“We should combat to and contain the threat in the East coast of the Mediterranean to prevent shedding blood on Iranian soil.”1 These words were uttered by Colonel Mojtaba Pashaie, head of the Middle East Directorate of SAVAK, Iran’s National Intelligence and Security Organization , to weaken Pan-Arabism in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Iraqi coup of 1958. It was the beginning of the Green Plan strategy in Southern Lebanon. Iran’s Green Plan planted the seed of Iran’s connections with the Shia community in Lebanon. With charismatic, Iranian-born Seyyed Musa Sadr’s departure to Lebanon, Tehran’s relations with the Lebanese Shia hit the new course.
Pahlavi Iran also sided with the Iraqi Kurds against Iraq. The Iraqi coup of 1958 toppled the pro-Western monarchy and established a pan-Arab, pro-Moscow republic on Iran’s western borders. Within this context, SAVAK was instructed by the Shah to build a strategic connection with the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the Kurdish guerrillas tied down the Iraqi Army and turned Baghdad away from posing a threat to Iran’s western provinces and the Persian Gulf. Contrary to popular opinion regarding the Shah’s foreign policy, the U.S. did not initially side with Iran’s strategy toward the Kurds in the period between 1961 and 1972. Despite maintaining close ties with the Shah, the White House did not share his threat assessment toward Iraq. It was only after the Tehran summit of 1972 that President Richard Nixon instructed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert cooperation with SAVAK in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Iran’s strategic connections with the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia ushered in a strategy toward non-state entities in the Middle East. It was the beginning of Iran’s “non-state foreign policy”—a specific foreign policy intended to build connections with political and militant groups and movements. Non-state foreign policy refers to connections between a state and a political-militant non-state actor. This policy relates to how a state builds and manages ties with a non-state actor(s) through mechanisms beyond the common foreign policy. In addition to revolutionary Iran, the non-state foreign policy has been implemented by the Soviet Union in support of communist parties, leftist movements, and liberation militias during the Cold War. Other countries, like China, Cuba, and more importantly, the U.S ., have followed the same policy.
Almost a half-century later, Iran’s non-state foreign policy expanded to an unprecedented level. Late in 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan popularized a controversial phrase that still dominates the heart of the geopolitics of the Middle East: the Shia Crescent. “If pro-Iran parties or politicians dominate the new Iraqi government, a new ‘crescent’ of dominant Shia movements or governments stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon could emerge to alter the traditional balance of power between the two main Islamic sects and pose new challenges to the U.S. interests and allies.” In Sunni Arab leaders’ eyes, the Shia Crescent has been shaped around the armature of strategic connections between Iran and Shia non-state entities. However, this outlook failed to recognize the roots of Iran’s non-state foreign policy before the Islamic Revolution. In reality, Iran’s non-state foreign policy emerged in the midst of the Cold War.
Pre-revolutionary Iran’s support for non-state entities was not limited to the support for the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia. The Shah backed the royalist Mutawakkilite forces against the Soviet-backed, pro-Nasser Republicans in North Yemen in the 1960s. In the last months of his reign, he began siding with Afghan Mujahedin against communist Kabul and the Red Army in Afghanistan. The Shah financially and logistically supported a remote western-backed UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola ) in fighting the Soviet-backed MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola ) in Angola.2 Despite their significance, none of them played major parts in Iran’s non-state foreign policy as Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia did. First, connections with the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia are still significant. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has sided with both non-state actors against its regional foes Israel and Baath Iraq.
Second, the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia are geographically and culturally closer to Iran. Shia Islam has been the predominant religion in Iran since the early sixteenth century. The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group whose culture and language are much closer to the people living in modern Iran than to Turks or Arabs. Third, both the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia have affected Iranian society and domestic politics. Although the Iraqi Kurds have been backed by both the Shah and the Islamic Republic, the Kurdish separatism in Iraq has had spillover effects on Iran’s Kurdistan. In the pre-revolutionary era, several Iranian revolutionaries were trained on military bases in the south of Lebanon. On top of that, religious networks between Sadr with the Shia Marja, including Ayatollah Khomeini , had tremendous effects on the dynamics of the Revolution of 1979.
Iran’s connections with political-militant non-state entities in the Middle East have been at the heart of international and regional security for about four decades. While the Islamic Republic’s support for non-state entities in the Middle East, like Hezbollah, has framed the country as an allegedly top state “sponsor of terrorism,” the Shah’s support for the Iraqi Kurds and the Lebanese Shia was never framed as a significant threat to international peace and security. Additionally, the breadth and depth of these ties, along with Iran’s geostrategic location and its antagonistic relationship with the U.S. over the last three decades, have given rise to a body of literature on Iran’s foreign policy. While much ink has been spilled on the issue, there has been a void in the analysis of the country’s ties with non-states entities. Despite their profound impact on the power arrangement of the region and on U.S. national security, these connections have been partially unknown to Western audiences. In fact, the sensitivity and complexity of the issue, as well as the lack of access to Iranian sources and officials, have caused most experts to avoid dedicating extensive efforts to the matter.
The current literature on Iran’s ties with non-state actors could be classified into four categories. The first category focuses on regional political-militant groups per se and only indirectly and superficially addresses their ties with Iran. The main goal is to unravel the hidden black box of the socio-political context, internal power struggles, decision-making processes, and institutional arrangements of each non-state entity.3 The second category includes literature on Iranian foreign policy in general, and on Iran’s relations with the U.S. in particular.4 However, this specific literature has downplayed Iran’s non-state foreign policy by reducing Iran-U.S. relations to accounts of the coup in 1953 and the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Framing Iranian-American “special relations” as a direct path from the coup to the revolution, such an overly simplistic narrative neglects the crucial period between those two momentous events. The third category looks at terrorist networks, considering Iran’s ties with these groups highly suspect. Blinded by the condemnatory rhetoric, these textbooks frame Iran’s connections as the source of instability in the Middle East.5 The last category focuses on Shiism and Shia communities as well as on Kurdish communities. These books are notable for taking a longer view of the history of the Shia and the Kurds.6 Similarly, relations with Iran are merely secondary topics in this category.
The mainstream manuscripts on pre-revolutionary Iran’s foreign policy has framed the Shah, in final word, as “the U.S. puppet” whose foreign policy was, by and large, in line with the White House. Conversely, the revisionist manuscripts of the literature have recently framed the Shah as an ambitious leader who unsuccessfully tried to take a more independent policy in the region and beyond. In contrast to both mainstream and revisionist views toward the Shah’s foreign policy, the present book shows how Pahlavi Iran built an effective non-state foreign policy to contain international, regional, and domestic threats. It also shows how the Shah successfully countered the U.S. interests in the region and manipulated it in managing Iran’s non-state foreign policy. In short, the present book is a post-revisionist.
From this perspective, the present work sheds new light on the emergence and fluctuation of Iran’s connections with non-state entities in Iraq and Lebanon during the Shah’s era. The book is not intended to cover different aspects of Iran’s foreign policy under the Shah’s reign; rather, it narrates the story of Iran’s non-state foreign policy by focusing on specific geopolitical and geocultural threats and opportunities in the period between 1958 and 1979. It also examines domestic institutions that pushed the Pahlavi regime to build Iran’s non-state foreign policy.
The present book contributes to the literature in multiple ways. First, it traces the ebbs and fl...