Iran's Deadly Ambition (23 page)

Naturally, Iranian officials have also turned their sights on social media. Iranian authorities reportedly are working on new software suites designed to better control social-networking sites, which were a hub of activity during the 2009 protests and afterward.
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The Islamic Republic is currently one of just three countries in the world to block Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
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But this prohibition is selective in the extreme; top Iranian officials, including “moderate” president Hassan Rouhani, have active social-media accounts, and even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, maintains a flashy dedicated website at
www.khamenei.ir
. Indeed, although Rouhani has taken pains to stress freedom and human rights among Iranians since taking office in the summer of 2013, regime repression of online critics has deepened.
⁴⁶

Surveillance and Control.
The Iranian regime likewise has expanded its control of domestic phone, mobile, and Internet communications. In the months after the summer 2009 protests, Iranian authorities installed a sophisticated Chinese-origin surveillance system. Since then, China’s ZTE Corporation has partnered with the state-controlled Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) to implement advanced monitoring of the country’s telecom sector.
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Iranian authorities have supplemented this tracking with methods intended to limit access to such media. In the spring of 2013, for example, Iranian authorities blocked most of the virtual private networks (VPNs) used by Iranians to circumvent the government’s Internet filters.
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Simultaneously, Iranian officials announced plans—since implemented—to
reduce Internet speeds and increase costs of subscriptions to Internet service providers (ISPs) within the Islamic Republic.
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Regulation and Oversight.
The foregoing restrictions and regulations are overseen by a new government agency tasked with monitoring cyberspace. Announced in early 2012, the Supreme Council of Cyberspace is led by top officials from both Iran’s intelligence apparatus and the Revolutionary Guards and empowered to carry out “constant and comprehensive monitoring over the domestic and international cyberspace,” with the power to issue sweeping decrees concerning the Internet that would have the full strength of law.
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The council was formally inaugurated by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in April 2012, and now serves as a coordinating body for the Islamic Republic’s domestic and international cyber policies.
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They include new, restrictive governmental guidelines forcing Internet cafes to record the personal information of customers—including vital data, such as names, national identification numbers, and phone numbers—as well as install closed-circuit cameras to keep video logs of all customers accessing the World Wide Web.
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These restrictions—and, indeed, the Islamic Republic’s deepening crusade against Internet freedom itself—have everything to do with well-founded official fears of the power and breadth of the Internet in Iran. Iran is currently among the most-wired nations in the region, with Internet penetration estimated at 57 percent of the population.
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This online community, moreover, is vibrant; as of 2008, Iran was estimated to have the third-largest blogosphere in the world, after those of the United States and China, with 60,000 or more active weblogs.
⁵⁴
Although a number of factors—including state repression—have seen the phenomenon of “Iran’s blogestan”
recede somewhat since, this has been mirrored by the rise of social-networking sites such as Facebook, which are now estimated to have upwards of four million Iranian members.
⁵⁵

All this makes the World Wide Web, which provides Iran’s citizenry with access to alternative worldviews, values, and information, a mortal threat to the Iranian regime’s efforts to enforce intellectual orthodoxy. The Web is also the potential hub of coordination and communication for opposition forces, the way it functioned for the Green Movement during the second half of 2009. Which is why, even as it has taken the cyber offensive abroad, the Islamic Republic has gone to extraordinary lengths to stifle Internet freedom at home.

Conclusion

T
he preeminent physicist and philosopher Albert Einstein once remarked that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So it is with our Iran policy. Since taking office, the Obama administration has billed its efforts to engage with the Islamic Republic as a bold new initiative designed to reverse two decades of unconstructive American policy.

In their outreach, administration officials have been animated by the belief that dialogue—however tactical at the outset—can be successfully parlayed into something substantially bigger: a true reconciliation between Washington and Tehran. Perhaps the clearest indication of this was given by Philip Gordon, the senior director of Gulf affairs in the Obama National Security Council, in the fall of 2014. “A nuclear agreement could begin a multigenerational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries,” Gordon said in a speech before the National Iranian American Council in Washington, D.C.
¹

This belief goes a long way toward explaining why the White House has gambled so heavily on the idea of détente with Iran’s ayatollahs. It would be fair to say that outreach
toward Iran has become the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s foreign-policy agenda. “Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told a meeting of liberal activists in January 2014. “This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.”
²
In fact, according to Rhodes, securing a deal with Iran is as significant as “healthcare for us”—a reference to the massive overhaul of the U.S. health-care system that became the signal achievement of the Obama administration’s first term in office.
³

In its overtures, the White House has been backed by a loose but vocal coalition of journalists, pundits, and think-tank cognoscenti from groups and media ranging from the liberal Atlantic Council on the political left to the conservative
National Interest
magazine on the political right. The particulars of their respective arguments vary, but their conclusions are very much the same: outreach toward Tehran makes good strategic sense.

The idea may be appealing, but it most definitely isn’t new. Quite the opposite, in fact. For nearly a quarter-century, Western capitals have been awash in hopes that, with the proper mix of economic and diplomatic incentives, it might be possible to alter the Iranian regime’s aggressive, revisionist worldview.

The effort began with the collapse of the USSR, when European nations launched a new diplomatic outreach toward the Islamic Republic. Dubbed “critical dialogue” and formally initiated at the European Council summit in Edinburgh in December 1992, that policy was an attempt to use economic carrots and “closer relations and confidence” to moderate the Islamic Republic’s positions on everything from the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to terrorism.
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Half a decade later, however, the effort fizzled when a German court formally found Iran responsible for the 1992 assassination of four Kurdish dissidents at a Berlin restaurant—but not before Europe infused the Islamic Republic with much-needed cash and political legitimacy.

Europe’s waning enthusiasm, however, was offset by American eagerness. Beginning in 1997, the election of moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami to the Iranian presidency—and his subsequent calls for a “dialogue of civilizations” with the West
⁵
—fanned hopes in Washington that Tehran was prepared to turn over a new leaf. In response, the Clinton administration softened its diplomatic tone toward Tehran, held some Congressional sanctions against the Islamic Republic in abeyance, and made numerous political advances toward Iran’s ayatollahs, all the while ignoring the inconvenient reality that the main aim of Khatami’s “dialogue” was not normalization with the West but a lessening of Iran’s global isolation.
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The 2000s likewise saw a slew of new initiatives aimed at détente with Iran. Even as the Bush administration adopted a harder line toward Iran, famously labeling it—along with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea—as part of an “axis of evil,” European nations redoubled their attempts to engage with Tehran, focusing on the regime’s nuclear program as a point of reference. The first such effort, spearheaded by the E.U. 3 countries (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom), stretched from 2003 to 2005. The second took place in June 2008 via consultations with Iran by the P5+1 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, and Germany). Nearly a dozen proposals and compromises were alternately floated by Iran and the West before the start of the November 2013 talks in Geneva.
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But all failed to reach a substantive breakthrough with Iran over its nuclear endeavor or blunt Iranian adventurism.

Today promises to be no different. To be sure, Iranian officials are doing their best to fan Western hopes for détente once more. Early on in his tenure, Hassan Rouhani penned an editorial in the
Washington Post
calling for “constructive engagement” between Iran and the world.
⁸
Since then, Iran’s so-called moderate president has kept up his calls for normalization. During his fall 2014 jaunt to New York City to attend the U.N. General Assembly’s annual meeting, Rouhani spoke at length about how America and Iran are now on the brink of a historic reconciliation. “[N]o doubt that the situation between the U.S. and Iran will be completely different” following the conclusion of a nuclear deal, Rouhani told reporters. Moreover, a nuclear pact, he promised, was just the beginning; there were “many potential areas of cooperation in the future” between the two countries.
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Rouhani has made similar diplomatic overtures toward Canada, which formally severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2011, and the United Kingdom, which serves as a core member of the Western coalition arrayed against it.

Yet a lasting reconciliation between the Islamic Republic and the West is not in the cards, and for good reason: Western culture and intellectual influence represents a mortal threat to the absolutist, activist political Islam that animates the regime in Tehran. This can be seen in repeated Iranian accusations, intoned over the past decade, that the United States and its allies are guilty of attempting to foment “velvet” revolutions within the Islamic Republic, and in regular calls from Iran’s clergy to purge pernicious Western “decadence” from Iranian society.

While policy makers in Tehran may today be striking a softer tone, the idea of true rapprochement remains as toxic and dangerous to their worldview as ever. This is why Iranian president Rouhani has repeatedly skirted opportunities for an in-person tête-à-tête with President Obama since taking office
in 2013, demurring again and again that the time “wasn’t right” for such a summit.
¹⁰
Rouhani understands well, even if Western policy makers do not, that such a meeting would jeopardize his already-tenuous credibility within the Iranian regime and represent an ideological
casus belli
for Iran’s clerical hard-liners.

Nor can the successful conclusion of a nuclear deal, if and when it does finally occur, be expected to change this calculus. “While domestic Iranian politics is famously unpredictable, there is no historic precedent nor recent evidence to suggest the Islamic Republic might abandon or modify its long-standing revolutionary principles, namely opposition to U.S. influence and Israel’s existence,” Iran scholar Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explained to Congress in the fall of 2014. “Throughout the last three decades these pillars of Iran’s foreign policy have shown little signs of change, despite the election of moderate presidents or tremendous financial strain due to sanctions and/or low oil prices.”
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More than three and a half decades after Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, those pillars remain intact. U.S. military documents tend to emphasize that Iran’s strategy is defensive and centered around self-preservation. That impulse is indeed present in Iran’s calculations. But so is an abiding ambition for regional hegemony and global prominence—and an identity defined by opposition to the West generally and the United States in particular.

As a result, when Iranian and American interests converge (as they do currently in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group), tactical cooperation between Washington and Tehran may in fact be possible. But the Islamic Republic’s founding principles, and its strategic culture, preclude a real rapprochement with the West in any meaningful, long-term fashion. In the words of Ahmad Jannati, a powerful Iranian
cleric and power broker, “If pro-American tendencies come to power in Iran, we have to say goodbye to everything. After all, anti-Americanism is among the main features of our Islamic state.”
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It’s a reality that policy makers in Washington have not yet internalized.

DEFINING IRAN’S DEVIANCY DOWN

During his career in Congress, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, became widely renowned as a champion for criminal justice. Among his most famous contributions to the contemporary discourse on the subject was a 1993 article in the
American Scholar
, in which Moynihan railed against growing popular acceptance of criminal behavior and the lack of strict punishment for it.
¹³
By allowing rising criminality to go unpunished, and by excusing it away as the product of social circumstance or a myriad of other mitigating factors, Moynihan argued, the United States was systematically “defining deviancy down,” and doing so with grave consequences for civic order.