Wounds of history shaping US policy on Iran

Luv Puri

Luv Puri
Journalist and author

THE volatile US-Iran relations, as a consequence of the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, are a prime source of concern for the global community. President Trump and his team have justified the assassination on account of alleged immediate security threats facing the country from Iran.

General Soleimani is credited with having sponsored the activities of the dispersed ecosystem of the Shiite militias in Iraq and Lebanon to Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, that have allegedly directly harmed the interests of the US and its allies, including the killing of the US soldiers deployed in Iraq. However, the option of plausible deniability was available with the US President and this would have left a few footprints. In fact, this would have been similar to a number of attacks carried out by Iran and its offshoots against the US and its allies in the region.

This was not the case. President Trump decided to claim the assassination of the Iranian General and spelled out the reasons for the attack. This approach indicates that there is a strong domestic impulse that is shaping the American policy towards Iran. Iran is etched in the psyche of some sections of the American society since the infamous Iranian hostage crisis. This is evident in the war of tweets between the leaderships of the two countries after the assassination. The US President, through a tweet, threatened to ‘target 52 Iranian sites’ (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago).

Fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. Many attribute the electoral loss of President Jimmy Carter, a Democratic Party leader, to the impact of the hostage crisis. This sowed the seeds of the Republican Party’s advocacy of a muscular interventionist foreign policy in the decades to follow.

After 1981, no US President dared to engage Iran, fearing that this would be unpopular domestically. Another impediment was Iran’s nuclear project and its potential in unleashing a power imbalance in the region, particularly for its allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. In 2002, the last Republican President, George W. Bush, had clubbed Iran with Iraq and North Korea and termed the three countries infamously as the axis of evil. The détente had also been opposed viscerally by the prosperous Iranian diaspora living in large numbers in the southern part of California, that is in and around the Metropolitan Los Angeles. Most of the diaspora had escaped Iran during the revolution and were highly educated members of the society. Some were personal victims of the new elite that took over Iran in 1979. It is common to spot every year, many first and second generation Americans of Iranian descent holding placards against the alleged human rights violations in Iran during the opening of the General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Against this background, President Obama took a domestic political risk when he injected realism into the Iran-US relationship. During his second term, he decided to lend critical US support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015. Immediately after the deal, as expected, there was visceral opposition from the Republican Party. President Obama’s second term also marked the appointment of former career diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif as Iran’s foreign minister. He was seen as a moderate and a potential meaningful interlocutor by the US. One of the arguments in support was that he had studied in the United States for a decade.

Some statements emanating from the US governing elite in the post-assassination period of General Soleimani reek of a pattern similar to that of the previous Republican administration under George W Bush. One of the justifications given by President George W Bush to invade Iraq was the allegation that President Saddam Hussain had linkages with Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Though he was responsible for extreme human rights violations of ethnic minorities like the Kurds and was a brutal dictator, his alleged linkage with Osama bin Laden could not have been more removed from the truth and available evidence. Saddam, who was supported by the US during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, was a Ba’athist, a political philosophy that professed Arab nationalism and shunned religious extremism. Osama bin Laden had often criticised him for that.

In the same vein, US Vice-President Mike Pence linked General Soleimani to the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, Iran was one of the first few Islamic countries that supported the American assault on the Taliban in 2001. All 9/11 attackers were Sunni Muslims and 15 of the 19 were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one from Egypt. Except in the Shia-dominated areas, the assassination of General Soleimani has not provoked mass-scale anger towards the US in the Muslim world. The Shia population is approximately 200 million around the world against the Sunni Muslim population of around 1.5 billion.

While reacting to the assassination, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, who has worked in the National Security Council (NSC), Samantha Power, stated that President Trump had purged Iran specialists and abolished the National Security Council processes to review the contingencies.

With disregard to expertise and rigorous review of the intended actions, the wounds of history seem to leave a strong imprint over President Trump’s Iran policy. As the campaign for the 2020 presidential elections intensifies, Iran will be one of the foreign policy talking points. It is not exactly known how much it will still resonate with the American electorate, with 38 as the median age, nearly 38 years after the Iran hostage crisis.