Iran wanted to be the
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leader of the Muslim world. And it just couldn't do that. It couldn't make it work. Now going to the
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geography of Iran, if you look at this country, it's incredibly mountainous, as I hope the map will
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show you. You've got this massive sort of salt desert in the middle. It's separated from Iraq by a massive
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mountain chain. And it has this big vulnerability in the south, in the Ahwaz area. And the oil is
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concentrated here. And the oil is exported from a tiny little place called Khadig Island, which you
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should be able to see right here. This is where the processing for export of Iranian crude actually
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happens. And that's where the Iranians can send their oil into the rest of the world.
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And the Iranian exports, as I'd mentioned, happen from this Khadig Island. This is an important point
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to understand, because when you look at a map of the region, the ability to export oil is located in
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these tiny locations. The way that oil exports work is that you need a very specialized, very dedicated
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port to be able to do it. And each of those countries that are in the Gulf pretty much just have
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one of those. The Emiratis have more than that. But this is where most of the oil exporting happens.
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And if this kind of infrastructure is knocked out, if it's threatened by, say, Iranian missiles,
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that pretty much takes care of it. You can no longer export oil. So the Iranians export from
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Khadig Island. The Iraqis have a platform in Basra. The Kuwaitis, mostly from Ahmadi.
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The Saudis, you can see that from Ras Al-Nura and Qatar. They have Ras Laffan and they have a terminal
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up north for the gas exports. These assets are highly concentrated. And understanding this very
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high concentration helps you understand Iran's military strategy. Because there are these critical
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nodes from which oil can be exported, it makes sense for the Iranians to have precision-guided
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ballistic missiles that can knock out this kind of infrastructure in the event of a war and cripple
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their enemies. Their enemies rely on American forces and on the U.S. Air Force and on American
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technology, jets, etc., etc. So for the Iranians, given that they want to be the dominant player in their
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region, they want to be able to threaten critical assets, they can't build jets, and they often can't
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afford to buy an air force the size, say, of Saudi Arabia's or the UAE because they have smaller oil
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exports, what do you do about that? You build a lot of advanced missiles and you try to solve the
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problem that way. Given the Shia map of this region, given the religious dynamics, the Iranian strategy
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that we've seen of trying to create proxy forces in countries that are aligned with them also makes
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a lot of sense. The Khomeini revolution was always intended to be an exportable product. Khomeini wanted
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to not just lead the Muslim world, but he first had to lead his own Shia. And in order to lead the Shia,
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he needed to have reliable partners, reliable allies in countries that had a decent Shia
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minority or even majority for that dream to happen. So you ended up with the Iranians working very hard
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after the 2003 invasion on cultivating militias in Iraq and being able to expand their power in Iraq.
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By the way, all of the Gulf Arab states told the Americans in 2002 and in 2003 that if they
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actually went ahead with invading Iraq, it was going to strengthen Iran. And strengthening Iran
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would be a nightmare for them, given that Iran was a revolutionary country committed to dominating
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Islam. The Americans didn't listen to their regional allies. And we got the so-called Shia crescent,
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which is a network of governments and militias that were aligned with Iran, extending from Lebanon
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to Syria to Iraq, and therefore becoming a significantly bigger threat to Saudi Arabia
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and a significantly bigger threat to Turkey. You have to remember how much the Americans ignored
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their own allies and all of their Middle Eastern policies. So the Iranians cultivated the strategy and
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it was a perfectly reasonable strategy. Why did they want to do it? Well, again, because of geography.
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Considering that Iran's oil sits in this region, which is where there are no mountains,
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considering that this is the region that was found easiest to invade by the Iraqis during the
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Iran-Iraq war, considering that Iran has always been vulnerable to being invaded from this part of
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the country because that's the main way through. The rest of the country is too mountainous to send armies
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through it. They saw that they must be in control of Iraq in order to be safe. And when the Americans
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gave them that opportunity in 2003 by invading and dismantling the Ba'ath party, the ruling party of
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Iraq, and dismantling the Iraqi military, which was the only challenge against the Iranians, the Iranians
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took advantage. They fought Iraq from 1980 to 1988 in an incredibly bloody war. Each side lost at least
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hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It really forged the Islamic revolution and it forced the Islamic
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revolution to be more disciplined and to be more rational because having a war really imposes that on
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you. When you're fighting a war, you have to behave in a more competent way if you're going to survive.
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And that's why we see the Iranian military being, you know, not as rubbish as the others. That's why we
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see Iran focusing on building its own independent defense industry, being able to build drones that end up
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being imported en masse by Russia and copied by Russia and the Russia-Ukrainian war. That's why we see
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the emphasis on missiles because, you know, they fought this kind of war and they've tried to figure
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out the technologies that will work for them while challenging bigger and better armies that are
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equipped by the West. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,