US policy hostage to the hostage-takers

During his visit to Lebanon on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif laid a wreath at the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's notorious military commander.  Mughniyeh was responsible for a host of attacks against American targets, including the 1983 bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, as well as the kidnapping and murder of American hostages. The significance of Zarif’s action is that it affirmed continuity – of the Islamic revolutionary regime as well as of its regional policy and ambitions. 

Zarif’s public and deliberate affirmation was quickly followed by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s comment that the Geneva agreement meant that the western powers “surrendered” to Tehran’s demands. The actions of the Iranian president and foreign minister put the Obama administration in an awkward position. They came at a moment when the US president is working hard to convince a skeptical congress that Rouhani and Zarif represent a moderate Iran that is eager to open a new page with the US. 

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney shrugged off Rouhani’s statement as “expected,” meaningless rhetoric, a sop to domestic hardliners. “It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what they do,” he said. But Zarif’s visit to Mughniyeh’s grave was not as easily dismissed.  The White House felt the need to issue a sterner condemnation.  “The decision to commemorate an individual who has participated in such vicious acts and whose organization continues to actively support terrorism worldwide,” National Security Council Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden said, “sends the wrong message and will only exacerbate tensions in the region.” 

The White House statement drew a subtle distinction between Iran and Mughniyeh, glossing over the fact that the terrorist attacks he perpetrated were at Iran’s behest. Of course, the White House’s distinction does not reflect reality. Mughniyeh’s story with Iran’s Khomeinists goes back to the 1970s. At the time, Iranian revolutionary cadres were operating in Lebanon, where they worked closely with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Those cadres went on to become founding members of the IRGC and then to create Hezbollah. They also recruited a young Mughniyeh in the mid-1970s, a few years before the success of the Islamic revolution.

Over the course of the next three decades, not only did Mughniyeh become a critical asset for the Iranian regime, but he also became intimately tied to the top leadership in Tehran. Hence, when Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus in 2008, Khamenei sent an official delegation to his funeral headed by one of his closest advisors, Ali Akbar Velayati. The regime also put up a symbolic gravestone for Mughniyeh in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, in the section for the martyrs of the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Reportedly, Mughniyeh’s headstone is set next to another one dedicated to the two bombers he dispatched in 1983 to strike the Marines and the French paratroopers. The inscription on Mughniyeh’s monument reads: “The faithful disciple of Imam Khomeini.”

The city of Tehran also named a street after Mughniyeh, and Iran issued a stamp commemorating him a month after his assassination. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, then military advisor to Khamenei, unveiled the stamp, which would be used by Iranian institutions in official correspondence with other countries. “Rather than a mere stamp, it will be the ambassador of the culture of martyrdom,” Safavi said.

The direct connection between Iran and Mughniyeh did not end with his death.  There are signs that the Iranian leadership may be grooming Mughniyeh's son, Jihad, to perhaps assume a leading role in the organization in the future. This proposition recently received corroboration at the funeral of the mother of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force. Soleimani is widely considered the second most powerful man in Iran, and a close advisor to Khamenei. At his side at his mother’s funeral was none other than Jihad Mughniyeh.

But Soleimani is by no means the only high level Iranian official with a direct connection to Imad Mughniyeh. As a matter of fact, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which Mughniyeh organized, was coordinated by none other than Mr. Zarif's colleague, Minister of Defense Hossein Dehghan, who was the commander of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) force in Lebanon at the time.  

Dehghan himself recently led a memorial ceremony for Mughniyeh’s former close associate, the recently departed Hassan Laqis. As Hezbollah scholar Shimon Shapira wrote this week, in his eulogy of Laqis, the Iranian Defense Minister revealed that the slain Hezbollah commander, following his military training, “ was appointed as Dehghan’s own bureau chief while Dehghan commanded the Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon.” Shapira added that it was “reasonable to surmise that Laqis, like Dehghan, played an active role in the planning and execution” of the Marine barracks attack.

Thus, when Zarif placed a wreath at Mughniyeh’s grave, he was not only acknowledging Mughniyeh’s place in the hierarchy of power in Tehran: he was also underscoring the continuity of this Iranian power structure and of its regional policy, of which Hezbollah is an organic extension. Moreover, Zarif was expressing the Iranian leadership's consensus, of which both he and Dehghan are a part. In other words, what Obama wants to portray as a new, moderate government in fact has a direct connection to both Hezbollah’s birth and the subsequent terrorist attacks against the US in Beirut. 

Naturally, all of this was glossed over in the White House statement. Obama needs to sustain the myth of Iranian moderation because he has made reaching a deal with Tehran his central foreign policy gambit. Consequently, he is increasingly hostage to this policy, and he risks overlooking just about anything to make sure the policy is not derailed. Neither what Iran says nor what it does matters.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.