“We were naive to think the United States would keep its promises in a deal with us,” Hasan, a retired captain in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war — now a prominent film director — said last week from his office in a major regime production studio in central Tehran. “I thought enough time had passed since the revolution that we could potentially engage with America again,” he continued, before he let out a resigned sigh.
For years, I had spoken with Hasan and his colleagues, all members of the IRGC, as part of my academic research into their organization. (They all agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. The first names used here are pseudonyms.) In our most recent conversations, they seemed to be tacitly marking an abrupt end to a rare moment, in which they felt that changing Iran’s relationship with the United States was both possible and justified. Their tone was marked mostly by embarrassment for having felt hopeful in the first place.
Just four years earlier, these same IRGC members had hotly debated whether President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, were doing the right thing by seeking to strike a deal with not only European powers, Russia, and China, but also the United States. In 2014, they would gather regularly, usually over lunch, and hold lively discussions about the most recent developments in the negotiations. Hasan — one of the most vocal proponents of the potential deal — said excitedly during one of the meetings, “If Zarif can achieve this deal, he’ll be our Mossadegh,” referring to Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian prime minister from 1951 to 1953, who nationalized the oil sector and was later deposed in an American-British coup.
“But just like Mossadegh, he’ll eventually be thrown aside by the Americans,” Ghassem had chimed in during that meeting in 2014. Ghassem had lost two of his brothers in war. His eldest brother was killed by an Iraqi bomb, and his youngest brother died in 2005 due to complications from exposure to chemical bombs. He carried around the weight of their deaths and dedicated his work to creating films that uncovered the different geopolitical power dynamics of the Middle East in the 1980s. Ghassem was one of the leading filmmakers for state television in the country. He had made numerous documentaries that investigated the role of the Reagan administration in supplying weapons to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in his fight against the newly established Iranian government.
“America is too bogged down in the Middle East to try those tactics again, though,” Ali, one of his colleagues, rebutted. “Plus, they’ve learned their lessons that they can’t keep trying to change regimes in our region. Rouhani and Obama will work something out,” he said hopefully.