Iran's Arab Policies: Resurrecting Ancient Glory

Abstract

Since the establishment of the Persian civilization several thousand years ago, the Persian leadership has consistently striven to control the Gulf Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent. In addition, it always sought to establish a foothold in the Mediterranean Sea, while maintaining a sense of unique national identity. This applies equally well to the Elamites, the Medes, the Persians, the Achaemenes, the Parthians and the Sassanians.

Following a thousand years of decadence, starting with the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran in the seventh century and ending with the rise of the Safavids in the sixteenth century, with the exception of the Buyid interlude, the Iranians became Shiites under the rule of Shah Ismail I. It is essential to highlight this because the Islamic Republic of Iran is presently using Pan-Shiism as a means to achieve its imperialist ends in the Arab world. Concurrent with the mass conversion of Iranians to Shiism in the sixteenth century, the ulama in Iran in particular began to yield and accumulate an increasing amount of power from the time of the Safavids, to Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, passing through the Qajars and the Pahlavis. It is important to underscore this development because it directly facilitated the ascendance of clergymen as a central force in Iranian politics.

Since the toppling of the Shah’s regime and the unfolding of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Middle East has been facing the rising threat of Iran’s theocratic regime. The Islamic Republic’s ambitions for the region, which were centered on exporting the revolution of “Wilayat al-Faqih” beyond its borders and across the Middle East, were reined in by Saddam Hussein during the following vicious eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. Although the Mullah regime was not capable of penetrating the area as it saw fit during the war, it was nevertheless able to consolidate its grip on power internally. Throughout the same time period, the regime was simultaneously interfering in the course of the Palestine Question to establish a foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In fact, in 1982, it laid the groundwork of the embryonic Islamic Jihad which later became known as the Lebanese Hezbollah, and it allied itself with Baathist Alawite Syria. It is at this stage that the Mullah’s regime began to develop their Arab policies in the Middle East.

After the end of the Second Gulf War and the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991, Iran began promoting its “Axis of Resistance” front to counter United States’ influence, by culturally penetrating under-developed societies in Yemen, Iraq and Bahrain and presenting itself as a genuine and credible partner. Indeed, throughout the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iranian regime was able to cultivate genuine relationships with the Iraqi dissidents to the Baathist regime in Baghdad, it was able to sponsor Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and it succeeded in allying itself with the Houthis in Yemen. Notably, it is at this stage that the clergymen in Tehran were aptly capable of transforming Iran into a regional power.

In the aftermath of the so-called “Arab Spring” that erupted in 2011, the Iranian theocracy is exponentially expanding and enlarging its reach and scope of influence in the Fertile Crescent. This is demonstrated in its intervention in the Syrian Civil War, with the aim of protecting Bashar al Assad’s regime from collapsing at the hands of Syrian insurgents. With the official Russian intervention in the Syrian civil conflict in 2015, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was able to turn the tide of the war to their advantage, thus erecting a land corridor from Tehran all the way to Beirut. Furthermore, the Iranian regime in Tehran is conducting a regional competition with its main rival in the Middle East, namely the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for supremacy and hegemony over the entire Arab and Muslim world. In fact, Saudi Arabia along with the other Gulf monarchies are the only countries which are capable of counterbalancing Iranian influence and power projection in the Middle East thus far. Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether the Islamic Republic of Iran will be able to transform itself into the undisputed hegemon of the Middle East in the upcoming few decades, taking into account that it is arming itself with its own arsenal of nuclear weapons with long range ballistic missiles.