OPINION — “Today I want to talk about Iran-U.S. mutual threat perceptions and deterrence policies, its historical perspective, but more from an Iranian perspective. I’m afraid you may not like it, but I think it’s important to know the other side — the adversary’s thinking.”
Those were the words of Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and currently a Princeton University professor, who in the 1990s, was Iran’s Ambassador to Germany, and who earlier served on a committee of Iran’s National Security Council and was spokesman for Iran’s team as they attempting to negotiate a nuclear agreement with the West.
More important, was the venue at which he was speaking – U.S. Strategic Command’s 2023 Deterrence Symposium’s on August 17, at the convention center in downtown Omaha, Nebraska. It was the second day of the symposium which STRATCOM said had brought “two days of thought-provoking discussion about nuclear deterrence in a multi-actor environment” to some 700 government, military, academic and international experts representing 14 countries.
Of the other 31 speakers, most were government and military officials, but the two other so-called “keynote speakers” were two Republicans, now retired former House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Rep, Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a current member of House Armed Services.
Mousavian opened by describing how there were “excellent relations” between Iran and the U.S. from 1856 to 1953, even describing the roles played by two Americans during that period.
However, he then spent some time talking about 1953, when he said the U.S. was “overwhelmed by its Great Power ambitions.” It was then, he said, that the U.S.” played a key part in the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democracy in defense of the UK’s [United Kingdom’s] continued ownership of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, it changed everything, it changed 100 years of good relations.”
Mousavian called the 1953 coup a “foundational moment in modern Iranian perception of the U.S.” as Washington decided to use Iran as one of its Cold War bulwarks against the Soviet Union.
The CIA-aided overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, brought on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as firm ruler of the country for more than 20 years. “Dictator,” Mousavian called him in what was an overstatement. The Shah’s problems arose in his later years as he began to use force to, in his mind, modernize an Iran that had a large religious population that was not yet ready.
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Mousavian said, “Americans may have forgotten this history [of the 1953 Iran coup] but Iranians, still, they remember.” I spent time in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s and can confirm both those statements by Mousavian were true then and are probably true even today.
Mousavian then controversially described what he claimed was Washington’s attempt “to establish a new world order.” Citing three unidentified studies, he said the U.S has been involved in “80 percent of all global conflicts and wars since World War II…carried out at least 81 interventions in foreign elections during the period from 1946 to 2000… [and] engaged in 70 attempts at regime change during the Cold War.”
Mousavian pointed out, “Americans do remember the 1979 revolution in Iran and the taking of American diplomats as hostages. They do not recall that the [1979 Iranin] revolution was a popular reaction to the Shah’s dictatorship and the U.S. interference and violation of the political independence of Iran.”
However, I have to add that on the U.S. side it was mistaken fear on the part of the Carter administration that the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) party would take over the 1979 revolution that motivated the initial strong opposition to the new government led by then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
I reported from Tehran for 10 days in the weeks after the hostages were taken and it was an odd time to be there. Outside the American Embassy, a vocal crowd was shouting “Death to Americans,” while a few blocks away, Iranians would come up to me and say they like America and were worried that the U.S. would bomb Tehran.
One top new Khomeini Government leader, who had been educated at Georgetown University, told me Washington should not fear his government, rather the U.S. ought to be worried about the Russians, who had moved into neighboring Afghanistan,
Mousavian told the Symposium audience, “The 52 Americans that were seized and spent 440 days in captivity was a sad unfortunate story.” He went on to say that in the Algeria Accords, which led to release of the American hostages on January 19, 1981, the U.S. “promised not to intervene directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs, revoke U.S. sanctions and return Iran assets.”
The Accords were supposed to be foundation to reestablish diplomatic relations, but Mousavian said, “Soon after the hostages were released, the U.S. violated the Accords [and] Iran learned that U.S. assurances could not be trusted. Iran soon learned a more painful lesson.”
However, Mousavian was not talking about returning the U.S. returning Iraq’s frozen assets or halting sanctions, which were done as part of the Accords. He had jumped to describing what at the time was secret U.S. support to Iraq a few years later after President Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran. As the Iran-Iraq fighting continued for eight years, and the advantage went back and forth between the two countries, the Reagan administration provided aid to Iraq.
Mousavian referred to a Washington Post 2002 story that said declassified documents from 1983 showed Washington had provided Iraq with “large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and
The Post story quoted David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who said, “We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein’s government would become less repressive and more responsible.”
Mousavian explained major consequences arose from that U.S. secret aid to Saddam: The war actually helped the militarization of the Iranian revolution; Iran developed its own conventional armed drones, nuclear and missile capability after War, not before; and a new arm called the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC that is known to all of you was created to mobilize and organize hundreds of thousands of volunteers for the war front.
“Today,” Mousavian said, “one of the major challenges for the U.S. in the Middle East is the power and influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard across the region and inside Iran, both.”
I must point out here, with his introduction of the IRGC, a major flaw in Mousavian’s Symposium presentation was failure to mention Tehran’s support for terrorist groups worldwide – including al Qaeda. When the U.S. designated Iran as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984, it was the IRGC’s Qods Force that was described as providing support to terrorist organizations in Gaza, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
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Mousavian did, in his Symposium presentation, trace a history of Iran’s nuclear interests starting with the U.S. in 1967 supplying the Shah with a research reactor and a proposal Iran buy 20 U.S. built nuclear power plants by 1994. In 1975 President Ford signed a directive that allowed Iran to have a full cycle nuclear program, Mousavian said.
After the 1979 revolution, however, Mousavian said, “U.S. policy changed to zero nuclear technology in Iran and the U.S. pressured all other countries to stop nuclear assistance.” In 1996, Iran decided to go for self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel technology and by 2002 it had mastered uranium enrichment technology, according to Mousavian.
What Mousavian left out was that in 1995, Russia agreed to finish a nuclear reactor near the Iranian city of Bushehr that a German contractor had abandoned in 1979. Questions arose at that time about the spent fuel from the reactor, including whether it would aid in producing a bomb.
Mousavian said, without reference to Bushehr, that in 1996, “U.S policy shifted from zero nuclear to zero [Iranian] enrichment,” he said. When nuclear negotiations in 2005 failed, Iran pushed ahead and by 2013 reached point where in only two-to-three-months Tehran would have had enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb. “This served Iran as a deterrent,” Mousavian said, despite “Israeli-U.S. cyberattacks, facility sabotage, [and] nuclear scientists assassinated.”
In another example of cause and effect, Mousavian said that in response to those Israeli-U.S. cyber sabotage “Iran created a cyber army and today Iran is among the top 10 cyber nations in the world. He referred to a 2023 U.S. intelligence assessment that said, “Iran’s expertise and willingness to conduct aggressive cyber operations make it a major threat to the security of the US and its allies.”
Mousavian turned to President Obama’s second term, saying that when U.S. policy changed from zero enrichment to zero nuclear bomb what became the 2015 agreement became feasible.
He called it the “most comprehensive transparency measures during history of nonproliferation saying it put “limits on enrichment capacity and stock of low enriched uranium and heavy water; and a one-year breakout period for a bomb.”
Mousavian also said, “Iran complied completely with zero failure for three years, but the U.S. again broke it promise. Trump withdrew and re-imposed sanctions.” In response, he said Iran has step-by-step gradually withdrew from its commitment. Enrichment, he added, has grown from 3.6 percent in 2019 to 20 percent and then to 60 percent and perhaps even to 84 percent while the stockpile has grown 300 kilograms to 4,000 kilograms.
Mousavian described the Trump withdrawal from the nuclear deal as “disastrous,” adding, “Iran’s breakout time has declined from one year to 10 days.” He listed as other results, that Iran’s nuclear advancement has not stopped; Iran moved closer to China and Russia; Iran joined Shanghai cooperation and Iran has provided drones to Russia.
He speculated that, “Had the U.S. stayed in the nuclear agreement Iran’s strategy toward China and Russia might have been very different, and Iran and the U.S. could have cooperated and negotiated on regional issues.”
Mousavian closed with some recommendations for U.S. strategy starting with a revival of the Iran nuclear deal, which the Biden is attempting.
He also called on the U.S. and other countries to end what he called a double standard: “Israel is the only Middle East country with the nuclear bomb and the U.S. says nothing about it.”
Mousavian observed more broadly that, “The core conflict between Iran and the U.S. is about the region and not the nuclear [issue]. The U.S. has tried to isolate Iran, and Iran has tried to undermine that; 40 years of this has been a losing game for both.”
He pointed out that more than one-third of Iranians are living below the poverty line and so the U.S. should, among other things, “focus on economic investment and technological cooperation rather than sanctioning and weaponizing; …establish friendly relations with all countries rather than creating alliances with some countries to fight other countries. support a new regional security and cooperation system in the Persian Gulf, hand over the responsibilities to the regional countries to maintain peace and stability rather than trying to achieve it with tens of military bases and trillions of dollars…[and] promote civilian diplomacy to promote citizen-to-citizen relationships which would respect local culture rather than imposing Western culture.”
He closed by saying, “What America needs today is a new strategy that does not involve wars or regime changes and operations against sovereign states obsessively trying to control everyone in every part of the world. This is my message to this deterrence summit. Thank you.”
There was some applause, but more important, Mousavian should have left all thinking that some elements of past and present American foreign and defense policies might need a second look.
Ironically, Mousavian’s “thought-provoking” talk did provoke one wrong result. Two senior Republican Members of Congress sent STRATCOM Commander Gen. Anthony J. Cotton a letter on September 1, demanding “a full accounting of why an Iranian propagandist and former regime official participated as a keynote speaker in a STRATCOM-sponsored event.”
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Chairman and ranking member respectively of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, wrote that “providing Mousavian with an officially sanctioned U.S. Government platform for spreading historical falsehoods and Iranian regime propaganda is profoundly ill-advised.”
They demanded to know the names and positions of all STRATCOM officials “responsible for approving the invitation” to Mousavian and all compensation provided to him including, if there were, an honorarium.
I’m someone who believes in the old Robert Burns saying, “Oh the gift that God could give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”
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