US Dept. of State
Ministers of foreign affairs of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, France, China, the European Union and Iran, Lausanne, 30 March 2015, negotiating the comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program.
The United States and Iran have a long and complicated history. In 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency engineered a coup called “Operation Ajax” that toppled democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Then in 1979, following a popular revolution that overthrew the ruling Shah, a group of students captured the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days—releasing them on the same day as Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. These two events, perhaps more than others, have shaped both U.S. feelings about Iran and Iranian perceptions of the United States.
Donald Trump has called the Iran nuclear deal (forged as a “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” between six world powers and Iran in 2015) “a terrible one for the United States and the world,” and “the worst deal ever negotiated.” He has repeatedly threatened to abandon it, and most recently said the deal must be “fixed” or “the United States will withdraw.” Trump called this a “last chance,” giving an implied deadline of 120 days before sanctions would again need to be waived under a requirement of U.S. law.
Iranian scholar Emad Kiyaei recently stopped by the offices of The Progressive. Kiyaei is a principal with the Interdisciplinary Global Development group and past executive director of the American Iranian Council. His book, Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East: A New Approach to Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, co-authored with Seyed Hossein Mousavian, is due out from Routledge later this year.
Q: What do you make of Trump’s announced plans for sanctions against Iranian government broadcasters?
Emad Kiyaei: This is nothing new. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has been under U.S. unilateral sanctions. Only later on, in 2006 and 2007, did we have European Union and then later the U.N. Security Council resolutions that imposed overwhelming sanctions on Iran. But these types of unilateral actions by the United States have been there for many years. And Iranians have found many innovative ways to go around these restrictions.
Placing sanctions on Iran’s media, or on its natural resources, or on its military wing is for us just another course of action by the United States. Does it help? Unfortunately not. It divides the populace in terms of their thinking about the United States.
Since the election of President Trump, we have seen an uptick in the language towards Iran, and also the blatant intervention in Iran's domestic affairs, as we saw with the recent protests. Which ironically ruined the protest activities in Iran because the Iranian government used the excuse that this was orchestrated from the United States and outside Iran as a reason to clamp down on the protesters.
Q: Who suffers most when the United States imposes sanctions on either the government television broadcaster or members of the revolutionary guard?
Kiyaei: When I was working with Ambassador William Luers, who ran the Iran Project in New York during the Obama years, we did a comprehensive study which allowed us to at least make the argument that yes there are some instances where sanctions have been useful, but overwhelmingly they have been counterproductive.
We did a study of 100 applications of sanctions globally and there was only one case where we could somehow attribute to a change in policy in the country that is under sanctions and that was South Africa during apartheid. Beyond that, there isn’t a case where U.S. sanctions have impacted the right group.
If the United States government placed sanctions on Iran to reorient the government, that hasn’t happened. Ironically, the’ve actually caused the reverse.
If the United States government placed sanctions on Iran with the aim of a policy reorientation by that government, that hasn’t happened. Ironically, the’ve actually caused the reverse—a commercialization of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard because they control everything that comes in and everything that goes out of the country. Once you sanction a country, these elements, which are more organized, which are able to control the imports and exports of the country, manage to become very wealthy overnight. So everything still gets in, but it has to go through at the behest of the Revolutionary Guard.
So the sanctions placed on Iran to weaken the government strengthened elements within it—those which were the most anti-American, the most radicalized.
When you suddenly cannot get specialized medicine to Iran, who does that hurt? It hurts your patients, your population. So the very short answer would be it hurts the people and it emboldens the government.
Q: Protests have been going on over the last couple of weeks in Iran, occurring mainly in some of the more rural areas and smaller towns. How are they different from the protests of 2009?
Kiyaei: 2009 was the reelection of [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, which was seen as a sham. Millions of people poured into the street and protested the rigging of the elections. Most of the people on those streets were middle-class Iranians from major cities—it was students, professionals. There was a clampdown by the Iranian military forces and security forces.
But let's not forget these [2009] protests were in support of candidates [Mir-Hossein] Mousavi and [Mehdi] Karroubi, who were also part of the system. Even though the elections were rigged, it wasn’t one group was pro-American and the other was Anti-American—it was all individuals from within the system.
Now, with the protests in late 2017 and early 2018, it is a completely different ball game. Here the protests were ignited mostly by the poor in religious cities of Mashhad. It ignited because the current Iranian government had decided to chip away at the subsidies or the cash payouts they provide to the poor families. It wouldn’t be automatic anymore; you’d have to come and register. And this disturbance in quality-of-life for these very poor, most vulnerable members of society caused them to pour out [into the streets].
These protests then expanded to include calls for an end to this dictator, [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei, and became more politically aligned. And this is where the Iranian government and the security forces then blamed the expansion of the issues to foreign intervention.
[Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani—if you listen to his speeches—he’s saying, ‘You can protest, it’s okay, we get it that you’re having economic concerns. But now we see there’s agitators in there, and buildings are getting burned. This is not your typical poor, so this must be a finger from the outside.’
Q: President Rouhani just gave a speech in which he said the concerns are not just economic and that the lifestyle that has been imposed on the people of Iran is something that needs to be reevaluated.
Kiyaei: Rouhani is known as a moderate or pragmatist. And there is a clear understanding that the Iranian society, after so many years of isolation and severe socioeconomic and political oppression, has limitations, that there need to be gradual evolutionary changes that have to occur to bring Iran into the new era. And Rouhani understands that he is up against multiple organs of the government or the system.
There are those who want to continue a very conservative approach, and there are those who say that when you have a country with 70 percent of its population below the age of thirty, we need to open up spaces for our youth to be able to have more prosperity.
There are those who want to continue in a very conservative approach to socioeconomic political aspirations. And there are those who say that when you have a country with 70 percent of its population below the age of thirty, we need to open up spaces for our youth to be able to have more prosperity. The underemployment, unemployment, the frustrations with not being able to express oneself, these are all limitations that will come and knock on your door at some point. So they are trying to avoid a complete uproar within society. Ironically, this recent protest may have given Rouhani some sort of carte blanche to be able to push through some reform in the parliament. We will find out in the months ahead.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.