A Tangled Web: US-Iran Relations at a Crossroads

US involvement in Iraq has brought tension with Iran to a head, but a complicated US-Iran relationship is hardly a recent phenomenon. For more than fifty years, the US has had a complicated relationship with Iran – or more accurately, with various groups vying for power both within Iran and throughout the Middle East.

Identity Matters: Boundary Issues in the Middle East

The complicated relationship between national boundaries, and the religious or cultural identities that often transcend them throughout the Middle East, make it tricky to define a particular nation as either ally or enemy. Especially ‘nations’ like the modern Iraq, pieced together from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which the British had conquered and occupied during the First World War and comprised of various sects sharing neither a culture nor any sense of national identity. The rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites, in particular, has persisted to this day.

The conflicts in the Middle East are all about boundaries -- not simply physical borders, but religious, ideological, and cultural boundaries as well. The various groups that inhabit the region, such as the Sunnis and Shiites, the Syrians and Lebanese, the Iranians, Iraqis, and Israelis feel an absolute and burning necessity to assert and clarify their boundaries for the world to accept and respect.

Click here for an in-depth analysis of boundary issues in the Middle East. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 successfully erased some Sunni and Shiite boundaries within Iraq, but also shook up the delicate balance in the region– with far reaching consequences, particularly for our relationship with predominantly-Shiite Iran.

Oil, Money & Power: Foreign Policy in A Global Economy

It is hardly surprising that when Iraq gained independence from Great Britain in 1932 the various groups and factions in the new nation immediately began competing for power and resources – particularly oil – and looking to neighbors with whom they shared more than an arbitrary ‘nationality’ for aid.

Throughout this phase – and up to the present – the major international powers used various combinations of national military force and government pressure to gain control of a share of oil in both Iraq and Iran.

In 1953, U.S. and British intelligence services helped Iranian military officers to overthrow Prime Minister Muhammed Mussadeq, a proponent of limiting foreign interest in Iran’s oil industry, and reinstate the Shah, who was friendlier to Western oil interests.

Beginning in1954, the Shah agreed to let a Western multinational consortium led by British Petroleum to run Iranian oil facilities for 25 years in return for fifty percent of profits and help crushing political dissent within Iran.

The Shah returned the oil industry to national control in 1973, but instead of joining an Arab oil embargo against the West and Israel, Iran used the situation to raise oil prices – using the money gained for modernization, and significantly, to increase defense spending.

The failure of these reforms to improve the lives of the majority of Iranians, however, resulted in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, forcing the Shah to leave the country and replacing the monarchy with a conservative Islamic government.

The strikes and protests that led up to the revolution culminated in Iranian students seizing the US embassy in Tehran and taking more than fifty Americans hostage. The US responded by what would become a familiar pattern during the subsequent presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush: by imposing strict sanctions on Iran. In 1979 sanctions imposed on Iran included severing all diplomatic ties and freezing billions of dollars in assets.
Recognizing the economic and military advantages that Iran’s vast supply of oil and the revenue it generated could provide, President Carter ordered a complete embargo of oil from Iran. Since Iranian oil production had already declined as a result of the Revolution, the combined shortage of oil, caused panic in the global market and a surge in prices. As the price of oil rose, so did its ability to affect politics around the globe.

Today, even though Iran has the second-largest gas and oil reserves in the world, it imports most of the refined products it uses, like gasoline, making the Iranian economy vulnerable to international sanctions – especially the oil sector. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s revenue comes from the sale of oil abroad, according to a report by the foreign affairs and defense commission of the Iranian parliament in 2006.

At the same time, globalization has made it much more difficult for the U.S. to enforce meaningful sanctions, let alone to do so unilaterally. Particularly because China's booming economy is increasingly dependent on imported oil – and shows no sign of slowing down. It is also worth noting that while tensions between Iran and the U.S. have been escalating since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, China signed a 25-year oil and gas deal with Iran in 2004.

Click here to learn more about how economics and foreign policy are connected in an increasingly global economy, and what steps Iran has already taken to protect itself from U.S. sanctions on oil.

Defining Terrorism: Fading to Black & White

It is a testimony to the complicated dynamics of the Middle East and the oil economy that the long-standing tensions between Iran and the US have largely played out symbolically or economically, rather than on the battlefield.

Following the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United State’s official attitude towards nations that ‘sponsor terrorism’ has crystallized into a black-and-white definition: “You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

As official US policy toward terrorism has grown more black-and-white, however, the effects of that policy and the US invasion of Iraq have made the relationships between competing groups in the Middle East ever more fluid and volatile.

Following the embassy hostage crisis, Iran called the U.S. its “arch enemy,” but had bigger problems in its own backyard. In 1980 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein took advantage of the chaos caused by the Revolution and invaded Iran. His reason was two-fold: to gain control of the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan, and to reverse a 1975 border settlement in which Iraq had conceded territory in return for a promise from Iran to stop supplying weapons to Kurdish nationalists in Northern Iraq who had staged a revolt.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, longer than any other conventional war in the twentieth century, and was disastrous for both countries, costing an estimated 1 million casualties and $350 billion. Although the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the long and painful war – including conducting strikes on Persian Gulf oil platforms – it also provided weapons to Iran.

Connecting Iran and terrorism is nothing new, but in the past the links have been vaguer, taking into account the fact that political dynamics in the Middle East don’t always reflect national borders in the region.

The US has repeatedly blamed Iran for sponsoring acts of terrorism committed by the Shiite group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon (charges which Tehran has consistently denied) and the State Department designates Iran as a state-sponsor of terrorism. The complex and ever-changing web of relationships in the Middle East makes it difficult to define ‘terrorism,’ let alone prove a direct link, however, and accusations were often made many years after-the-fact. Moreover, none of the terrorist acts had been committed on U.S. soil.

Pick a Path: A Crossroads for U.S. Policy towards Iran

On September 26,, 2007, the Senate passed a controversial resolution, the Kyl-Leiberman amendment, which accuses Iran of fighting a “proxy war” against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq and designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

The Kyl-Leiberman amendment ignores fundamental realities about borders and identity in the Middle East. The administration’s decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam did politically empower predominantly-Shiite Iran, but in 2006 over one million Iranians also travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is more than a billion dollars in annual trading between the two countries.

The resolution is a non-binding ‘sense of the Senate’ resolution, yet it is significant in the extent that it reflects and intensifies the current with-us-or-against-us foreign policy, by simultaneously blaming Iran, as a nation, for the problems in Iraq and labeling a major branch of its military a terrorist organization (the US has never before done so to a sovereign country).

Some members of Congress are concerned about the implications. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) has offered an amendment to the Senate's fiscal year 2007 wartime supplemental bill that would prohibit the expenditure of government funds for any military action against Iran without specific authorization from Congress.

Webb, who is a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, was an outspoken opponent of the Kyl-Leiberman amendment, saying that neither committee had debated or examined the resolution before it was brought to the floor. Critics of Webb’s amendment say that it could do more harm than good in terms of curbing executive power because Article I, Section 8 of the constitution already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war.

Click here to find your representatives and tell them how would like them to vote straight from the WomenMatter site.

Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics: A Dangerous Game

When it comes to Iran, no specific situation is an example of just one issue. Any U.S.-Iran interaction is colored by our shared history and embedded in the dense web of global politics. Nuclear proliferation, in particular is of great concern to the global community and U.S. On October 17th, 2007 President Bush issued a stark warning that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” and urged the world to continue applying pressure, including economic sanctions aimed at persuading the Iranian people to find new leadership.

Illustrating the global implications of U.S.-Iran tensions, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has resisted Western pressure to toughen his stance over Iran's nuclear program, made clear on a visit to Tehran that Russia would not accept any military action against Iran.

The range of responses to perceived threats that the U.S. is willing to consider –even unilaterally- however, have shifted along with the definition of ‘terrorism.’

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush accused Iran of being a member of the so-called ‘axis-of-evil,’ both for pursuing nuclear weapons and “exporting terror.” He later made a series of speeches in which he refused to rule out using force with Iran. Click here to learn more about nuclear power and the debate over a nuclear Iran.

In response, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi explained, "I think Bush should know that our options are more numerous than the U.S. options… if the United States makes such a big mistake, then Iran will definitely have more choices to defend itself."

Although Asefi did not clarify what he meant by "options," the remark demonstrates that Iranian officials too may be prepared to move beyond a rhetorical battle to an actual one. Click here for a detailed report on the ‘War of Words’ between the Iran and the U.S.

Although Iran is predominantly Shiite, it is hardly a monolithic culture - the President’s remarks outraged conservatives and reformists alike in Iran. Both President Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad face strong opposition at home. It could be argued that both Presidents have something to gain by challenging each other.

Candidates in the Senate, too, face immense pressure to act tough on terrorism. Hillary Clinton was the only Democratic candidate to vote in favor of the Kyl- Lieberman amendment, but this arguably says more about her status as the front-runner looking ahead to the general election than it does about her stance on Iran (she also voted in favor of the Webb amendment).

Our electoral system can discourage politicians and candidates from looking too far ahead or behind- but it also demands that they listen to their constituents.

What do you think?

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