Khomeini’s revolution and CIA disclosures

I have read some of what is being published by Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper concerning the classified documents released by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the period around the Iranian revolution in the late 1970s. The period was a turbulent one and it witnessed continuous academic controversy.

Many of today’s political problems regarding the regional and international rise of Islamic extremism, sectarian conflict, major regional wars, the failure of peace projects, the efforts of controlling weapons — such as nuclear and chemical — have links to events in 1979.

I did not find in the few classified documents chosen by the newspaper much help in tracking and understanding the events from the perspective of the CIA, which supposedly had a good relationship with the government of the Shah.

The CIA estimates are not, however, wrong, unlike what was said in terms of understanding the tactics of the new regime in Tehran.

After the rise of Khomeini and the outbreak of war with Iraq, the CIA analysts predicted the Iranian regime would resort to the use of religion — especially sectarianism — as a weapon.

Intelligence predictions were that Khomeini would tend to incite the people of the region by using religious slogans opposing their regimes.

The predictions were that he would succeed in agitating the spirit of sectarianism in Iraq but would fail in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

When reviewing the eight years of Iran-Iraq war, we cannot underestimate the great propaganda effort made by Saddam Hussein’s government to prevent the infiltration of Iranian sectarian incitement. That infiltration focused on interpreting the war as a Sunni-Shiite one. Baghdad, for its part, saw it as a nationalist war between the Arabs and the Persians.

CIA predictions were wrong when it came to stopping the war — for the obvious reason that the decision was in the hands of Khomeini. He insisted on continuing the fight for three more years despite the failures the Iranians had experienced. He believed that a popular revolution could make a shift in Iraq in the balance of the war and that the shift would favor his country.

There were some questions that I could not find an answer to, even in what has been disclosed of analysis or confidential correspondence from the period. Nor in what was published in the media and specialized periodicals was there awareness of the danger of extremist religious movements in Iran to the region and the whole world. Perhaps this was due to the dominance of leftist and nationalist rhetoric at the time.

Indeed, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser made a famous trip to Pakistan. While there he adopted the policy of the religious Islamic jihadist war in liberating Afghanistan, in addition to the use of arms against the “atheist Soviet Union” forces. The 10-year war liberated Afghanistan and left more than 15,000 Soviet troops and allies dead in addition to the downing of more than 400 Russian planes.

The relationship between the Khomeini revolution and the war in Afghanistan cannot be ignored. The policymakers in Washington at the time of the Shah’s fall preferred the rise of a religious Khomeini at the expense of leftist parties that had played an active role in the outbreak of the Iranian revolution.

However, there is no indication that anyone at the time predicted what would happen in the region after the rise of Khomeini or the shift that would dominate the prevailing ideologies in the region, especially with the decay of the left due to the fall of the Soviet camp.

The new Iranian regime at that time used religious slogans, specifically Islamic ones, which supported its sectarian projects. It succeeded in exploiting religion politically in Lebanon and Palestine, and later in Iraq. It devastated the region in more than three decades and still represents the biggest threat to the region.

• Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was originally published.