Iran

Yet it would be a mistake to believe that Israel and Iran are eternal enemies. In fact, these two countries that despise each other so much—Iran’s Supreme Leader recently called Israel a “cancer”—were once allies. This is not ancient history. Both pre- and post-Revolutionary have Iran had extensive military and economic ties with the Jewish state. As recently as two decades ago, each country considered the other a vital friend in a region filled with hostile enemies. Conflict between the two may be bitter, but it is not, and never was, inevitable.

Iran informally recognized Israel in 1950, becoming the first Muslim-majority country after Turkey to do so. With few allies in the regions, Israel welcomed Iran’s modest support.  That support increased when England and the United States overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, installing in its place a more western-friendly regime. The new regime, headed by the Shah, was so aligned with the United States that a deal was stuck granting the Persian nation a huge nuclear energy program, as well as large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium—two pathways to a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli-Iranian alliance was a part of the Shah’s pro-western orientation. “The Shah looked at Israel as a way to establish friendly relations with the U.S.,” says the Rand Corporation’s Dalia Dassa Kaye, co-author of a recent monograph on Iranian-Israeli relations. Israel saw Iran as a way to escape its regional isolation. “They were bound by common enemies—the Soviet Union, and Arab nationalism, especially Iraq,” says Kaye.

The alliance, though never formalized or publicized because of Israel’s unpopularity in the region, consisted to deep intelligence and arms cooperation, as well as oil sharing. In the late 1950s, Israel, Iran and Turkey formed a trilateral intelligence alliance and performed counterterrorism intelligence operations. In the early 1960s, they teamed up to support Iraqi Kurds fighting the central regime. According to Kaye’s research, “Tehran and Tel Aviv developed a close military and intelligence relationship that would continue to expand until the Islamic revolution.”

The extent of this alliance should not be exaggerated. The Shah kept its relationship with Israel secretive for fear of rousing his own anti-Israeli population as well as those of Iran’s neighbors. Instead, “the alliance was based on the perception of common threats,” says Trita Parsi, author of a prize-winning book on relations between Israel, Iran and the United States. But the threats emanating from the Soviet Union, Iran and the Arab bloc were perceived as so serious that they outlasted the Shah’s overthrow in 1979.

The Islamist government that took power in Iran in 1979 was deeply hostile to all things Western, Zionism not least among them. And yet, the requirements of Iranian national interest trumped ideology to force the Islamic government to cooperation with the hated Jewish state on a number of issues. Once the U.S.-supported Iraqi government invaded Iran, the Persian state turned to Israel for much-needed arms. Phantom fighter planes and weapons for the Iranian army were sent by Israel. One estimate puts Israel’s arms sales to Iran at $500 million annually.

In the mid-1980s Israel was the conduit between Iran and the Reagan administration during the illicit Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan adminstration sold weapons to the Iranians and used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragaua. Even as it was relying more on Israel for arms in its war, the Iranian regime increased its poisonous rhetoric attacking the Jewish state, just as the Shah had done. According to the Iranian-born Parsi, such rhetoric was meant to maintain credibility in the wider Muslim world, but wasn’t matched by action. “Israel is Iran’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in 1987.

Two events caused the gradual splitting between the erstwhile allies. First, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, removing the greatest threat outside of the region to both nations’ security. Second, the weakening of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War diluted its menace. Simply put, Iran and Israel needed each other less, as both were more secure in the post-Cold War world. As Parsi wrote in “The Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, “the common threats that for decades had prompted the two states to cooperate and find common geostrategic interests—in spite of Iran’s transformation into an Islamist anti-Zionist state—would no longer exist,”

The Israelis, who had long ignored Iranian rhetoric, decided it needed to be taken seriously, especially in light of the Islamic state’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran worried about Israel’s growing power and wanted to assert power in the region. “Iran once had a more pragmatic leadership and policies,” says Kaye. The marginalization of the reformers that were popular in the 1990s meant that the extremist factions in the leadership became dominant. America’s invasion of Saddam’s Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 removed that country’s threat to Israel, leaving it with Iran as the most menacing nation in the region.

Now, Iran and Israel seem headed for war. One of those countries, or possibly the United States, will take an action that its opponent sees as requiring a military response. Assassinations of scientists and diplomats are bad enough, but a full-scale war could be the greatest disaster of the young 21^st century, a battle between well-armed bitter enemies who once found it possible to co-exist.

All of which makes his views on Iran both surprising and significant. Pollack’s 2004 book “The Persian Puzzle“ contended that containing a nuclear Iran was possible, if not desirable. Nearly eight years later, he has just written an important piece for the New Republic warning that the Obama administration’s  policies are unwittingly leading us to war with Iran.

Pollack was one of the authors of America’s “dual-track” policy with Iran, whereby efforts at serious talks are coupled with sanctions. He is now convinced that policy is failing. “The problem is that Iran sees it very differently from the way we see it,” Pollack said in an interview. “They put our efforts in terms of human rights and reaching out to the opposition, as well as the sanctions, in the same scheme as what the Israelis are doing, which includes assassinations, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks; and what the Saudis are doing, which is aid to basically every group fighting the Iranian proxies all over the Middle East; and what the British are doing, which is gathering information.”

Cumulatively, he says, these efforts are convincing Iran not that it should relinquish its nuclear efforts but that it is under attack: “To the Iranians, this looks like a concerted Western covert war against them.” The current hard-line regime in Iran takes this as the threat of war, and is prepared to fight a war rather than back down, Pollack says. His TNR article points out the ways in which U.S. policies toward Iran, intended as an alternative to war, are leading us directly to that result.

“I do not think we should go to war with Iran, and it is very clear to me that the president doesn’t want to go to war with Iran, and my concern is that the way we are doing things makes it increasingly likely that we will go to war,” he says. Pollack doesn’t want to see Iran with nuclear weapons. He concedes that containing Iran will be difficult. The nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the Americans in the Cold War was far more dangerous than people remember, says Pollack, and he shudders at those standoffs with Iran. But “if you give me a choice between war and containing a nuclear Iran, I will choose containment every time,” he says.

At the same time, he thinks diplomacy with Iran is probably a lost cause, but should still be attempted.

“I don’t think this regime has any interest in serious negotiations, because my reading of [Supreme Leader] Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard leadership, who are the ones running the Iranian government, is that they see engagement with the United States as subversive. They see it as what will bring about the end of their regime.” That is why when they do show up to talk, they send people to do nothing but read talking points, he says.

Still, even a tiny chance that negotiations will pay off is worth taking, because it is the best solution of all. At the very least, it’s important to show the world and the Iranian people that America doesn’t want a war with Iran, he says. “This is one of the great victories of the Obama administration — they convinced the Chinese and the Russians they we are not the problem, that Iran is the problem. They are right in saying that they have gotten unprecedented international support for the coalition.” The administration had the right policy, Pollack says, “but they need to ask themselves whether that policy can still work.”

Pollack’s perspective is informed by his experience with Iraq. He was instrumental at the CIA and NSC in implementing sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, sanctions that he rightly calls “the most draconian sanctions ever in history, probably.” Those sanctions ultimately failed, in preventing war, in being a humane policy, and in persuading the court of international opinion.

“Everyone assumed that Saddam Hussein would have to do what the international community wanted, because he wouldn’t dare to starve his people to death. But guess what? He decided to starve his people to death.” About Iran today, he says, “Everyone thinks now sanctions are so great, we’re putting so much pressure on the Iranians, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough pressure to get the Iranians to cave, and in one or two years we’re going to hear that the Central Bank sanctions are too harsh, and they need to be lifted. That’s what happened in Iraq.”

He grants that the failures of the Iraq War have “partly” shaped his thinking, but bristles at the suggestion that they play any larger role in his views on Iran.

“I know everyone loves to talk about Ken Pollack, the liberal hawk,” he says. “My argument in the book — you probably didn’t read my book because nobody bothered to read my book — was that Saddam was a unique character, and I think all the stuff we’ve learned about in the postwar has made that case that he was a unique, and a uniquely dangerous character. And while I don’t like the Iranian regime, and I think they are very problematic and troublesome in many ways, they aren’t Saddam Hussein. They don’t fall into the same category.”

In “The Threatening Storm,” Pollack argued that a large-scale war needed to be fought with Iraq. He seems now to believe not that the war was a mistaken idea but that it was improperly executed. By slipping into war with Iran without proper forethought and planning, the U.S. is repeating its mistakes.

“Wars are always opening Pandora’s Box and you just never know what you’re going to get,” he says. “And unless you’re prepared to fight a war all the way fully, you can get a bad outcome. And that’s what happened to us in Iraq. The Bush administration wanted to fight a war half-assed. And you can’t fight a war half-assed. You try and fight a war half-assed, it’s going to be a disaster.”