As Iran and Israel trade accusations over Iran’s nuclear program, and the U.S. sends indicators that it may pull out of the JCPOA agreement, The Cipher Brief talked with Norm Roule—the former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI and a Cipher Brief Expert —at The Cipher Brief’s Annual Threat Conference in April. Roule’s comprehensive insights into the region covered everything from U.S. efforts to roll back Iranian influence, to a potential new Arab Spring in the making. Despite the realities and risks, there is also a significant amount of good news in the region that could yield opportunity. Some of the highlights from the conversation are adapted for print below.
On the impacts and blind spots of the Iran nuclear deal:
In regards to the nuclear aspects of the deal and per ten IAEA reports, Iran seems to have met its JCPOA obligations. But regarding every other area of malign activity, Iran is off the charts. You now have people asking if we can trust a country involved in so much egregious behavior —to include detentions of Americans—to maintain its nuclear commitments? And therefore, you need to look at these so-called ‘sunset clauses.’
There are aspects of this deal which go on in perpetuity. Iran has destroyed the guts, the center, of its plutonium reactor. That cannot be undone. Iran has also agreed it will never undertake activity that could allow it to develop a nuclear weapon. Should we discover it is doing so, we would be able to snap back on sanctions.
Yet there are aspects (of the deal) I would change. In October 2020, the international restrictions on Iran’s conventional weapons will end. Is there anyone who believes the Middle East will be safer if Iran can purchase Sukhoi aircraft from Moscow, or if Iran can sell tanks or conventional weapons to Hezbollah, or to the Houthis? In October 2023, according to the Iran deal, the United Nations restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program go away. Is there anyone who believes the world will be safer if Iran is able to buy ballistic missile technology without UN supervision? What would it mean for regional security if Iran is able to sell ballistic missile weapons technology to Hezbollah or the Houthis? We need to fix these problems.
On checking Iran’s malign behavior:
When the deal was put in place, we told Iran and our European allies that the levers we pulled to bring Iran to the table for the deal could be employed if Iran engaged in other malign activity. Another way to explain this would be to say that just because we let someone out of jail because they agreed to stop robbing banks, this doesn’t mean we won’t put them back in jail if they commit other crimes.
Nonetheless, today, Tehran argues that if we employ any of the sanctions tools we used in the past, we are violating the deal. A few of our European partners and even some of the deal’s supporters in the U.S. sometimes seem to say the same thing.
The Iranian people need to understand that their government is mismanaging their economy and engaging in malign behavior that threatens regional conflicts. Iran is transforming the DNA of the region with its export of advanced missile technology and its creation of surrogate groups. Engagement with Tehran through negotiations alone will not alone stop this behavior. We need to employ sanctions to compel Iran to cease this behavior.
It would be unfair to say that the current Administration’s Iran policy has had no positive impact. Prior to President Trump’s October 13 speech on JCPOA, is there anyone in the room who heard any European leader say or do anything about Iran’s domestic ballistic missile program, its propagation of missile technology, cyber activities or its malign regional activities?
Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif appears irrelevant on regional and missile issues. I often believe his sole job is to talk while facts on the ground are being developed. So we need to engage Iran in a way that doesn’t allow them to use the engagement itself as a brake on any pressure campaign.
So, those levers you mentioned. Is the situation too far gone in terms of proxies in Syria, support for the Houthis, technology transferred, for those levers to work?
Not at all. Iran has transformed the regional DNA, but it has also bought a lot of rubble. Iran must now support, fund, and manage a large number of fractious allies…expensive allies…allies who don’t like each other. As we saw in the recent protests, the Iranian people don’t support these activities.
We need to convey to the Iranian people what this activity is costing them in terms of blood and money. We want to provoke an internal debate within Iran along the following lines, ‘The West will allow us to choose our own government. But it will not allow us to choose someone else’s government and our attempts to do so will result in pressures which will impact our stability.
So, what it sounds like you’re saying is—Iran could at this point, the Iranian security structure, could be bankrupting the country at home to conduct wars abroad to expand its influence, but they’re about to go from phase 3 to phase 4 in some of these areas—which is stabilization…
First of all, it’s not bankrupting Iran, as we’ve seen from BBC reporting from Afghans who have been captured, wounded in Syria. They are sometimes not paid. But again, it’s a long walk from Aleppo to Kandahar if you want to quit, right? And when they are paid, it’s a few hundred dollars a month. The materiel and personnel costs to the Iranians are probably relatively low, in part because the nature of surrogate warfare means that the conflict costs are limited.
But the Iranians need to understand that regional adventurism and proliferation of missile technology will cost them the financial channels they need, particularly with Europe. Sanctions should also include international insurance for their tankers and insurance for their ports. Ports are expensive. You bring an oil tanker into port and you bump a pier, that’s expensive. You take away the insurance for that pier, or that entire port, and suddenly international shippers get a little nervous about doing business with Iran. In short, we want to have a debate among Iran’s leadership in which they ask, ‘Who thought it was a good idea to risk the profits from a tanker of oil so we could give weapons to the Houthis?’
If we don’t push back on Iran, the Middle East will continue to transform and move to conflict. You will often hear people say there’s a Saudi-Iranian rivalry. There isn’t. If I ask you to name a specific Saudi, Emirati, Bahraini, Kuwaiti surrogate group, you cannot. If I ask you to name an Iranian surrogate group, you can’t do it in one breath. Also, a rivalry implies people who have similar goals and similar capabilities. This is not a guy with a sword against another guy with a sword. This is a ‘rock, paper, scissors’ sort of conflict. We should expect to see the Saudis and Iranians compete in Iraq and Yemen, but I have never seen any information to suggest that Riyadh seeks to dominate either country in the same way that Iran seeks through its Quds Force.
Iranian-sponsored groups transform over time. In its early days, Hezbollah was not the organizational creature you see today. Wherever Iran goes, it employs a cookie-cutter approach, and this approach is going to empower these people in a similar fashion. If we look at the Houthis, we have to ask ourselves, who might they be in five years?
Sticking to Yemen, let’s look at the Bab el-Mandeb strait [which connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean]. The Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, handle about 45% of the oil shipped every day. The Bab al Mandeb alone handles about 4.6 million barrels of oil a day, more than 15% of the globe’s trade, and major submarine cable that carries all of the Internet traffic between London and Asia.
Is it reasonable to assume that we would allow a strait 10 miles across to fall into the control of an adversary owned, operated and directed by the Iranians—empowered with anti-ship cruise missiles, explosive boats, and other technologies, which they’ve already used on at least four occasions? The Iranian people need to understand that the international community won’t tolerate this.
You wrote in The Cipher Brief about how Iran and Tunisia have elements that were the elements in society present before the Arab Spring. That we could be seeing another Arab Spring in the making. What would that look like?
If you look at recent events in Iran and Tunisia, you notice extraordinary similarities. Iran has the Supreme Leader and Tunisia is led by a 91-year-old leader. Among the world’s leaders, only Queen Elizabeth is older than the president of Tunisia. In each country, you have ostensibly subordinate reformist leaders who aren’t effective. You have governments with large, youthful populations. About 31 is the median age and relatively well educated. Each country has difficulty drawing foreign direct investment. Each country relies primarily on a few resources: Iran, oil; Tunisia, phosphates. In each country we saw unrest break out in dozens of cities. The specific unrest was unexpected but drivers of the rest were widely understood. In each case, protesters seemed unhappy with every aspect of their leadership. Throw the bums out, seemed a common theme. We watched security forces tolerate some level of unrest before putting down the protests. We then watched politicians on all sides of the political spectrum blame each other for the economic problems which drove the unrest. In the weeks following the turbulence, we have seen few real changes. The prospect for future unrest remains.
If you look throughout the Middle East, there are a number of common themes. Many countries in the region have general unemployment around 15-17 percent. If you break this down into women, youth, college educated, or rural areas, unemployment figures spike to more than 30 percent.
Regional populations are also increasingly assertive, willing to complain, demonstrate, and use social media. We should recall that a single vegetable seller’s suicide sparked that Arab Spring. Well, we have seen similar actions in recent years. I recall protests after the death of a vegetable oil seller in Morocco. Yet this didn’t produce an Arab Spring. We have also seen demonstrations by Moroccan coal miners, Tunisian phosphate miners, and Iranian farmers protesting a water shortage. Any of these could expand to another Arab Spring level of unrest.
On good news and opportunity in the Middle East:
Despite these problems, in many ways, we’ve never had as much good news in the Middle East as we have today, but in the echo chamber of soundbites and daily events, negative developments and conditions do receive the bulk of our attention. Let me give some examples, in no particular priority.
ISIS has been defeated. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has been severely set back, and it was set back by the Emirates working with Yemenis. The concept of militant Islamic governance in the Middle East is severely tarnished. From Hamas to ISIS to the leadership in Tehran, it is generally recognized that government led by revolutionary militants is ineffective, if not an invitation for disaster.
The list goes on. Iraq has held together, despite the prediction of many. And the various sides in Iraq are all tired, grumpy—I’m not saying they like each other, but the last thing the Shia, the Kurds or the Sunnis want is a civil war.
Software and technology is ubiquitous throughout the Middle East. It washes across the region, it is uncontrollable. It’s tying the Middle East together in ways that produce everything from commercial startups, to a growing press for women’s rights, to greater regional political discourse that crosses boundaries.
Intolerance of mismanagement is increasingly voiced on social media and in protests. Government’s now realize their young and educated populations can be an important resource.
Oil is far less important than it was before. Gas discoveries are aiding economies from the Eastern Mediterranean to Oman. Gas finds will enable Egypt to become a modest energy exporter. Solar and renewable energy use is growing. Subsidy reforms are underway and the old rentier state system of government appears to be going away. This will be tough on expatriates as local governments seek to hire their own nationals.
The Saudi ambition to develop the Red Sea basin is extraordinary. The amount of physical territory being developed in region is about the size of Belgium. Think about that. If successful, the program will tie together the economies of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and East Africa. The initiative will involve such disparate sectors as gas, oil (to include along the East Africa coast), tourism, ports development, shipping, petrochemicals, and so on.
What is happening in Saudi Arabia is unprecedented. If this campaign succeeds, imagine the impact on the Middle East? Similarly, if this campaign fails, how will this impact the region? What policies should we have to make sure this program helps the people of the region?
On the U.S. backing democracies vs. authoritarian regimes, and the role of the U.S. in promoting Middle Eastern democracy:
We should press for basic human values whenever we see there is a need to do so. But I don’t believe even under the Obama administration that we ever lectured them on democracy. Rather, we supported what we thought were the aspirations of the people. This can be problematic when we think about the Muslim Brotherhood. The old line about the Muslim Brotherhood was, one vote, one man…one time. It’s up to the people of the region to choose their own governments, but we should make sure that we don’t support potentially extremists ideologies.
On the Kurds, and a future Kurdish state:
The Kurds are great partners. They are brave, they have been heroic. Their suffering—from Halabja, to a variety of other atrocities against them and others in their area is well known. They have their own language, they have a unique culture and history. For a hundred years, the Kurds—even at the League of Nations—have pushed for their own state. However, a new micro-state in that area would represent a strategic challenge to a number of countries.
Observers of the region will say, ‘Now is not the time’ for a new micro-state that would split apart Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Any attempt to develop such a state would bring fresh devastation to the Kurdish people.’ But the time never seems right and that is also a tragedy. So, I think that while we have many interests in Syria which should compel us to stay in Syria, one of the most powerful is to support the Kurds while they develop a capacity to defend themselves and their culture.
For more insights on the region, click here to purchase a copy of The Cipher Brief’s exclusive Threat Report.
