Part 7: 1991-2001: The Soviet Collapse, the
Growth of Islamic Fundamentalism, and The Intensification of U.S.
Hostility Toward Iran
For over 100 years, the domination of
Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism,
enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military
assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S.
hostility toward Iran today—including the real threat of war. Part 1
of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists up
through World War 1 over which one would control Iran and its oil.
Part 2 exposed the U.S.’s 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s
secular, nationalist government in order to restore a tyrannical
client, the Shah. Parts 3 and 4 examined the impact of 25 years of
U.S. domination via the Shah, and how it paved the way for the 1979
revolution. Part 5 explored the 1979 revolution and the U.S.
response, including how both fueled the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism. Part 6 exposed the imperialist logic—and necessities—behind
Ronald Reagan’s 1985-86 “arms-for-hostages” gambit to Iran. Part 7,
traces the escalation of U.S. hostility toward Iran—from the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991until 2001, when George W. Bush
took office.
The Soviet Collapse—A Geopolitical
Earthquake
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a
geopolitical earthquake—opening both new opportunities for and new
threats to U.S. imperialism. In one swift stroke, the main rival to
U.S. global power had (at least temporarily) been removed. America’s
theoreticians of empire sensed a historic opportunity to forcefully
extend U.S. global dominance and deal decisively with a raft of
impediments—to create an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire.
This new mix of opportunity and necessity reshaped
Washington’s approach to Iran. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the
U.S. not only drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but destroyed much of
Iraq’s military and industrial infrastructure—while Iran remained
neutral. Afterward, the Islamic Republic’s leaders took some
tentative steps to normalize relations with the U.S., which had been
broken when the U.S. Embassy was seized in 1979. The Ayatollah
Khomeini had died two years earlier and a new, more pragmatic
leadership under President Rafsanjani had come to power. And Iran
was eager to attract new foreign investment and trade to prop up its
economy.
The U.S. wasn’t interested. The Islamic Republic was
still an obstacle to U.S. aims on a number of fronts. The Soviet
collapse hadn’t resolved the knot of problems the U.S. faced in the
Middle East (in fact it exacerbated some) and it opened up a
Pandora’s box in Central Asia,. The U.S. was increasingly bumping up
against Iran in both regions. And now with the Soviet Union gone,
U.S. strategists no longer felt the need to balance Iran and Iraq.
Instead they could move more directly against both.
“Dual Containment”—Preserving the U.S.-Dominated
Status Quo
The Clinton administration adopted a policy of “Dual
Containment,” with punitive economic sanctions against Iran and Iraq,
aimed at weakening and isolating both. Clinton and company feared
that Iran’s regional needs and ambitions and the growth of Islamic
fundamentalist movements could jeopardize the U.S.-dominated Middle
East order.
Iran’s 1979 revolution and its anti-U.S., Islamist
message still reverberated with people living under brittle pro-U.S.
tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Egypt. The
Soviet Union’s demise had weakened (sometimes fatally) many
pro-Soviet parties and movements. This further strengthened Islamic
fundamentalist trends, which were becoming the main pole of
opposition to the U.S. and its clients. The Iranian revolution and
then the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan emboldened Islamists who could
now argue that if they had helped bring down the Shah and then a
superpower, why couldn’t they do the same to the United States?
As the region’s main Islamist state, Iran
represented an ideological challenge to U.S.-led imperialist
globalization and “modernization.” The Islamic Republic represented
a pole of opposition to some of the U.S.’s political objectives in
the region, as well as a source of inspiration (and sometimes direct
support) for various Islamic trends.
The Clinton administration viewed the U.S.-sponsored
Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” which was aimed at ending the
Palestinian struggle and strengthening Israel, as crucial to
undercutting anti-U.S. sentiments and strengthening U.S. control of
the region. But Iran was an obstacle here—both because of its
political support for the Palestinians and its material support of
Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Islamic Palestinian forces.
The U.S. also worried about Iran’s potential to
become a major force in the region due to its size, location, vast
oil resources, and its efforts to reach out to global powers. The
fact that the U.S. 1991 war on Iraq had weakened it as a regional
bulwark against Iran added to these worries.
Iran, meanwhile, was eager to attract foreign
investment precisely to expand oil production and build its
industrial and military infrastructure. In the early 1990s, Iran
offered the U.S. oil giant Conoco $1 billion to help develop its oil
and gas industry. This sparked a furor in the U.S. and led to the
imposition of sanctions in 1995, blocking any U.S. companies from
investing in Iran’s oil and natural gas industries (later expanded
to punish foreign firms who did so).
A New “Great Game” in Central Asia
The Soviet collapse also had enormous repercussions
for the U.S.—and Iran—in Central Asia. Suddenly, states formerly
part of the Soviet Union possessing vast energy resources—Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan (today the site
of the world’s largest oil development project)—were independent and
up for grabs. Fierce competition was quickly underway between the
U.S., Russia, China, as well as European powers for access,
influence and control. Former Carter official Zbigniew Brzezinski
warned, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…America’s
global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively
its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
Iran sought to expand its historic, geographic,
cultural, and linguistic ties with these new republics. It also
sought inclusion in the new energy arrangements centering on the
construction of oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to outlets
for the global market. Iran lies between the energy-rich Caspian Sea
to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, and already had a
network of pipelines. So why not transport oil and gas through Iran?
As Revolution noted, “If the pipes go south
through Iran to its refineries and harbors, then the U.S.
containment of Iran is broken…. The U.S. vetoed any Iranian route
and insisted the pipes run over Afghanistan—to Pakistan.” (See
“Afghanistan: The Oil Behind the War,” Revolutionary Worker
(now Revolution ) November 4, 2001)
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. and its ally Saudi
Arabia were also covertly organizing and bankrolling anti-Iranian
Sunni fundamentalist groups (including the Taliban) in order to
isolate Iran and counter Iranian-inspired Shia Islamists,
particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These covert intrigues
further fueled reactionary religious fundamentalism and sectarianism
across the region.
The Clash Over Grand Strategy in the 1990s
U.S. strategy toward Iran was shaped by sharp debate
within the bourgeoisie that took place during the 1990s over
post-Soviet global strategy. The neocon strategy was articulated in
1992 by top officials in the George H.W. Bush administration (who
returned to power under Bush II). It called for wielding U.S.
military power to preemptively knock down potential rivals and
establish unilateral global hegemony.
During his eight years in office, Clinton championed
Washington’s “right” to act unilaterally and shape the global
environment by force if need be, while emphasizing acting in
alliance with other imperialist powers, an overall posture the
administration called “assertive multilateralism.”
Clinton was not hesitant to use military force, as
in the NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the military
preservation of the no-fly zone over Iraq, and the taking out of
targets in Sudan. And he pushed for NATO expansion into the former
Soviet Bloc. But this was still in the context of a more traditional
“multi-lateral approach” (in which the U.S. always had the final say
and veto power). Further, there was a considerable focus by the
Clinton administration on strengthening the U.S. economic hand
globally, and aggressively pushing forward with imperialist
globalization and things like “free trade agreements” in the
interest of U.S. finance capital.
Clinton never adopted a strategy of regime change
toward the Islamic Republic, but while emphasizing the stick, also
dangled the carrot of better relations. U.S. bullying was, in the
words of Clinton’s “Report to Congress on National Security Strategy”
(January 11, 2000), “aimed at changing the practices of the Iranian
government in several key areas,” while “signs of change in Iranian
policies” were viewed “with interest…”
The neocons felt the Clinton administration was
squandering the victory of the Cold War, allowing events to drift
and threats to build. They considered Clinton’s approach too
multilateral (vs. unilateral) and his efforts to forge a new wave of
globalization (in the interest of U.S. imperialism) too economically
focused. What these neocons saw was an opportunity to radically
reshape global relations through a hard line, unilateral and vast
step-up in the application of military force and an aggressive
program of “regime change.”
Their view was that even though Saddam Hussein was
not a major threat to the U.S., the Middle East needed to be
radically reshaped or else it would keep generating anti-U.S. forces,
particularly Islamic fundamentalist forces, which would get in the
way of U.S. domination in the whole region—an objective shared by
the whole ruling class, even while there were (and are) differences
over how to go about achieving this.
This battle was intertwined with a sharp debate over
the significance of resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, which had been
sparked by serious Islamist challenges to the ruling regimes in
Egypt, Algeria, and Afghanistan. According to author Robert Dreyfuss,
there were basically two camps within the U.S. establishment: those
who “argued that the United States had nothing to fear from the
Islamic right” versus “the clash-of-civilizations school [championed
by right-wing academics like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis],
which believed that the Muslim world was unalterably and
fundamentally hostile to the West.”
George Bush’s capture of the presidency in 2000
followed by the attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the
consolidation of the neocon grand strategy and the launching of the
“war on terror” to carry it out. The U.S. war machine would be
unleashed to defeat Islamic fundamentalism and take down states
impeding U.S. objectives. Global relations were to be radically
transformed, and America’s sole superpower status locked in for
decades to come. Iran would quickly become a prime target in this
war for greater empire, as we will explore in the next and final
installment of this series.
References
Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of
American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle
East, Chapter 4—The United States and the Islamic Republic, pp.
132-146
Bob Avakian, “The New Situation and the Great
Challenges,” Revolution #36, February 26, 2006
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, p. 30
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, p. 316
Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the
U.S. Global Agenda, Chapter 8—A Growing Clamor for Regime
Change
Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts
within Islam Will Shape the Future, Chapter 5: The Battle of
Islamic Fundamentalisms, pp. 160-168
