Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 24, 2009
Consortium News

Iran’s current political divisions can be traced back to a controversy nearly three decades ago when Iran faced war with Iraq and became entwined with U.S. and Israeli political maneuvers that set all three countries on a dangerous course that continues to this day.

In the election dispute now gripping the streets of Tehran, Iran is experiencing a revival of the internal rivalries born in the judgments made in 1980 and later that decade about how and whether to deal with the Little Satan (Israel) and the Great Satan (the United States).

Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims he is the rightful winner of the June 12 presidential election, was part of the group (along with his current allies former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former House Speaker Mehdi Karoubi) that favored secret contacts with the United States and Israel to get the military supplies needed to fight the war with Iraq.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s current spiritual leader and the key supporter of reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was more the ideological purist in the early 1980s, apparently opposing the unorthodox strategy that involved going behind President Carter’s back to gain promises of weapons from Israel and the future Reagan administration.

Khamenei appears to have favored a more straightforward arrangement with the Carter administration for settling the dispute over 52 American hostages seized by Iranian radicals in 1979.

In 1980, the internal Iranian divisions played out against a dramatic backdrop. Iranian radicals still held the 52 hostages seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; President Jimmy Carter had imposed an arms embargo while seeking the hostages’ release – and he was struggling to fend off a strong campaign challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious at Carter for pushing him into the Camp David peace deal with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that required Israel returning the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for normalized relations.

Begin also was upset at Carter’s perceived failure to protect the Shah of Iran, who had been an Israeli strategic ally. Begin was worried, too, about the growing influence of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as it massed troops along the Iranian border.

Editorial Note: Top notch investigative reporter Robert Parry reconstructs the complicated recent history of United States Iran relations involving Israel and Iraq. Parry makes the point that President Obama must review this history before coming to the negotiating table with Iran's leaders (who were part of the Iranian government during the hostage crisis), whoever emerges the victor of the election.

Read the rest of the story here.