Yes, foreign backing did hurt the Iranian opposition
The Israeli attacks on Tehran have revealed how foreign patronage put factions of the Iranian opposition in a toxic, compromising position.
“Surely oppression makes the wise foolish, and a bribe corrupts the heart.” - Ecclesiastes 7:7
Today is an awkward day to be part of the pro-intervention faction of Iran’s exiled opposition.
Before the Women Life Freedom uprising of 2022 and the explosion of regional war in late 2023, it had been a consensus among all the opposition that no one would dare call for a war with Iran. Even the more hawkish factions insisted that they were just asking for nonviolent regime change, and took offense at the claim that they were seeking war. Over the past year or so, however, some factions of the opposition began to tease their openness to a regime change war while cozying up to Iran’s archenemy Israel.
The vision, which some were more explicit about than others, was a targeted military campaign against Iran’s hated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and clergy. Iran’s regular army — a conscript force that is widely seen as a politically neutral institution — would be spared, not to mention Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Some imagined the regular army turning its guns against the IRGC in the name of the Iranian people.
Last night, that vision came crashing down on itself dramatically. Israel launched air raids on Iranian missile production facilities, the first foreign attack on Tehran since the Iraqi invasion of the 1980s. In order to do that, Israeli forces had to break through Iranian air defenses, which involved killing Iranian regular army troops. Citizens woke up in the middle of the night to terrifying explosions, and woke up again the next morning to news of at least four confirmed deaths, none of them from the IRGC and all of them from the regular army.
The interventionists seem to be dumbstruck. Hours after claiming on live TV that “targeting an IRGC base in Iran is not an attack on the soil of Iran, not an attack on people of Iran,” United Against Nuclear Iran research director Kasra Aarabi had to sheepishly insist that the killing of regular army troops still doesn’t count, because the specific people killed were not conscripts. Voice of America journalist Masih Alinejad, who had once insisted that Iranians would “welcome” an Israeli attack, was left complaining that the Iranian government didn’t provide air raid sirens for the terrified masses. Former crown prince Reza Pahlavi has been completely silent as of publication time.
This paralysis is a reminder of some conventional wisdom that Washington chose to forget. For a long time, liberal doves insisted that overt foreign support would hurt the Iranian opposition and cause Iranians to rally against foreign pressure. The events of 2019 through 2022 seemed to disprove that logic, and even I was convinced that doves had overestimated the strength of Iranian nationalism. But the aftermath of the Israeli attack highlights how foreign intervention does put the opposition in a compromising position.
The belief that a hands-off approach would best empower Iranian liberals was most popular in the early 2000s. The ascendant class of “Iran experts” in Washington at the time had experience with the Reformist movement, and believed that a nationalist loyal opposition was the future of Iran. American liberals, reeling from the failure of the Iraq War and the subsequent false start of the Arab Spring, were willing to hear what they had to say. President Barack Obama took that theory to heart. He maintain a careful distance from the Green Movement of 2009, and later pursued diplomacy with Iran meant to moderate the country by opening it up.
Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, seemed to prove the theory wrong. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign didn’t quiet down opposition in Iran. On the contrary, at the peak of the pressure campaign, the Islamic Republic faced the most violent and threatening unrest since the 1979 revolution. An increasingly large part of the opposition, including Reformist queen bee Faezeh Hashemi, was willing to openly defend U.S. sanctions. The Biden administration did not return to Obama’s opening, and an even more serious uprising broke out in 2022. In response, Obama himself conceded that not taking a harder line in 2009 was among his greatest mistakes.
But there was a gap in expectations between the Iranian opposition and the American elite. More and more Iranians were willing to defend U.S. sanctions, which they felt only indirectly, or surgical interventions like Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials. Many fantasized that these actions would make a revolution easier on the Iranian people. Hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv, on the other hand, were quietly planning for regional ultraviolence, and wanted to use Iranian discontent as a weapon in the coming showdown.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies head Mark Dubowitz said in an online panel in 2020 that the Iranian government “will turn their guns on their own people.” That same year, Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) head and former Bush administration official Michael Makovsky advocated for forcing a “regime collapse” in Iran that he explicitly compared to Libya and Yugoslavia’s civil wars. At a later JINSA event, former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror advocated for policies that he admitted might lead to “a very bad war from the point of view of civilians in Lebanon, and Israel, and probably in Iran as well.”
Of course, these dark prophecies were not broadcast to Iranians, who instead were fed a steady stream of conspiracy theories and magical thinking by foreign-funded media. Some figures in the interventionist camp even tried to cast any warnings about war as an Islamist talking point. “[I] don't know of anyone credibly pushing war with [I]ran…it's a regular scare tactic used to stop people from pushing for a change in regime, which is what is actually needed,” wrote Macdonald-Laurier Institute senior fellow Kaveh Shahrooz in September 2023. Being tied to U.S. and Israeli war planning did not hurt Iranian opposition figures — so long as most Iranians were not too aware of these ties.
Yet there were warning signs that foreign patronage could become a liability, as the breakdown of the Georgetown coalition in early 2023 showed. During a power struggle within the umbrella opposition in exile, Pahlavi tried to flaunt his powerful foreign connections by making a pseudo-state visit to Israel as crown prince. Instead of a coronation, the trip ended up being a petty, humiliating slight against Pahlavi, who was also being accused by his opponents of literal cuckoldry at the time. The crown prince was chaperoned around by the Israeli intelligence minister (certainly an interesting message to send!) and had a sad-looking backroom meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At a banquet, the Israeli flag flew directly above the Iranian monarchist flag.
Meanwhile, Pahlavists were trying to muscle out another rival by lobbing accusations of antisemitism at Alinejad, who had once written eloquently linking the Palestinian and Iranian struggles for freedom. Alinejad, who risked losing her U.S. government patronage if she were branded an anti-Israel antisemite, defended herself with a sycophantic pro-Israel statement. Other members of the Georgetown coalition simply quit. Although they cited Pahlavi’s overbearing behavior rather than his pro-Israel politics, the open competition to impress foreign patrons was clearly embarrassing for a movement that branded itself as an Iranian nationalist reaction to rootless Islamist imperialism.
Then there was the question of what happens once the opposition had outlived its usefulness to its patrons. Saudi Arabia normalized relations with Iran in March 2023, and the two countries reportedly agreed to cut loose support for each other’s internal opposition movements. Although the details of Saudi support for the Iranian opposition have never been clear, the immediate aftermath of the Saudi-Iranian deal demonstrated that Saudi resources were quite important.
By mid 2023, money and political influence were clearly drying up in some quarters of the opposition. Pahlavi’s visit to Israel also occurred soon after the Saudi-Iranian deal. Of course, none of this is proof that any particular figure was on the Saudi payroll. Rather, it shows that Saudi Arabia’s cutoff had shrunken the overall pool of resources available to the opposition, and forced previously secure factions to compete for funding. Opposition institutions were clearly bloated beyond what the Iranian diaspora could support by itself.
As the big showdown between Washington and Tehran approached, the limits that foreign patronage imposed on the opposition really became apparent. An obvious criticism of the Islamic Republic is that it is unable to defend Iranians from foreign hostility. But many oppositionists had boxed themselves into taking a much more toxic position; they had to argue that those enemies, their patrons, meant no harm to the Iranian people, and that foreign pressure is actually a good thing.
Probably the most egregious case came after the January 2024 bombing in Kerman by the Islamic State. While the perpetrators were still unclear — and widely speculated to be Israeli — several opposition figures jumped to claim that the victims had it coming.
Today, probably no one in the opposition is more stuck than Pahlavi. His entire appeal is based on a return to the old national institutions of Iran, including the regular army, in which he served as a fighter pilot. (A much younger Pahlavi actually volunteered to return to Iran and fight alongside the Islamic Republic against the Iraqi invasion.) Pahlavi’s theory of change is built on having loyal soldiers from that army rise up for the good of Iran. Yet his foreign patron is killing those very soldiers.
If he embraces the Israeli attacks, Pahlavi will be betraying not only his cause, but also his actual former comrades in arms. If he denounces it, he will not only be cutting off a source of material patronage, but also admitting that he had made a grave mistake by cozying up to an enemy of Iran. The strongest case for Pahlavi was that his name recognition allowed him to be a decisive leader in a divided country. Now, sitting in the proverbial cuck chair, the former crown prince has nothing to say about a pivotal moment for his nation.
Even if doves didn’t exactly predict the mechanism and timescale, they were right that foreign interference would compromise the Iranian opposition. On one hand, the influx of outside resources selected for an opposition that could tell foreign patrons what they wanted to hear, rather than an opposition that could build a real support base among Iranians.
On the other hand, keeping foreign support often meant avoiding straightforward appeals to Iranian patriotism. The need to make Iranians believe that supporting foreign pressure is actually the nationalist thing to do, a belief that is absurd on the face of it, can explain at least part of the conspiracy theory culture among the opposition. For some foreign patrons, the latter tension may have been a good thing. Domestic politics did successfully polarize some Iranians into taking a pro-Washington and pro-Israel (or more specifically, an anti-anti-Israel) stance.
But that stance was sustainable only as long as Iran’s conflict with Israel and the United States was an abstract, distant issue, a faraway money sink for the Islamic Republic. Just as Americans who oppose military aid to Ukraine or downplay Russian influence operations would not be happy to see Russian missiles slamming into their hometown, Iranians willing to entertain U.S. State Department talking points about sanctions or Hamas are not enjoying watching from the rooftops as Iranian conscripts are bombed.
“Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life sacrificed for Iran,” goes the protest chant against the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. Aarabi wrote about the first part as a vindication of maximum pressure. He does not seem to have thought too hard about what the second means for his politics.
Ironically he correctly criticised the MEK for cosying up to Iraq but now he makes the exact same mistake