THE IRAN-ISRAEL WAR COMES OUT OF THE SHADOWS – BEHNAM BEN TALEBLU

As a senior fellow at Federation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), Behnam Ben Taleblu focuses on Iranian security and political issues. Leveraging his subject-matter expertise and native Farsi skills, Behnam has closely tracked a wide range of Iran-related topics including: nuclear non-proliferation, ballistic missiles, sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the foreign and security policy of the Islamic Republic, and internal Iranian politics. On a visit to Australia sponsored by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Behnam Ben Taleblu addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 22 August 2024. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of the talk.

THE IRAN-ISRAEL WAR COMES OUT OF THE SHADOWS

BEHNAM BEN TALEBLU

Thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure to be back at the Sydney Institute, and welcome and good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

We used to have to import barbed wire. That’s a line Iran’s Supreme Leader – a title meant to be taken rather literally – has used on video, in speeches, and from the Friday prayer lectern. The point is that during the foundational conflict of the 45-year Islamic Republic of Iran, the eight-year war with neighbouring Baathist Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran had to import barbed wire, a phrase that emphasised the nation’s lack of domestic arms potential. In the region, that conflict was on a par with World War I or World War II or Vietnam for America.

But fast forward to today when, for almost a decade and a half, the US intelligence community assesses that the Islamic Republic of Iran is home to the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. What a change. This is a ballistic missile arsenal which has been used, overtly and directly, to move that country from the shadow war, from the 45-year proxy war it has prosecuted against Israel, US forces and against partners in the region. And on 13 April and 14 April of this year, to be fired at the Jewish state. Of the 300 plus projectiles, back in April, that the Islamic Republic of Iran fired, 100 of them were medium-range ballistic missiles and all of them were classified as being able to carry an unconventional payload, meaning a nuclear weapon.

Today, we are again on the precipice, where the Islamic Republic is dangling the threat of again, overtly and directly and militarily, using ballistic missiles to adjudicate another element of its conflict with Israel. It’s claiming to be seeking bloodlust. That was a word that cascaded for the first week of August across the Iranian press, particularly the hardline press, as what the regime wanted in response to the killing of the Hamas political chief who was guarded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran. Based on the New York Times and Axios reports, Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a pre-planted bomb, one planted about five and a half weeks before he had even arrived in Tehran. Since 7 October 2023, Haniyeh had twice visited Tehran. Once we believe in late October or early November, and once we believe much more recently, in the spring of 2024.

Either way, this tells a huge story about how punctured Iran’s security state is. But you don’t have to take that sense of puncturing from me. You can take it from a former intelligence minister who, in 2021, said, “No official in the Islamic Republic should be sleeping safely at night.” He offered that view in a larger speech, talking about alleged Mossad penetration of Iran’s security services. This obviously follows a whole history of the Israel-Iran shadow war that includes cyber-attacks, kinetic actions like sabotage from drones, as well as a whole host of assassinations, including of military officials and of nuclear scientists on Iranian soil.

All this is despite the history between Iran and Israel, despite the mismatched balance between Iran and Israel in the conventional space, meaning Israel’s, conventional superiority in its armed forces and military technology. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a grey zone fighter. In the past four and a half decades, Tehran did not feel comfortable moving to an overt threshold until back in April. Indeed, one of the policies of this regime was strategic patience to absorb much of the shadow war for fear of trying to respond and losing face or its head.

What has changed right now, and what we’re living with, is the result of two distinct factors. One is political and one is technical. One allows the regime to feel comfortable, moving from the shadows into the public eye, making the matter of a military response to the killing of Ismail Haniyeh more a matter of when, rather than if – and to include how and where as well. If you look at the hardline media again, the first week and a half, they were talking about a 360-degree attack vector against the Israelis, forcing other proxies to join in the fight, potentially from Lebanon in the north, potentially from the Houthis in the South, in Yemen, potentially from the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria that are to Israel’s east. Since October 7, as many of you know, these have been aerial threats that the Israelis have faced off before, perhaps not as well coordinated, but this is a threat that the Islamic Republic is dangling. Yet we are now, some 22 days since that assassination of Ismail Haniyeh yet with no overt attack. Why?

That question takes us to the political element, which is bolstering the regime’s confidence. Right now, we have a force that may appear peace-loving, may appear cautious, may appear restrained, one that forces US diplomacy. Inadvertently, this force is midwifing and bolstering Iranian deterrence. What the Islamic Republic is counting on is that, with the threat of a wider regional war, the dangling of the nuclear sabre, or the rattling of the nuclear sabre in Europe, you have the rattling or the dangling of the conventional military weapon in the Middle East today. By dangling that and threatening the use of that, the US is coming into the region as a more responsible and restrained actor. And for those of you who have paid attention to some of the comments from US officials like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, or even from President Biden himself and, potentially, from some national security officials, the US is seeking in the heartland of the Middle East, de-escalation with deterrence.

These two contradictory missions for US policy and US politics represent a philosophical misunderstanding about how peace can actually be achieved in this troubled part of the world. If one is de-escalating, they are doing so knowing that they need not bolster their deterrence. Conversely, if one is bolstering their deterrence, to make it effective, you have to threaten and often engage in escalation.

The Islamic Republic is betting, or hoping, that once that projectile is rattled, once that threat of the overt use of force is dangled, once the prospect of moving from the shadows and out into the public is spoken of and said, it would jettison US forces, diplomatic forces, rather than just military forces, into the heartland of the Middle East. Rather than be used to constrain and restrain an American adversary like the Islamic Republic of Iran, instead it will handicap and prevent the expansion and continuation of Israel’s 10-11 month war in Gaza. It’s a very unique phenomenon.

For those of you concerned about the nuclear program, I should say this. At the heyday of the revolution in 1979, the founding father of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, said that the nuclear reactor should be turned into grain silos. But, the onset of the war with Iraq one year later, the regime began to reconsider those tools, those technologies, and the quest for the ultimate weapon of deterrence commenced in the 1980s. It was a direct line from the 1980s and Tehran’s pursuit of deterrence then to its quest for a WMD capability and near threshold status today. In response, also during that conflict, to Saddam’s Scud missile barrages, the Islamic Republic built ties and set out to talk to Hafez Al Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and the Kim family’s North Korea, to produce and procure a nascent ballistic missile arsenal that has perhaps blossomed to become the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East.

Sometimes when you’re looking at the threats in the Middle East, quantity has a quality of its own. We have seen this with that April attack where 300 plus projectiles were fired. But the Islamic Republic in the past decade and a half has been moving from just quantity and its 3,000 plus ballistic missile arsenal, to quality. Range, precision, survivability, reliability and mobility. Based on US reports citing unnamed US officials during that April attack, half of Tehran’s ballistic missiles failed, misfired or did not go past the boost phase. This is not even talking about the successful intercepts of the US, Israel and the other allied forces of the region. They failed due to technological defects of their own. In the West, we would say that’s a poor standard. From Tehran’s perspective, the four to seven warheads, depending on the video, if only one of those contained an unconventional payload that could be four to seven too many.

Lest we forget, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, someone who actually commanded forces during that formative conflict, the late Ayatollah Rafsanjani, was found dead in his house in 2017. He said famously, in the early 2000s, that Israel was a one-bomb state. The Israelis rightly have repeated that line and use that line when looking at how to deter and contain and roll back the Iranian asymmetric threat, because that is an area where, rightly, they should apply and have applied the zero per cent doctrine of trying to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from developing some of the world’s most dangerous and destabilising weapons.

But within that rate of failure, within the Iranian perspective of that operation on 14 April, we could have a lesson learned that we may not want to have learned, where if they fired 100 missiles and 50 per cent failed, maybe next time they might fire 200 or 300. This is a rather precocious and prickly place for us all to be in today, to be waiting on Tehran to see what response they deign to make. Again, that willingness to use force is brought to you by those two other supplementary elements, technical capability and a political understanding of their adversary’s desire for restraint and risk aversion, rather than deterrence and risk tolerance.

So, unfortunately, this toxic combination is about to bring you more conflict in the Middle East, not less. Particularly at a time when Tehran is using these weapons more frequently and more often and against a whole host of different targets, I might add. In March of this year, I published a piece with Zero Hidden Knowledge. There is a Persian-Arabic word Ilm al-Ghayb, or hidden knowledge. It alludes to some kind of premonition, divine premonition. I had zero divine premonition that, three weeks later, the Islamic Republic would fire its biggest ballistic missile barrage in history. But looking at the history of Iran’s missile operations from 2017, Tehran has fired ballistic missiles from its own territory more than 14 times, depending on how you count.

For instance, US forces in Iraq on January 2020, at two different bases, received from Iran the largest ballistic missile barrage since World War II. The US did not respond militarily. That came after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s chief terrorist, under former US president Donald Trump. Nonetheless, the point still stands in the minds of Iranian decision makers that an adversary that they styled “the great Satan” had absorbed the Iranian missile attack. Fast forward a year and a half into September 2022 and, for the first time ever, a US citizen was killed with an Iranian ballistic missile when fired in the fall of 2022 at Kurdish targets in northern Iraq. In the first four months of 2024, the Islamic Republic used ballistic missiles and fired them at two nuclear-armed nations, Pakistan and Israel. This very toxic combination of an enhanced capability and an understanding of the irresolution of the adversary is leading to a lower threshold for the use of force and bringing a conflict, the shadow war or proxy war, out of the shadows and into the open.

QUESTIONS

Q: I know that Iran is both Shia and Persian, whereas most of the other significant powers are Sunni and Arab. But can you explain why Iran seems, amongst all those powers in North Africa and the Middle East, to have this unique hatred for Israel, with which it doesn’t even have a disputed border. Does the Iranian population support the regime’s hatred?

A: It’s an excellent question, one very near and dear to my heart as an Iranian American. The answer you need not take from me, but you should take from the brave and protesting Iranians. Since 2009 in different iterations of street protests, but particularly since 2017, they tell you where they stand. Theirs is a nationalist critique of the central government’s fundamentally Islamist perspective on things. That the difference is the particular for the Iranian population, versus the general or universal for the views, values and interests of the Islamic regime in Tehran.

It is not just a centre periphery thing. It is a population versus regime elites divide, and it’s a state versus society divide that continues to bubble up. For example, in January 2020 when the Iranians shot a Ukrainian passenger jet out of the sky, killing over 100 innocent civilians, this was shortly after the military exchange where they fired on two US bases. Outside a university in Tehran, the regime had painted on the ground an American flag and an Israeli flag to get the students and the passersby and onlookers to trample on it on the pavement. You can find the videos for yourself, but you have vast queues of Iranians going around the border of the flag and hissing and even assaulting those who would transgress and walk upon it. So, as you know, the Middle East today is a rather complex place.

I wouldn’t just say this as an Iranian American but there aren’t that many places to do statecraft and soul craft at the same time. There aren’t that many places to hang your head and your heart at the same time. There aren’t that many places to do strategy or to do well by your strategy for the West and to do well by your values for the West, outside of standing with Israel and supporting the Iranian people. So, this is a regime elite that cut its teeth on opposing Israel, opposing America and opposing the Shah. These guys came to power having co-opted all the tools of statecraft to carry out their ideational mission, which is not demographic, not geographic and, for the Iranian population, has no dividend and is devoid of strategy.

Q: Decades ago the focus, as we looked at Islam, was on a conflict between Sunni and Shia. But with Iran doing the leading, does that mean much anymore?

A: It’s a kaleidoscopic question, because the facts are the facts. How you rearrange them gives you different answers. You can look at the 1980 Iran-Iraq War and say this was a period of the cementing of nationalism, where Iraqi Shia and even Iranian Arabs remained confined to their national border-drawn boundaries. But from the 2003 Iraq War, fast forward a couple of decades and this transnational sectarian element has become a huge element of Iranian foreign and security policy and carries great weight and resonance beyond its borders. The way the regime gets over it is through an ecumenical approach to co-opting anti-status quo forces. It’s through that prism, that Persian Shiite Iran or, more importantly, the Shiite Islamic Republic is able to build bonds of affection and affinity and material support for terror with a Sunni group like Hamas.

You can look at the timeline and see how the relationship is scaled up between the First Intifada and the Madrid Conference, then look to find the group that would be an armed group that could put a shiv, literally, in the Oslo process. Then scale up that material support over time. Such that, even when there was a conflict, it introduced an ideological conflict between patron and proxy; if you remember, Iran has only one state partner in the Middle East and that’s the Assad regime. The Assad regime is Alawite, at best heterodox Shia and not even that. But Hamas thumbed its nose at this group. It used to be headquartered in Doha, it used to be headquartered in Damascus. They went from Damascus to Doha under the auspices of the Arab Spring. Hamas was trying to gain that kind of pan Arab Islamist favour. And, unlike some other alliances, rather than have the Islamic Republic turn its back on this investment, it said wait. Someone who was essential in repairing this relationship made sure the bonds that would tie would be ecumenical and, so long as the baseline was anti-semitism and anti-Americanism, those bonds would endure. Ismail Haniyeh played a key role in the rehabilitation of Hamas in Iran’s Axis of Resistance.

So, depending on the time, the answer may vary; depending on the group, the answer may vary. But the regime is able to walk and chew gum at the same time between ecumenicalism and sectarianism, between the ideological export of its revolution and the militarised export of its revolution. And that’s precisely what makes it so lethal. This morphing, shape-shifting element.