West Asia conflict: Actors in a new script

The developments in West Asia validate the words of British statesman and politician Lord Palmerston – 'a nation has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.'

As this is written, Iran has mocked President Donald Trump’s call to “unconditionally surrender” – “Iran does not negotiate under duress, shall not accept peace under duress, and certainly not with a has-been warmonger clinging to relevance”.

The world is awaiting Trump’s response. Fierce aerial battles between Israel and Iran are destroying civilian lives. Meanwhile, panic is growing in Iran and neighbouring countries at the reported American preparations to attack Fordo, an underground Iranian uranium enrichment facility, and
how Iran would respond. Trump has kept the world guessing: “I may do it, I may not do it.”

There was, however, a time when America was helpless in checking Iran’s onslaughts in the Middle East, beginning with their 1979 Tehran embassy siege when 52 of their staff were held as hostages for more than a year. During that period, no major power, not even Israel, was willing to mediate between Washington DC and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini regime.

Declassified Soviet documents revealed that the Soviet leadership, worried over the developments in Afghanistan, had also feared that America would intervene militarily to prevent the collapse of the Shah monarchy. Although Moscow had felt confident that the Khomeini regime would terminate US influence, KGB officer Leonid Shebarshin, who was posted in Tehran from 1979, had said in his memoirs that his chief Yuri Andropov had no confidence that the Khomeini revolution would proceed according to Soviet plans. Shebarshin also claimed that he had proof that the failed attempt of America to rescue the hostages through ‘Operation Eagle Claw’ on April 24 1980 had “more far-reaching aims” which was for a change of regime in Tehran. Would Trump manage to do that now?

According to Thomas L Friedman (The New York Times, Nov 22, 1986), Israel was busy in 1979 forging links through its intelligence with “certain senior Iranian Army officers and other elements in revolutionary Tehran” to connect with the Khomeini Government. This was to get Iranian Jews out of the country. Friedman said that Menachem Begin, then Israel’s Prime Minister, began shipping small amounts of arms and spare parts to Tehran. However, he said that America did not support Israel’s contention that Washington was kept informed. Friedman felt that Israeli relations with a section of the Khomeini regime were also a “tactical ploy” to “gain some useful intelligence before its Iranian military contacts ‘died out’ in the mid-1980s”.

This was corroborated on January 29, 2025, by Rana Nejad, who had earlier worked with The Washington Post. She said records showed that both “countries felt that maintaining a secret relationship would be strategically beneficial”. As a result, Iran and Israel continued to engage in trade worth millions of dollars per year after the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “even as Tehran publicly denied Israel’s right to exist”.

According to Nejad, several reasons contributed to this secret alliance. The Khomeini regime had inherited “the world’s sixth-largest army, $26 billion in foreign reserves, an oil industry producing $105 million a day, and a close relationship with Israel”. The Shah had forged a close relationship with Israel due to the security threats from Egypt under President Gamal Nasser and the Soviet Union. Although Khomeini purged the Shah’s army to the extent of 60%, he wanted this secret alliance to be maintained as he needed Israel’s help in facing Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988.

Nejad says that by 1985, Danish cargo ships chartered by the Israeli government and private arms dealers had made over 600 trips carrying American-made arms through the Persian Gulf to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. “As the war continued, Israel kept Iranian military planes flying, while Israeli military instructors trained the Islamic republic’s army commanders”.

The Times of Israel (June 14, 2024) added a new dimension to this relationship by quoting Trita Parsi, founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council, that Israel gained valuable intelligence from Iranians before the 1981 ‘Operation Opera’, which was the destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, “a cornerstone of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions.” Forty-four years later, Israel is trying to destroy Iran’s nuclear projects!

A cornered US

During the 1980s, Iran gave repeated blows to America forcing it to negotiate under duress. On October 23, 1983, the Beirut Marine barracks housing US Marine “Peacekeepers” for intervention during the Lebanese Civil War was hit by a devastating truck bomb by Ismail Ascari, an Iranian suicide bomber, killing 241 American marines. The FBI described this bombing with 18,000 pounds of explosives as “the single-largest non-nuclear explosion on earth since the Second World War”. A few minutes later, another suicide bombing killed 58 French soldiers. As a result, President Ronald Reagan was forced to withdraw the US Marines from Lebanon. 

Years later, a US National Security Agency (NSA) intercept revealed an oral instruction by Iranian Intelligence headquarters to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, then Iranian Ambassador in Damascus, asking him to direct Hussein Musawi, leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, to do a “spectacular act” against Americans.

The hostage crisis of 1982 during the Lebanon civil war when nearly 104 foreign nationals, mostly American and West European, were abducted by Islamic Jihad/Hezbollah compelled President Reagan to negotiate with Iran. Among these were CIA station chief William Buckley and Marine Colonel William Higgins who were tortured to death. The release of some of these hostages was among the subject matters of the “Iran-Contra Affair” which shook the Reagan presidency for covertly agreeing to sell arms to Iran through Israel and diverting sales proceeds to fund the anti-Sandinista rebels (Contras) which was banned by the US Congress. The aim was to prevent the CIA funding of rebels opposed to the Government of Nicaragua.

All these validate the words of British statesman and politician Lord Palmerston – “a nation has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.”

(The writer is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat; Syndicate: The Billion Press)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.