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My quotes in AlJazeera’s Listening Post from January 11, 2020.

My latest in Middle East Eye: On 3 January, the new year began not only with a violent bang, but also with a tectonic shift – and not the one that anybody expected.

The surprise was not the US air strike on Qassem Soleimani, who commanded Iran’s Quds Force, the foreign operations unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, but rather the reaction to it.

Soleimani’s death was not unexpected. He was a soldier who survived the devastating Iran-Iraq War. His military career continued well after the end of the war in 1988, and he eventually became the Quds Force commander in the late 90s.

A ‘living martyr’

Soleimani dutifully developed and implemented Iran’s regional security architecture, which evolved into the era of the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war. In the latter, he coordinated militias to fight alongside a depleted and exhausted Syrian army.

When the Islamic State (IS) began marching on Iraq’s cities in the summer of 2014 and eventually reached the gates of Baghdad, the world was slow to react – except for Soleimani. He was the first foreign leader on the scene to shore up resistance to IS. He commanded troops and militias not from a distant, fortified encampment, but by moving freely in the world’s most tumultuous region, where countless groups, least of all IS, vowed to kill him.

It is thus no surprise that he ultimately fell. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei often referred to him as a “living martyr” before his death.

As with any military commander who fought in wars, Soleimani had allies and enemies. As such, there were those who welcomed his assassination – a welcome that CNN played on loop when a sparsely populated, spontaneous march in Syria’s Idlib celebrated his demise.

But the real surprise was the groundswell of solidarity that his death generated. His body was not immediately returned to Iran to receive burial rites; rather, he was kept in Iraq so that regular Iraqis and the militiamen he backed could take his coffin to Iraq’s shrine cities, including Najaf and Karbala, the hallowed grounds of Shia Islam.

Throngs of Iraqis gathered to commemorate him and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of the Kataib Hezbollah militia who was also killed in the US strike.

Hallowed grounds

The bodies of Soleimani, Muhandis and several others were then transported to Ahvaz, an Iranian city with a history of dissent, and Kerman, where Soleimani was born and where millions gathered to pay their respect. The massive domestic shows of support underscore how foreign aggression is a red line that can bring Iranians together even after the polarisation resulting in the state’s brutal crackdown on the November protests.

More to the point, he was also taken to the shrine city of Mashhad. For the first time in the modern period, a political figure received burial rites in hallowed grounds in both Iran and Iraq, a watershed moment that cannot be overstated.

In Tehran, the bodies were placed in front of mourners who gathered behind Khamenei as he led prayers for the departed, with their coffins wrapped in Iranian and Iraqi flags. Indeed, Iran’s leader prayed in front of the colours of a country with which Iran fought the longest conventional war of the 20th century.

Again, what is surprising is not their deaths, but the manner by which Iranians and Iraqis have come together in solidarity. Despite the war of the 1980s that was very much a byproduct of Cold War politics, Iranians and Iraqis share a long history in which culture, religion and even ethnicity overlap.

Muhandis, for example, was born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Iranian mother. He married an Iranian woman after going into exile not to a fellow Arab country, but to neighbouring Iran. He returned to Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, and emerged as a commander during the bloodletting of the subsequent sectarian civil war.

Their killing at the hands of the US fosters a unity that speaks to a larger issue. Western media presents Iran’s role in the Middle East as an insidious foreign actor with “tentacles reaching far and wide”, as CNN’s Michael Holmes put it.

Sprawling US military infrastructure

Iran has long-standing ties with countries and communities throughout the region. The Shia communities in Iran and Lebanon have a centuries-long history, with roots in the 1500s, when the Safavid shahs imported Lebanese clerics to Iran to preach Shia Islam to their subjects.

In the 1980s, Syria was the only Arab country that sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, which explains why Iran mobilised to help stave off the collapse of the Syrian government.

In the US political lexicon, Iran has “tentacles” and “proxies”, while the US merely has regional “allies” and “security interests” that encompass a military presence encircling Iran from Afghanistan to the east, Iraq to the west, and the Persian Gulf to the south.

The US has long been flooding the region with arms, and US invasions and interventions – including the recent seizure of Syrian oil fields – are naturalised within the ideological framework of a self-affirming imperial discourse. That is, US “security interests” no longer simply mean safeguarding the homeland, but also expanding and protecting the sprawling US military infrastructure overseas.

The killing of Soleimani and Muhandis, the unprecedented mourning processions in their honour, and the recent parliamentary vote in Iraq calling for a total US withdrawal, underscore the emerging unity against this ever-expanding US military presence – one that US commentators have internalised when they use a discourse that fails to realise that Iran is native to the Middle East, and the US is not.

My quotes in The Guardian: “Pouya Alimagham, a lecturer and historian who was at home with his parents in Orange county when the news broke, noted that it was unnerving to watch US media programs feature rightwing thinktank heads and retired military personnel while largely excluding Iranian perspectives.

‘We’ve been on a rollercoaster ride for months,’ he added. ‘We’ve been talking about escalation for the past six months, and how this is going to lead to war … the war has already begun.'”

My quotes in The Independent: “Pouya Alimagham, historian of Middle Eastern at MIT, thinks Rouhani and his foreign minister Javad Zarif have risked their entire political careers on this nuclear agreement. He says the Iranian electorate voted for Rouhani in 2013 on the promise with engagement with the world, and again in 2017 on the promise that they will enjoy the economic relief promised under the 2015 nuclear agreement. Alimagham told The Independent: ‘All the while, Iranian conservatives had been saying that the nuclear agreement is a fool’s errand – that the US government’s signature is not worth the paper on which its written. With President Trump subverting the agreement, the conservatives feel vindicated, and Rouhani and Zarif have been undermined.’

My quotes in Newsweek: “Pouya Alimagham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also told Newsweek that ‘Japan can indeed play a constructive role in mediating between Iran and the U.S. It has longstanding ties with both Iran and the U.S. Iranians in general view Japan in a very favorable light,’ alluding to Japan’s 1905 victory over czarist Russia, which had long intervened in Persian affairs.

Like Azizi, Alimagham explained that ‘there’s more than just friendly relations or history that drives relations’ between the two.

‘Japan imports Iranian oil and does extensive business with Iran, and U.S. sanctions are hurting those endeavors,” he told Newsweek. “Consequently, Japanese businesses have been pressuring their government to resume oil imports and to put in place protections in support of companies wanting to return to Iran.’

Still, there were major challenges ahead, even with an ambitious diplomatic effort on Japan’s part. Alimagham said that ‘the departure of Bolton helps make de-escalation more likely, but many barriers exist,’ such as Pompeo, who readily blamed Iran for Saturday’s attacks and appeared enthusiastic to paint the Islamic Republic as a rogue actor, and regional U.S. partners such as Saudi Arabia, which was also building a case against Iran.

‘That said, and despite the bluster, neither Trump nor the Iranians want a conflict to break out between the two countries, so there’s room for hope,’ he added. ‘Japan, along with France and others, can use their ties with both countries to find common ground.’”

My quote in Al Jazeera: “Firing war hawks like John Bolton is a step in the right direction, but if the Trump administration is interested in de-escalation, it needs to stop pursuing hawkish policies and pressure campaigns that ultimately force Iran to choose between submission and confrontation,’ Pouya Alimagham, a historian of the modern Middle East at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Al Jazeera. ‘After all, it is not hard to imagine what path a nation with a modern history of resistance to western intervention would take under such circumstances.’”

My latest in The American Conservative: On July 29, President Trump tweeted: “Just remember, Iranians never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” In just 12 words, Trump leveled a multi-layered, ahistorical insult against both his predecessor, Barack Obama, and Iran.

More importantly, the remarks betray a dangerously ignorant understanding of Iran that could result in another careless Middle East war of choice.

The tweet invokes a clichéd, colonial-era stereotype that Iranians, like other Middle Eastern peoples, are wily swindlers—rapacious, greedy bazaar merchants who aim to take advantage of honest and unsuspecting Westerners. Trump is hardly the first American leader to dabble in such denigrating stereotypes. Wendy Sherman, a senior State Department official and former lead negotiator who helped forge the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, infamously quipped that Iranians could not be trusted because they have “deception in their DNA.”

The president deployed the stereotype of Iranian cunning to imply that they tricked a naïve president, Barack Obama, into signing a flawed nuclear deal. According to the world’s foremost nuclear security experts, however, the accord was ensuring Iran’s compliance, thereby preventing a nuclear weapons program—that is, until Trump subverted the agreement in 2018.

More importantly, Trump’s words underscore the idea that Iranians are cowardly and militarily ineffectual, but make up for such unflattering character flaws by swindling their foes during negotiations to achieve victory.

Iran’s last war, however, should dispel any notion of cowardice and military weakness—a history President Trump and anti-Iran hawks like National Security Adviser John Bolton must face with clear eyes if the United States is to avoid another needless, catastrophic war in the Middle East.

Iraq Invades Iran

In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iran faced one of its most vulnerable moments in modern times. During the revolutionary upheaval, many arms depots were raided and weapons were distributed to volunteers ready to deliver the monarchy its coup de grace.

After the watershed moment, the Revolutionary Council feared that, given the Anglo-American coup in 1953 through the Iranian military, Iran’s generals could not be trusted. The subsequent purge resulted in the decimation of the country’s military leadership. Moreover, political infighting between revolutionary factions also led to unrest. To make matters worse, militant students were fearful that the U.S. was planning to undermine the revolution through a coup—as it did the nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953—so they resolved to ward off any such attempts. Consequently, they seized the U.S. embassy and held its personnel hostage. The international community responded by isolating Iran for its blatant disregard for international norms.

Capitalizing on Iran’s internal post-revolutionary chaos, military disarray, and international isolation, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of his neighboring rival on September 22, 1980. Shortly after, Iran’s internal power struggle between the various revolutionary factions erupted into open warfare.

So devastating was the power struggle that many of the leading personalities of the Iranian Revolution died in assassinations and bomb blasts, including Iran’s president and prime minister. Thus, the Iranian state was forced to fight on two battlefronts—internally against its challengers and externally against Iraqi invaders. The government did not, however, collapse under the weight of its domestic rivals and foreign aggressors. In fact, the war enlivened Charles Tilly’s timeless words: “War makes states.”

Iranian Resilience

The Iranian state harnessed a powerful ideology that intertwined nationalism with Islamic revolutionary zeal in order to prompt Iranians to close rank behind it, marshaling hundreds of thousands of soldiers to liberate Iranian territory occupied by the Iraqi military. By May 24, 1982, and after tens of thousands of deaths, Iran freed the border city of Khorramshahr after a brutal two-year siege.

Soon after Khorramshahr’s liberation, the invading Iraqis were on the defensive, and Saddam’s wartime financiers, namely Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, offered Iran a multi-billion dollar reparations package to end the war. Iran’s leader refused, declaring that the only way the war would end was with Saddam Hussein’s bloody demise. He then spearheaded the conflict onto Iraqi soil for the first time. Time captured the moment by phrasing the counter-invasion as “Iran on the march.”

Iran Versus the World

Iraq enjoyed the support of the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and the Arab League—with the exception of Syria and Libya—and even used chemical weapons on Iranian troops. Yet Iran persisted despite such horrible odds, and hundreds of thousands continued to go to the battlefront knowing it was possible that they, too, could fall victim to Iraq’s horrific chemical weapons.

The violence dragged on for eight bitter years, making it the longest conventional war of the 20th century—with an Iranian death toll estimated between half a million to a million. To put that staggering number into perspective, the conservative estimate exceeds the total American loss of life in World War II.

The war’s conclusion was a failure in Iranian eyes, as it did not end in Saddam Hussein’s overthrow and Iraqis and the region would continue to suffer at his hands. Two years later, he refused to demobilize his million-man army to a jobless future in a war-ravaged economy, and instead dispatched them across Iraq’s border again—this time to Kuwait.

Yet neither did Iran lose the war. In fact, it was the first conflict since the two 19th-century wars with Czarist Russia in which Iran did not lose any territory. Above all, the country survived a genocidal conflict—and survival was its own victory.

Iran Today

Today, Iran’s population is more than double what it was in 1980—estimated at roughly 83 million. After lacking military support from abroad during the Iran-Iraq War, Iran now has extensive domestic weapons manufacturing capabilities. Also unlike 1980, it has more allies in the region. In other words, if Iran fought so stubbornly under such dire circumstances during the ’80s, it will only fight more effectively today. It has already proven itself militarily by coordinating the fight alongside the U.S. to defeat ISIS in Iraq while simultaneously working with Russia to help the Syrian government win an unrelenting civil war.

The Iranian military budget may be a fraction of America’s, but the Trump administration—especially anti-Iran hawks John Bolton and Mike Pompeo—should consider this history and current reality objectively. If they don’t, if they continue to underestimate Iran the same way the Bush administration did with a far weaker Iraq in 2003, they risk another war of choice. Indeed, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney infamously stated: “I think it will go relatively quickly…weeks rather than months.” To be sure, history has been unkind to his rosy assessment.

Thinking a war with Iran will be over before it begins—or that it will, as Senator Tom Cotton boasted, not require more than “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike”—is the first step towards another needless, ruinous war.

On this day 31 years ago, the USS Vincennes shot down IranAir Flight 655. 290 civilians died.

That the downing of the passenger plane happened during the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War serves as a reminder of the US role in that war. With President Reagan at the helm, the United States entered into a tactical alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The now infamous photo of Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam in 1983 speaks to this pact (image below).

The Reagan administration supplied Saddam’s regime with billions that were used to buy some of the most advanced weapons available in the Western world. The US also provided satellite information so Iraq knew where to strike Iranian troop movements. When that satellite information was used to enable Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian soldiers, the US not only did not protest, but provided diplomatic cover at the UN against Iranian objections. No UN resolution was passed condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians, and Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons stockpile.

My latest piece – Lobelob: On June 2, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the United States would be willing to engage with Iran as long as “the Iranians…behave like a normal nation.”

Aside from the condescension of talking to Iranians as if they are children who need to “behave,” Pompeo’s remark begs the question as to what it means to act like a “normal nation.” A brief look at US-Iran relations before the Iranian Revolution and a short survey of America’s long-time allies in the Middle East today help shed light on how America’s foreign policy establishment defines “normal” behavior.

Iran under the Shah

Before the revolution in 1979, Iran was ruled by Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi—an autocrat installed by the United States and UK after they orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq had defied imperial Britain by nationalizing the country’s oil resources for the benefit of the underdeveloped nation. A trained lawyer, he even successfully defended his case at the World Court—a legal decision that the British rejected.

After the coup, the United States helped the shah establish the notorious internal intelligence agency, SAVAK. The CIA trained SAVAK personnel in the most brutal forms of modern, scientific torture to ensure the longevity of the shah’s rule against a population that increasingly saw him as an American puppet. As a result, according to Amnesty International, the shah’s regime became one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The Iranian opposition, which had long reeled under SAVAK’s heavy boot, predictably blamed the United States for the shah’s repression.

After Britain announced the withdrawal of its naval forces east of the Suez, then-President Nixon went to Iran in 1972 to meet with the shah to ensure that America’s ally in the Persian Gulf would fill the void. President Nixon offered to sell the shah the most sophisticated American military hardware short of nuclear weapons to become the policeman of the Persian Gulf. The shah eagerly obliged by building the most powerful military in the region. By 1976, the United States was selling more weapons to Iran than any other country in the world. In turn, the Iranian opposition criticized the shah’s multi-billion-dollar arms purchases as a waste of the country’s wealth.

The shah also had an interventionist record that aligned with American strategy during the Cold War. Bogged down in Vietnam, the United States looked to outsource the fight against Communism to right-wing regimes like the shah’s. In the early 1970s, Iran dispatched soldiers across the Persian Gulf to help put down Marxist insurrections in places like Dhofar, Oman—interventions that were supported at the time not only by the Americans, but the Saudis as well.

In sum, a “normal” Iran before 1979 was an autocracy that ruthlessly repressed dissent, bought billions in American weapons, protected U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf by intervening in other countries, and even had a Western-backed nuclear program.

Other “Normal Nations” in the Region

Cold War strategic considerations perhaps prompted the United States to consider such “behavior” as “normal.” Yet, a survey of America’s allies in the post-Cold War Middle East illustrates how the precedent of the shah is very much consistent with what the United States considers to be “normal” today.

Saudi Arabia is an apt starting point given that U.S.-Saudi relations go back as far as Roosevelt’s presidency. Today, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—with the backing of the Trump administration—are spearheading the bombing of the poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen, contributing to what the UN considers the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The Saudis and Emiratis are also the leading force in the blockade of America’s other ally in the Persian Gulf, Qatar. They are supporting some of the most extreme jihadis in Syria—though this support has lessened after the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen diverted resources and attention. Mohammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, is also credited with ordering the assassination of the U.S.-based Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, when he visited a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Long before the upstart crown prince, Saudi Arabia had been deploying its oil wealth to spread its puritanical, hard-line interpretation of Islam across the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were born, in part, from this ubiquitous Saudi ideological conditioning.

Moreover, although President Trump alleges that the Iran nuclear agreement was not stringent enough, his administration quietly signed agreements to sell nuclear technology to the Saudis. What’s more, two American allies in the region, Pakistan and Israel, the former of which borders Iran, possess nuclear arsenals.

In terms of other “normal nations,” Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories has endured for more than half a century with no signs of abating. Instead, the Israeli government frequently announces plans to build more settlements in the West Bank.

America sends billions of dollars in annual military aid to Israel and Egypt. The latter has jailed thousands of dissidents since the overthrow of its democratically elected government in 2013. The home to one of the most iconic uprisings in the Arab Spring has become its seeming deathbed. The current Egyptian government is exponentially more authoritarian than the one preceding 2011. According to Human Rights Watch:

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government. The Egyptian government and state media have framed this repression under the guise of combating terrorism, and al-Sisi has increasingly invoked terrorism and the country’s state of emergency law to silence peaceful activists.

The coup at home was not enough. Egypt, along with the Emiratis and the Saudis, are backing the renegade general, Khalifa Haftar, whom Trump has endorsed, as he attempts to topple the UN-recognized government in neighboring Libya.

Another “normal nation,” Bahrain—with the aid of Saudi Arabia and the UAE—repressed the most peaceful Arab Spring uprising of all. American support for the government, however, remained steadfast since the island country is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

As such, “normal” today, as in the past, means pro-U.S. dictators, Islamist governments but of the pro-American kind, military occupations, regimes that violate human rights, hosts to U.S. armed forces and high-end customers of the American arms industry, and governments that intervene in the affairs of their neighbors. To be sure, none of this should actually be considered normal.

In reality, Iran’s conduct is not different from its regional counterparts. It violates human rights, intervenes in other countries either directly or by supporting armed groups, and is authoritarian like its pro-American neighbors. The only thing not “normal” about Iran’s actions is that they do not align with U.S. foreign policy goals as they did in the past. In fact, they often obstruct them, and that’s the point—a “normal nation” is allowed to do seemingly anything as long as its actions accord with U.S. interests in the Middle East.