For decades terrorism was an intelligible thing. He had a face, a liturgy and a declared enemy. I was looking for the synagogue, the Christmas market, the nightclub in Bali or the Jewish office in Buenos Aires. He struck the symbol to terrify the spirit. It was a terrorism of almost medieval catechism in its obsession with profaning the sacredness of the other.
This terrorism still exists, however, something new arose alongside it, and it is worth naming it before custom makes it invisible. The recent revelation by Israeli services about an Iranian Revolutionary Guard-operated network does not describe terrorists seeking a synagogue alone, but rather activists seeking an oil pipeline. The Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan is 1,768 kilometers of pipeline that connects the Caspian with the Mediterranean and transports around one million barrels per day. Attacking that pipeline does not kill people on any street, but rather wounds the backbone of an entire economy.
Terrorism discovered the infrastructure recently, thus, it went from the face to the duct, from the martyr to the drone. In that transit it became less visible and more devastating, because an attack on a synagogue produces corpses and headlines. On the other hand, an attack on a pipeline produces queues at service stations, recessions and political weakness. The difference between the two separates the wound and the hemorrhage.
The failed attack in Azerbaijan deserves careful reading. This country is one of the few in the world with a Shiite majority outside of Iran and Iraq. He would be, according to any confessional logic, a natural ally of Tehran. However, Azerbaijan trades with Israel, supplies it with oil and buys weapons; and that is why Tehran treats him as an enemy. Meanwhile, religion serves when it suits the regime and disappears when it hinders it. There is no Shiite brotherhood but imperial ambition disguised as theology.
Here it is convenient to formulate the thesis with the clarity that the matter demands. Iran is a caliphate that does not act as if it were one. The only difference with the so-called Islamic State of Mosul and Raqa is between a fanatic with dirty hands and a fanatic with clipped nails. That one cut his throat on video in front of a shaking camera. He signs treaties in Geneva, sends ambassadors, chairs commissions at the United Nations and then sends drones against other people’s pipelines. The first had impudence, the second has good manners.
Good manners confused the Western world for 46 years. Iran has a parliament, elections, courts, chancellery and universities. Projects the external appearance of a modern state. But Iranian institutions are what architects call false facades. Behind there are no offices, but rather a clerical apparatus that decides, militias that execute, and religious poetry that justifies. The rest is decorated for photographs with European diplomats.
The Islamic State collapsed because it was treated, essentially, as what it was. The international response was predominantly military. There were air coalitions, special forces on the ground, alliances with Kurdish militias and bombings sustained for years. Attempts at political containment were marginal and arrived late. The weight of the effort was in destroying its operational capacity, not in negotiating it. That’s the policy that worked.
The opposite was done with Iran for decades, with negotiations, lifting sanctions, signing agreements and unfreezing assets. Their presidents were received in European capitals, so the result was a stronger, more insolent regime with the capacity to plan attacks against distant oil pipelines from offices in Tehran. Each concession was read in Qom as a weakness. And all negotiations became a pause for rearmament.
Whoever believes that this can change has not studied the history of the regime. The device has not changed since 1978, it only changed tone, adjusted the mask and altered smiles with howls. He never modified his project, that of the entire caliphate. This consists of exporting the revolution, humiliating the enemy, subduing the neighbor, destroying Israel, weakening the West and replacing the international order with a confessional one. It is the project that Khomeini inherited and the project that Khamenei transmits.
There is one detail that should not be overlooked. In Iran there is a much more cultured, plural people who are more tired of their clerics than the West imagines. Thus, women tear off their veils in the street, young people risk their lives for a forbidden song, and we see intellectuals writing in Persian what they cannot say out loud. But those people do not govern, nor did the Iraqi people rule under Saddam Hussein, nor the Syrian people under the Assads, or the population that survived in Mosul under the Islamic State. Totalitarian states are never the nation, but rather an armed minority that takes over the country and uses it as a human shield. Confusing the regime with the people is the oldest moral error of contemporary pacifism.
The parallel with the Islamic State, this has a decisive limit. The Islamic State never had nuclear weapons or came close to having them. That’s why it could be destroyed. Iran has been working for decades on an atomic program that alternates advances and dissimulations. If it crosses the threshold, the West will have given birth to a second North Korea. And then the same rule that applies with Pyongyang will apply. Nothing can be done against a deranged family managing a nuclear arsenal that guarantees its own impunity. That is the terrible lesson of the twenty-first century, the bomb grants immunity to the madman.
That’s why the window is now. Each month that passes strengthens the structure, multiplies the centrifuges, hardens the bunkers, trains the cadres, extends the networks. Each frustrated attack against an oil pipeline, a dismantled cell in Germany, the conspiracy against a rabbi in Melbourne are rehearsals. The regime learns where its operators went wrong and where they got it right.
It is worth saying what few dare, negotiations with a caliphate end badly for those who make the agreement. These regimes are by definition entities that do not recognize the interlocutor as equal, but rather as unfaithful. When a non-believer negotiates with a caliphate, it understands that it is buying time. And when he signs, it is interpreted as a capitulation of the infidel. On the other hand, when the West complies, it is understood as weakness. All the movements of the infidel are read under the same key, and that key rarely includes peace.
The solution, unfortunately, is similar to the one applied against the Islamic State. The military apparatus must be broken, the clerical elite dismantled, the empty institutions emptied and the Iranian people freed from their captors; In short, Iran must become Iran again. Nobody wants to say it because the word sounds old and violent. But the alternative is to wait for a regime of fanatics with clipped nails to get the bomb. Then there will be no alternative but to wait.
The West has a habit of learning late. In each case the delay was paid for in millions of lives. An oil pipeline that almost blew up in Azerbaijan is not an isolated episode, but an announcement. Whoever knows how to read advertisements can still act.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international issues like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast El Observador Internacional, available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
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