Iran: The Debate We Should Be Having

Iran’s position in this conflict is unique: there is no state who fights against Salafi-Jihadist extremism with the consistency and force shown by the Islamic Republic. The revolutionary Shi’a ideology promoted by the Iranian state is less extreme and exclusionary than that promoted by Sunni extremists: Iran’s Lebanese client Hezbollah’s most important political partners are Christians and Druze, while Syria’s Christians flee to the areas controlled by Assad’s regime for safety and protection. In Afghanistan the Iranians worked for a stable regime that protected minority (and thus Shi’a) rights. In Iraq and Syria no other power—with the exception perhaps of the Kurds—fights ISIS with the consistency of Iran and its proxies.

The narrative presented here is more nuanced than the standard cable news presentation on Near East or on Iran. In many ways it is still a gross oversimplification—one could easily add a few more levels of complexity to the discussion by describing the role of the Kurds in regional politics, or tracing the relationships between different Libyan militias and their foreign sponsors, and so forth. But the marginal utility of these additional layers of complexity are small. The most important distinction has already been made: instability in the Middle East is largely rooted in two distinct but connected conflicts. The first is a regional geopolitical rivalry between Iran and its adversaries, Israel and the GCC. The second is an attempt by extremists to hijack Islamic civilization with a violent and utterly intolerant Salafist ideology. Recognizing this should change the terms upon which we debate American-Iranian relations.

The Iran debate we should be having centers around two questions:

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