More than a decade ago I travelled to Tehran to interview former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was reviving his political career after falling out of favour within the Iranian regime.
Mr Rafsanjani was one of the original Iranian revolutionaries with a long history in Tehran’s complex politics. He was also one of the key officials who chose Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, the same leader who was assassinated in February by the first US-Israeli air strikes in this war. Ali Khamenei’s son now fills his father’s role, although he is believed to have been injured.
Back in 2005, former president Rafsanjani ran for a third term in office but lost. He tried again in 2013 but was disqualified by the Guardian Council. I’m recalling his up-and-down political career not so much to do with Mr Rafsanjani himself, although the interview in a palace in Tehran was one of the most interesting I ever did. More revealing was the conversation I had before I went to Iran with a senior aide in Mr Rafsanjani’s trusted circle who helped arrange the filming trip.
We sat together over coffee in a London hotel and went through details and logistics. As we finished, I asked the Rafsanjani aide to give me some background about his country. I was confused about who precisely was in charge and how the Iranian system actually worked. The Iranian laughed. “What don’t you understand?” he said. “I’ll try to help.”
The conversation that followed has stuck in my mind ever since. I said I knew a lot of names of Iranian organisations but could not understand who really decided what – the supreme leader, the president, the Guardian Council, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij, the army, navy, air force, the police, the Islamic Consultative Assembly, the Assembly of Experts and so on. Were these different names for the same people? Did they overlap?
The Iranian aide was amused. He pulled out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram of the names I mentioned and put them in various linked boxes with the supreme leader and a lot of lines and arrows between them. As we talked there were more and more boxes, names and lines. He painstakingly explained the system although at the end the diagram was like a doodle of the London Underground route map.
“How did you come up with such a complicated system of government in Iran?” I said. He laughed again. “We learned from the Americans,” he responded. “Their separation of powers.” He explained that the original Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 had overthrown the Shah just as the Americans had overthrown the British monarchy in the 18th century. Many of those original Iranian revolutionaries took as their model the Enlightenment ideas of the American republic 200 years earlier. Americans created the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Executive Branch of the presidency and called it the “separation of powers”. Iran did a more complex version of the same.
This conversation more than a decade ago was eye opening. A member of Rafsanjani’s inner circle told me something that should have been obvious but I had never understood. His insights were not a secret. Anyone interested in post-revolution Iran could have had the same kind of education I experienced. But the reason the conversation is relevant now is obvious. On January 3 this year, the US launched a military strike against Venezuela to capture the then president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
Operation Absolute Resolve – taking the Maduros captive in the middle of the night – was a striking success. The couple now face criminal charges in an American court and the new president of Venezuela is someone much more to US President Donald Trump’s liking. This decapitation strategy worked well for Mr Trump in Venezuela and it appears to have been one of the reasons Mr Trump thought a similar decapitation would succeed in Iran. The White House may have believed “taking out” Iran’s supreme leader would somehow bring regime change, even though that conversation with the Rafsanjani aide years ago explains why such a strategy would never work in Iran.
Decapitation in Iran is delusional. What is extraordinary is that the current conflict tells us less about the Iranian system and more about the naive thinking of some in the White House. American national security experts I have talked to do absolutely understand the complexities of the Iranian system. The mystery is why the drawbacks of the decapitation strategy never seem to have been properly understood in the Oval Office.
One day we may learn what really happened. As for now, the Gulf region, the Trump administration and much of the rest of us around the world have to deal with the consequences. The options appear to be doubling the US military campaign and perhaps using ground troops or alternatively Mr Trump declaring victory and retreating. Reading his mind is even more complex than deciphering a map of the structure of the Iranian regime.
