30 Jun 2017

Persian Iran in a Shiite Disguise

Policy Studying Unit

Harmoon Centre for Contemporary Studies is an independent, nonprofit, research, cultural and media institution. Its main focus is to conduct studies and researches about the Arab region, especially Syria. It also works towards cultural and media development, enhancing the civil society performance, and spreading democratic awareness and values of dialogue, as well as respect for human rights. The Centre also provides consultation and training services in political and media fields to all Syrians on the basis of Syrian national identity.To achieve its objectives, the Centre conducts its activities through five specialized units, (1) Policy Studies Unit, (2) Social Researches Unit, (3) Books Review Unit, (4) Translation and Arabization Unit, and (5) Legal Unit.A set of action programs are also adopted, such as the program for Political Consultations and Initiatives; Program for Services, Media Campaigns, and Public Opinion Making Program; Program for Dialogue Support and Civil and Cultural Development Program; Syria Future Program. The Centre may add new programs depending on the actual needs of Syria and the region. In implementing its programs, the Centre deploys multiple mechanisms, including lectures, workshops, seminars, conferences, training courses, as well as paper and electronic press.

HARMOON CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDIES

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Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 2

First: The lost empire returns .................................................................................................................. 2

Second: Taking advantage of the chaos ............................................................................................... 4

Third: The religious and the national .................................................................................................... 6

Fourth: Dangerous results ....................................................................................................................... 8

Fifth: Persistent ambitions ....................................................................................................................... 9

Sixth: Unstable influence ....................................................................................................................... 10

Seventh: Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 11

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Introduction

Iran declared the return of the Persian Empire, claiming to be the master of Iraq,

Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and blatantly threatening the Arabs with its

willingness to crush them if they do not bow to the rule of the new Xerxes. Undoubtedly, this

Iranian frankness affirmed the nationalist dimension of the Iranian project, which explains its

insistence on intervening in the affairs of neighbouring countries and sabotaging them for

decades.

First: The lost empire returns

At the end of last May, Iranian Defence Minister Hussain Dehqan announced that after

2003 Iraq "has become part of the Persian Empire, will not return to the Arab world, and will

not be an Arab state again." He went on arrogantly addressing the Arab Iraqis: “Arabs living in

Iraq have to leave to their arid desert where they came from, from Mosul to the border of

Basra, this is our land and they have to evacuate it. "

On top of that, former Air Force commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has

threatened the Arabs in general, saying that the pro-Iranian Shiite forces in Iraq "will silence

any voice that tries to bring Iraq back to its so-called Arab environment, because now it is back

to its natural Persian environment”, warning that Iran “is now capable of designing and

manufacturing ballistic rockets of 3000 km range, and is already producing enough of them”,

concluding by saying: "We have returned as a superpower as we were before, and everyone

should understand that we are the masters of the region, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and

Bahrain soon. "

Dahqan, who is close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is in turn the

supreme political, military, and religious authority in Iran, could not control his excitement

this time, and revealed what was going on inside the hallways and lobbies of the government

in Tehran and Qom, exposing the real Persian nationalistic strategy controlling the Iranian

project, a truth that Iran has often tried to camouflage in a sectarian Shiite disguise.

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In fact, the statements made by the Iranian general are not entirely new. They repeat what

Ali Yunisi, advisor to Iranian President Hassan Rowhani, said on 8 March 2015: that Iran "has

become an empire, as it has historically been, with its capital Baghdad, the centre of our

civilization, our culture and our identity today as in the past. "

"The geography of Iran and Iraq is indivisible, our culture is indivisible, so we can either

fight or unite," he resumed, and then going beyond Iraq and its borders he said: "The entire

Middle East is Iranian, and we will stand up to Islamic extremism, takfiris, atheism, neo-

Ottomans, the West, and Zionism ».

Yunisi, who was head of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security until

2005, was referring to Iran's intention to restore the time of the Sassanid Persian Empire

founded before Islam. The Persians were its foundation and it continued for more than four

centuries. At later stages it aimed to fight the Islamic Khalifat, and in its peak it took control of

parts of Armenia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Iraq, invaded the Levant, and made

Mada'in its capital, and then took over Jerusalem and Egypt, but was defeated by Hercules of

Rome in Little Asia, losing Syria and Egypt, than it suffered a crushing defeat by him near the

ruins of Nineveh. Later on, after being weakened by its defeats, what was left of the ruins of

this empire was finished off by Arab Muslims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of Iranian officials statements that confirm the Persian

nationalistic occupation intentions that dominate the strategy of the Iranian state, and bear

clear interpretations of the expansionist Iranian project, as well as explaining the wars that it

waged, supported, ignited or attempted to ignite in many parts of the Arab region, such as Iraq,

Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and the sectarian military militias that it created, dogmatically

fuelled, and encouraged to commit war crimes in many places, especially the Lebanese

Hezbollah and dozens of other sectarian militias in Iraq.

Three years ago, in February 2013, about two and a half years after the start of the Syrian

revolution, Iranian cleric Mahdi Taib, the head of AMAR's Strategic Headquarters against Anti-

Iran Wars, said that Syria was "Iran's number 35 municipality". He added that «if the enemy

attacked us in order to occupy Syria or Ahwaz, we will fight for Syria first», thus confirming

that Syria’s strategic importance outweighed that of the occupied Arab (Ahwaz), in spite of

containing (Ahwaz) 90 percent of Iranian oil fields.

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Months later, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards announced Iran's readiness to send

130,000 Basij members to Syria and talked about the establishment of the Syrian-Hezbollah

to be the right arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards there, similar to its counterpart in

Lebanon and the (popular crowd militias) in Iraq.

The statements of Dahkan, Yunisi, and others make it possible to conclude that the Persian

nationalist factor is, in fact, dominating the sectarian religious factor in the Iranian project.

Iranian officials want to conquer the world again and control Asia, its middle and west, to

revive an Empire, that ruled, prospered then crumbled, using any available method, direct and

indirect, political, military, religious, and ideological, hoping that they can change history,

demography, and doctrines, and establish a new historical consciousness for the people in the

region.

Second: Taking advantage of the chaos

The afro-set above is not mere accusations towards the Iranian policy, rather than a

description of it. Iran, according to historians and politicians, has had a long history of

benefiting from chaos and has not had a history of good relations with its neighbours. It has

largely benefited from the Second Gulf War and its mess, it took control of Iraq, established

the Lebanese Hezbollah in the chaos of the Lebanese civil war in the seventies of the last

century, worked to infiltrate the Sudanese society during the southern rebellion and its

separation in 2011, and tried to spread Shiism in Egypt and some African countries, taking

advantage of the deteriorating economic situation and dominance of dictatorships. It founded

in a rotten ruling class in Iraq, political, religious, and military, and some sectarian militias,

which some civil resources estimated to be around 75 militia, all of this during the chaos of

the American invasion of Iraq. It has also taken advantage of the Afghan chaos by supporting

Taliban and supplying them with weapons to fight the government forces and claimed the

contrary. It supported the leaders of the organization of (Al Qaeda), which is classified as a

terrorist organisation in the whole world, gave refuge to some of its leaders and still doing the

same, exploited the political differences in Bahrain and sought to turn the protests into a civil

war, and used the Houthis in Yemen and supplied them with weapons, and loaded them with

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sectarian ideology to ignite a war that is still burning the south of the Arabian Peninsula, as

well as it did in Syria while supporting a ruling sectarian totalitarian corrupt regime, helping it

destroy Syria, and displacing its population, erasing its past and present, and recruited dozens

of military militias to wreak havoc in the country.

Iran’s dream of re-establishing the Persian empire is more important than the political

projects and religious ideologies, which are used as tools to reach this goal, covering the

Persian nationalist state with the Shiite sectarian state, to pass its project, which cannot be

accepted regionally and internationally.

After Iran's revolution in 1979, it began to export its revolution, based on the wishes of

Imam Khomeini and his dream, which held a grudge for a history of Arab-Persian conflict,

grief, and anger for the Persians. His strategy was based on rejecting the current maps at that

time, with his regime planning for a new position for the Iranian influence, by changing

borders, submitting political regimes, or igniting wars among countries in the region.

The Iranian revolution was distinguished by the arrival of the conservative Shiite clerics to

power. The Iranian media and all political and religious officials promoted the idea that the

sect was the basis, not nationalism. The new religious rule promoted the sectarian spirit of the

Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and others, and publicised for the Fakih rule (the

religious scholar rule), pushing by all means to make Iran, the primary Islamic Shiite centre,

gathering all Shiites in the world, and used political money, financial aids, promotion of

sectarianism, and community penetration to uplift this idea, and did not care much to

compete with the Iraqi Najaf to lead the world Shiite because they benefited from Najaf and

its influence on the Arab Shiites as well.

Iran of Khomeini and Khamenei did not reveal its main nationalist goal, perhaps fearing

that the change of maps will affect them nationally, and the possibility of using it against them.

It is true that about 55 percent of the Iranian people are non-Persian, but there is 45% of

different nationalisms and ethnicities of the Iranian people, making the change of maps a

threat that could threaten Iran from within.

Iran sought to gain positions of influence within the neighbouring countries, by exporting

the revolution and recruiting Shiites in the region. To this end, it contributed to the

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establishment of political systems that adopted the Iranian vision of government and worked

on dominating political systems that were plagued with crisis. It stressed its hostility to the

United States to attract regimes that claimed socialism and anti-imperialism and strived to

create Shiite political parties and armed sectarian Shiite militias, whose task was to cause

confusion and to take over states by taking advantage of the sectarian dimension as much as

possible. At the same time Iran supported Sunni Islamic forces, movements, and parties under

the pretext of supporting the "resistance" against Israel, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in

Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, National Union Party of Talabani in Iraq (PUK),

(Boko Haram) in Sudan and Nigeria, (the Turkish Hezbollah and the PKK), in Tajikistan,

Uzbekistan, and Turkey, all to achieve the undeclared nationalist goals of reviving the glories

of the Safavid state, based on the superiority of the Persian race over the Arab and other races

that make up the Iranian state. This strategy was expressed by General Qasim Soleimani,

commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who said, "We have

created 10 Iran(s) outside Iran."

Third: The religious and the national

Imam Khomeini believed the authority of the Faqih was parallel to that of the Prophet,

even succeeding it, and Ayatollah Khamenei considered himself the representative of God on

earth and the infallible Faqih, thus attempting to remove any historical and religious obstacles

that could face their desired state. They worked on enhancing the Shiite doctrine as a political

and military power, dedicating the power of religion to carry their national Persian project.

Earlier, Khomeini Iran reconciled with its Persian imperial past, especially during the reign

of Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who visited Persepolis or (Persia City),

stressing the historical and strategic depth of the Persian Empire, and called on the Iranians to

cherish this history and seek to revive it.

The Iranian authorities tried to portray the state of the Faqih as a (modernist state) that

was able to face the secularisation of the society. At the same time, it managed to attract the

Shiites of the whole region within one (backwards) reference, directly and clearly, bearing a

religious face and an extremist national Persian depth. On the other hand, there had been a

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Sunni loss of reference, in which Iran had contributed significantly by supporting

fundamentalist Sunni current (Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others) and extremism (the Taliban

and al-Qaeda and others).

In the past decade, Iran has also worked to spread Shi'ism in many Arab countries, a move

that has been welcomed by some regimes subordinates to Iran such as Hafiz al-Assad regime,

and his successor Bashar al-Asad, offering intensives and generous give aways to those who

converted, such as free medical services and higher education in Iran, in addition to appealing

monthly salaries comparing to the average income in Syria, and not to mention the business

facilitations and the advantages for the well-off converters. The Iranian embassy and its

cultural advisor have worked in the last 20 years to perform a semi-public operation to spread

Shi'ism and opened seven Iranian Shiite channels around the world, promoting the Iranian

project, Iran, and the Shiite religious preachers.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Iran has led dozens of its irregular military militias -

comprising hundreds of thousands of fighters, heavily armed with an exclusionary sectarian

ideology – to carry out large-scale liquidations of Sunni opponents, large-scale demographic

change campaigns, emptying whole villages and towns from their original inhabitants and of

the Sunni population through forced displacement, and tried to establish what is known as

(Shiite Crescent), which runs from Iran to the Mediterranean through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

Iran aspired to change the balance of Islamic sectarian power, manipulate the geography

of the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, falsify history, expand spatially, and politically

dominate. For this reason, it employed the idea of the Wilayat al-Faqih to awaken sectarian

tendencies to the utmost, prioritising the reclamation of the Safavid heritage.

It should be noted in this context that the Safavid Empire resorted to violence and

massacres to force the people of Iran to embrace Shiism, which confirms that the dream of the

Shiite Crescent is an offspring of the imperial dream, not the other way around.

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Fourth: Dangerous results

This Iranian expansionist ethnic nationalism policy, based on sectarian ideology, has led

to a wave of sectarian tensions, particularly between the Shiite (Arab minority) and the Sunnis

(Arab majority), reaching the point of sectarian civil war in some cases, as in Lebanon and Iraq,

and contributed to the widespread of radical Islamic movements and their expansion in many

parts of the world, leaving a wide rift between the Iranian authority and the regional

authorities, especially between Iran on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the

other, assuming that the latter are major poles of Sunni Islam in the region.

The Persian Iranian national strategy created a sectarian division between the Muslims

and encouraged the public sectarian rivalry, which escalated to armed confrontations, and

interfered with the military structure of the countries of the region, affecting the security,

safety, and stability of these countries, creating illegitimate leaderships and authorities, that

had nothing to do with the societies they dominated, nor with the structures of modern states.

The Iranian strategy has caused great strife between the Arab countries, specifically among

the countries subordinate to Iran, and those who were aware of the Iranian threat, and their

blatant interference in these countries, undermined the previous good interrelationships and,

paralyzed Arab cooperation, which was to the pleasure of "Israel" that Arabs were

preoccupied with their internal differences and forgetting the central dispute that they all

shared.

Iran’s aspirations were not exclusive to the Middle East, but rather it expanded towards

the Arb Gulf, where Iran began to support the Shiites there, creating a rift - that did not exist

previously - between them and the Sunnis of these countries, especially in Bahrain, and

eastern Saudi Arabia, where there were Shiite minority, and Yemen, home to Houthis, who

decided to be a sectarian Iranian military tool.

Today, Iran has a large role in four Arab countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and

dozens of pure Shiite militias are deployed there, exploiting this religious tide to confront the

rest of the adversaries on religious grounds, without Iran being directly involved in the

conflict. Iran’s connection with the Islamic State organisation continues to be a mystery, as

there have been lots of unexplained facilitations for it, minimising Iran’s confrontation with

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the US, once this organisation was established as America's first enemy instead of Iran, whose

threat retreated to the second place in America’s lists.

Fifth: Persistent ambitions

During its export of the revolution, the Iranian regime sought to defend the Arab regimes

in crisis in the region. Its support was unlimited, and its relations were strengthened with

them. It facilitated preaching the sanctions and embargo imposed on Iran since the second

Gulf War and the emergence of Iran's nuclear program in public, helping it breaking the

isolation imposed on it, whether it was economic investments or supplying them with

weapons that were prohibited internationally from possessing, or even harnessing the

military force if necessary. The benefits were mutual between these regimes and the Iranian

regime, but the Iranians have always been the stronger side tactically and strategically,

penetrating the state and societies, and established a force that could influence the political

decision if not fully dominate it. Iran's relationship with these regimes, as in Iraq, Syria,

Lebanon, and Yemen shifted from being a circumstantial relationship linked to specific

objectives to a dependency, control, and conspiracy-loaded relationship.

After the Islamic Revolution, the Wali al-Faqih establishment sought to brand the Iranian

state as the Shiite ideological state, relying on the doctrine as a guide and reference in its

political and military work to avoid labelling it illegitimate due to its religious character. The

West did not realise that deep Iran was a direct threat to Western interests. The religious

establishment enhanced its authority as a sole religious reference, utilised Islam and

politicised men of religion, swallowed up the state and its institutions, and dominated and

destroyed them, with the aim of establishing a Persian empire on the ruins of a sectarian

religious state, and succeeded after nearly four decades to achieve relative success in this area.

But The Iranian imperial dream is still eluding them, especially since Iran does not guarantee

local, regional, and international conditions. It cannot continue its domination over countries

for long, nor is it capable of adapting the hostile Arab environment that is increasingly

becoming aggressive toward Iran, its policies, and ideologies.

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Since 2003, countries in the region have tried to reveal the Persian ambitions of Iran and

warned against practices in the region, its control and (occupation) of parts of it, its work to

dismantle the structures of society, and the spread of sectarianism in communities, and

warned of Iran's going ahead with its imperial project without any regard to the rights of the

population, and the sovereignty and independence of the authorities in these countries. The

revolutionary tendency to revive the Persian Empire was highlighted by former US Secretary

of State Henry Kissinger, who considered the Iranian empire more dangerous than Daesh.

Sixth: Unstable influence

Iran's influence in the region will not be temporary, but it is almost definitely long-term,

and perhaps there will be a Persian Iranian centennial, but still, the imperial project is

stumbling on large obstacles that the Iranians did not anticipate. The Syrian complex was not

resolved according to the Iranian wishes, as other rival countries were aware of it and they

supported the opposition which wanted to overthrow the Syrian regime, and at the same time

and in the same intensity, they wanted to end the Iranian presence and influence, and to

eliminate the idea of the Shiite crescent, as well as eliminate the idea of Persianization of the

region, and seek to consolidate its Arabism.

The Iranian project had already received little response amongst the masses, but after the

direct Iranian intervention in Syria in particular, some Arab countries began to monitor the

Iranian endeavour, reducing or stopping it, and the popular Arab aversion towards Iran and

its policies grew, accompanied with a popular hostility to the irregular military militias, Which

spread throughout the Middle East, and this aversion undermines Iran's most important tools

in the implementation of the Persian project.

The majority of the people in the region have become alerted to the Iranian Persian

expansionist nationalist threat, and the level of readiness to confront it has risen year after

year. The popular and official rejection of the Iranian presence has grown all over the

countries of the region. The regimes that were puppets in the hands of Iran, and those political

and military forces that have become fully dependent on the Iranian will, and to a project that

will bring nothing but destruction to the region, were exposed, which will be a major obstacle

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to the continuation of Iran in its imperial-occupation project. The general environment is no

longer a neutral or friendly environment. It is a hostile environment, and Iran will not be able

to continue in it peacefully.

At the same time, what is helping Iran to move forward with its project, albeit at a very

slow pace, is America’s silence on Iran’s policies since the beginning of the Arab Spring and

the Russian alliance with them. These factors are unstable and are subject to complex

considerations of the two major countries. This is threatening Iran to be out of the Equation

at any time, in the near or further future.

Seventh: Conclusion

Iran's ambition to restore the glory of a backward empire explains its attempts to penetrate

the internal affairs of all the Middle East, Central Asia, some of the Gulf states, and North

Africa, and seek to control these countries militarily, politically, and ideologically, directly or

with the help of mediators from these countries.

Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the export of the Iranian revolution has become a

source of concern and damage to the Arab countries, and the religious-sectarian occupation

approach adopted by Iran and the anti-Arab Persian trend has become clear. This Iranian

political approach became public, and was assisted by a number of Arab regimes which were

unaccepted by their own people, and who decided to hand over their decision to Iran, whether

because of sectarian religious grudges they had, political, or military motives, or due to Iran's

(interim) ability to keep these regimes in power.

Since the Iranian revolution, Iran's intervention in the affairs of the nations, in the

independent sovereign states, and in the movement of the economy, whether the interference

was legitimate or not, to destabilize the internal affairs of the countries of the region has

become clearly a factor in the sectarian conflict, and a propagator of extremist sectarian

organizations on the other side, extremist ideological groups, and a provocative for extreme

religious, political, and military rhetoric of the people of this region.

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It seems that there are two contradictory Iranian strategies; The first dreams of expanding

and dominating the East, imposing the Iranian state as a regional power to be reckoned with,

portraying Iran as a single and powerful reference to the Shiites of the world. The second

dream is that the entire Orient is directly subordinate to Iran, and the Persian Imperial heritage

is revived. Although the second project is the main one and the deepest of both, but the Iranian

leadership is moving with both strategies side by side, and not letting the first outweigh the

second, so as not to lose the most important cards, the most important means of pressure, and

the strongest force of the sectarian doctrinal legitimacy, to evade being labelled as a racist,

chauvinistic, and nationalist in the true sense of the word.

In addition to the aforementioned difficulties, the dreams of Iran's Persian Empire are also

governed by Iran's internal situation, Iran's ethnic diversity, the danger of disturbing its

balance, in addition to Iran as a state, which is ultimately subject to international law, and

should respect the sovereignty of States, a state that should have a specific regional role, which

should not be subject to the moods of the Wali al-Faqih, neither the moods of (Hajatollah)

and the Great Ayatollah, nor to the tantrums of the racist nationalist Chauvinist Persian

authorities, who think that restoring the past is just around the corner.

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IntroductionFirst: The lost empire returnsSecond: Taking advantage of the chaosThird: The religious and the nationalFourth: Dangerous resultsFifth: Persistent ambitionsSixth: Unstable influenceSeventh: Conclusion