Iran Without Khomeini

...8 / AUGUST 1989 Michael Ledeen IRAN WITHOUT KHOMEINI We are consoled during the official period of mourning by the knowledge that opportunities for better relations with the Ayatollah's successors will come-our way if we are clever and patient...

...For Khamenei is no threat to the serious contenders for Khomeini's power, not to Rafsanjani, not to Interior Minister Mohtashemi, and not to the son of the prophet, Ahmad Khomeini...

...The good news is that, with such a background, he can be supported by people with a wide range of convictions...

...Yet at the moment we have little to say about Iran's future, because Ronald Reagan insisted that the release of our hostages precede any new relationship, and because George Shultz refused to do anything to develop a coherent Iran policy...

...q We do not wish to see Iran fall prey to the Lebanese disease of disintegration and civil war...

...At the moment, such an effort would be fruitless, for no fundamental policy decisions can be taken with the political class so intensely riven by the power game...

...And from Rafsanjani to Khamenei, they were certain that Bush was the man with whom they were dealing...

...We do not know the details of this initial power struggle, but the most likely explanation is that the wise men wanted an interim period in which the strong candidates would fight with each other to determine who is the most powerful...

...Keep your sense of humor...

...Since no quarter must be given in this holy war, the radicals' notion of effective policy includes a relentless export of Khomeini's Shiite Islam by all means, including terror, and a highly centralized control over all aspects of life in Iran, from religion to commerce...

...Curiously, the CIA and the vast majority of our journalists long held that Montazeri was one of the worst of the radical extremists, only coming to recognize the truth of the matter when he was deposed as Khomeini's heir...

...But don't agree on a new relationship without getting the hostage matter resolved (as the British Foreign Office did...

...C ontrary to all our expectations and long experience, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini finally died...

...It should be evident that we need an Iran policy, and those who have discussed the matter with George Bush are unanimous in reporting that the President both understands and endorses this view...

...While much of this savage war is purely personal (one must remember that treachery is the national sport of Iran), much of it is intensely...

...L ooking back over the past four years, we can see that there were "windows of opportunity" when the conservatives temporarily held the upper hand...

...It's going to be a long one...

...Their uneasiness guarantees that they will pay very close attention to us when we finally decide to re-establish contact with them...

...At the opposite end of the limited political spectrum come the conservatives (often mislabeled "moderates...

...That is where the matter stands today...

...That is one reason why they both welcomed and feared our Iran Initiative in 1985, for while they were pleased that we had finally established contact with them, they were afraid that our plans might not be good news for the leadership of the country...

...T he situation is much the same to- I day, and this offers a glimmer of hope that the United States might yet be able to have a voice in Iran's future...

...Many thousands of men and women have died in Khomeini's Iran, and in recent months they have even died in street fighting...

...During this period we negotiated an end to Iranian terrorism against Americans and American targets, started to talk about a new relationship between the two countries, and obtained the release of the Rev...

...that accounts for his elevation...

...The bad news is that he has made many enemies, and has yet to pay the inevitable price for losing the war...

...Thus, from the first days of the Islamic revolution, Montazeri and his followers argued for contacts with the West, including the United States...

...In death as in life, Khomeini remained the grand master of mass hysteria, which after all accounted for a great deal of his lamentable success...

...That power struggle will be the dominant theme in Iranian affairs for the next several months...

...The Iranians' view of America is disarmingly simple: the CIA commands the country, and much of the world, and George Bush is—indeed has been for many years—its leader...

...The third window of Western opportunity came in the spring of 1988, when Iran normalized relations with France, Canada, Kuwait, and Great Britain...

...They were not the missiles that the Iranians expected, and the event convinced them that they were being tricked by the Great Satan...

...He was chosen as Khomeini's successor after the electors rejected Ahmad's candidacy...

...During the Iran-contra years, it emerged that the Iranian leaders believed that Bush was the only official who mattered in Washington, precisely because he had been head of the CIA...

...Yet Khamenei is chief of state, and he will remain there even after the election of a new president a couple of months from now...

...But men like George Shultz were not about to go down a road that had so recently carried so many of their former colleagues over the precipice, and the opportunity was missed...

...Iran is a country of enormous geopolitical significance to the West, sitting as it does astride the Soviets' potential avenue to the Gulf, and possessing as it does one of the largest and strongest armies in the Middle East...

...Would the most powerful man in the world lose an election...

...And the media's favorite "moderate," the leader of Iran's parliament, Mr...

...The window slammed shut when the unfortunate delivery of HAWK missiles took place in late November...

...Between these two blocs comes the usual swing group, moving from one pole to the other according to opportunity and careful sniffing of the political breezes...

...This is the man who, for the moment at least, has taken charge in Tehran, and the analysts of chicken entrails and the readers of tea leaves must begin their predictions with him, and with President Khamenei, selected as head of state by the council of wise men that met immediately after Khomeini's death to select his first successor...

...This means that the "consensus" in Tehran can shift dramatically from day to day, and that many of the policies of the Islamic Republic are subject to rapid change...

...These men, led by Montazeri, hold that centralized control over economic ac12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 tivity is counterproductive, and that if Iran remains isolated from the Western world it will eventually find itself in mortal crisis...

...And the West now has enough experience with Iran so that we know the basic rules: • Don't talk about hostages until you've worked out the basic relationship between the two countries (just as the French did...

...For the moment, the dominant figure is Rafsanjani, who has variously represented the "opening to the West" (when he served as the primary channel to General Secord, Colonel North, the CIA's George Cave, and Albert Hakim), the "war party" (when he personally took command of the campaign against Iraq . . . and lost the war), and the "opening to the East" (his latest incarnation, citing the alleged urgings of Khomeini to deal with the lovable Gorbachev...

...Our very inaction only increases their fears and suspicions, for, in their view of the world, this means that they have been unable to discover what we are really doing...

...He called it "Hollywood propaganda...

...His election therefore came as no surprise in Tehran...

...From our standpoint, this also means that our ability to play a role in the future of Iran may come and go, and that any effective American policy must be able to shift as rapidly as the mood of the mullahs...

...They don't expect us to tell them the truth (or quote the real price) the first time around and they are in no rush to resolve anything...

...The Iranians view negotiations (barter) as an integral part of life...

...But the Iranians themselves gave us a funeral worthy of Cecil B. De Mille, complete with millions of mourners, frenzied keening, and even a final assault on the corpse for swatches of the great man's garments...

...Ali Khamenei was no one's first choice to follow Khomeini as the second leader of the Islamic Republic, and Michael Ledeen is the author of Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair and (with William Lewis) Debacle: The American Failure in Iran...

...Khamenei's politics are well known: he is a radical, thoroughly supportive of the most extreme version of Khomeini's visions, from the violent export of the Shiite revolution to the systematic use of terror to accomplish it...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 13...

...This promising interlude was abruptly terminated by the Iran-contra scandal...

...Sooner or later those bills will come due, and we shall have to wait to see if he has enough credit to pay them...

...The only negotiations that work are secret...

...The third window was sealed in the wake of the Rushdie affair, which carried the radicals to new heights of hegemony...

...The Revolutionary Guards have been divided into factions, each serving a different leader, and they have killed dozens of each other, and even mullahs and ayatollahs have been murdered by the private armies that roam the streets of Tehran and other major cities...

...This event had been predicted so many times over the past twenty years that when it fmally happened it seemed almost an anticlimax...

...Meanwhile, the new battle front is domestic, and it is difficult to do justice to the cast of characters in Tehran, or to the sort of war of all against all that is now under way...

...It is quite likely that we could have done the same had we had the courage to try...

...Rafsanjani, is a classic pol: clever, devious, happy to embrace any position so long as it is popular at the moment, a searcher for power at any price...

...Their immediate problem is to decipher our secret plans, so that they can act accordingly...

...Either of these developments would greatly complicate our search for peace and stability in the Middle East, and might well increase the terrorist threats to Americans...

...Benjamin Weir from his gaol in Lebanon...

...The "radicals"—the keepers of the holy flame of Khomeiniism—view Iran as an island of purity in a sea of filth and degradation, and they have two overriding concerns: to maintain the purity of the revolution, and to combat the dark forces that surround them, from the Sunni monsters in such places as Baghdad and Riyadh, to the Zionist entity in Jerusalem, to the Great Satan in the White House...

...The same cannot be said about the would-be leaders he left behind...

...The competing factions in Tehran each suspect that one of the others is favored by the Americans, and there is a great deal of dark thinking going on right now by those Iranians charged with forecasting the future actions of the United States...

...The first of these came in the second half of 1985, when the Iran Initiative was born...

...His own original hand-picked successor, the Ayatollah Montazeri, was purged before he even had a chance to wear the mantle of religious leader of the Islamic revolution...

...Sometimes there is the pretense of a trial before the executions are carried out, but more often summary judgment is rendered on the victims' doorsteps...

...After months of effort, a new window opened the following summer, two more hostages— Jenco and Jacobson—were permitted to leave, and a new dialogue began...

...What, if anything, should we do now...

...He is also a deeply suspicious man who, for example, refused to believe that the Americans had landed an astronaut on the moon...

...But the situation may change at almost any moment, and Secretary of State Baker would do well to insist on a careful Iran strategy, so that he can move quickly when the opportunity presents itself...

...It follows that they also believe that we have a plan for Iran (they cannot imagine that the CIA could possibly ignore a country as important as theirs...

...ideological...

...We do not wish to see an expansion of Soviet influence over Iran, nor do we wish to see Iran fall prey to the Lebanese disease of disintegration and civil war...

...This is the sort of war that the Chinese understand, and Americans strain to comprehend: the winners win, and the losers die...