Unknowing the Enemy: Iran and the Geopolitics of Illegibility in Washington
By Negar Razavi (Northwestern University)
This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”
In 2002, the US Department of Defense ran a $250 million “war game” called the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC’02), which simulated a military conflict between the armed forces of the US (Blue team) and a Gulf country closely modeled after Iran (Red team). MC’02 took two years to plan and included over 13,000 service members, seventeen different simulated locations, and nine live locations (Zenko 2015). MC’02 became infamous within the US security circles I study, not due to its unprecedented costs or scope but because its results seemed to have been intentionally skewed midway through the simulation to ensure a US victory. In fact, Marine Lt. General Paul Van Riper, who led the Red team, quit in protest after just seven days. Later he wrote a scathing critique of the entire exercise, arguing that had the rules not been changed in the middle of the simulation, the Red team (a.k.a. Iran) would have had a military victory against the Blue (Zenko 2015). Meanwhile, defenders of the mid-game adjustments countered that the Red team had operated outside of what was “expected” of their enemy, hence why they were forced to change the rules.
A decade later, in 2012, the Brookings Institution, a well-known think tank in Washington, DC, ran yet another war game that played out a potential conflict and negotiation with Iran. This time Iran was represented by a group of Iranian Americans and experts on Iran—though their names were never publicly revealed (Siegal 2012). Once again, the simulation ended badly for the United States. As Kenneth Pollack (2012), one of the organizers of the war game explained in his report: “the American teams were surprised by the retaliation that their strikes triggered from the Iran teams . . . assumed that Iranian rhetoric would not translate into action, and . . . saw the Iranian reactions as excessive when the Iran teams chose to back up their words with corresponding actions.”
Over the past twenty years, security elites inside and outside the US government have run dozens of exercises like these, trying through different configurations to simulate the US response to armed conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran—a country that US leaders have regularly identified as its primary state threat in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.[1]
What I find most striking about these war games is that regardless of how they are designed or their immense price tags, their outcomes consistently appear to take their organizers by surprise. More specifically, the US-based security community seems unable to grasp or anticipate Iran’s geopolitical anxieties, concerns, interests, and strategies. Furthermore, they seem to repeatedly lament the extent to which their lack of knowledge threatens the very security interests they proclaim to pursue in the Middle East.
More perplexing still is the fact that these same securitizing actors seem uninterested in learning the lessons of these war games with each successive simulation, even as Iran has continued in the “real world” to expand its geopolitical influence across the Middle East in ways that challenge US hegemony.[2]
One way to explain this apparent paradox is to look at what sociologist Lisa Stampnitzky (2013) calls the “politics of anti-knowledge,” which defined the US government’s initial responses to terrorism post-9/11. As she explains, “the root of the politics of anti-knowledge is hence that, if terrorists are evil and irrational, then one cannot—and, indeed, should not—know them” (189). However, if the US security community is wholly invested in the politics of anti-knowledge with regards to Iran, then how and why has it built an expansive knowledge apparatus to supposedly overcome their lack of understanding of the country?
There are, in fact, hundreds of analysts situated both inside and outside the US government—including across the many diplomatic, military, and intelligence agencies, think tanks, universities, lobby firms, and private consulting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton—who track Iran’s leaders, military capabilities, and security policies. In addition, the US government and various other institutions have invested millions into research projects and war games like the ones I described above, while organizing thousands of public talks, closed-door conferences, and government briefings, all with the express goal of further clarifying the geopolitical “threat” posed by Iran.
Over the course of two years of ethnographic research among security experts in Washington and over fifteen years of close contact with this community,[3] I have come to know many of those analysts who proclaim expertise on Iran either in person or through their writings. I have also attended many of these events. Through this grounded research, I ultimately came to understand the US security community’s epistemic approach to Iran as one rooted in a geopolitics of illegibility. Inherently contradictory in its logics, the geopolitics of illegibility is the sum of the intellectual, affective, political, and security work needed to ultimately represent Iran as an unknowable enemy.
Using the war games as both analogy and entry point into understanding how this geopolitics of illegibility operates, I see the policy community in Washington as continually “rigging the game.” That is, they render Iran’s security anxieties about its sovereign borders, access to resources, and other geopolitical concerns as inherently irrational and unknowable and its right to defend its boundaries and to resist the US empire (both in the past and present) as “unthinkable” (Trouillot 1995). Such illegibility persists even as these same security elites in the United States acknowledge that their continued lack of understanding of the country in all its complexities leads to their losing the geopolitical game with Iran, both in simulation and “real” life—a fact that Iran’s own leaders proudly tout (Bajoghli 2019).
Not only does this epistemic rigging materially serve the growing political economy of expertise on Iran, but it sustains a posture of continual uncertainty that serves the nebulous, expansive nature of the counterterror state (Masco 2014), which exceeds both sovereign and state boundaries (Al-Bulushi 2014).
More importantly, however, Washington’s geopolitics of illegibility with Iran reveals a form of global power rooted in much longer imperial traditions and forms of racism adapted to more contemporary technologies and forms of governmentality. Such power allows elites in the Global North to further detach themselves from the consequences and costs of the security policies they ultimately enact. Instead, through expensive simulations and an industry dedicated to predicting a “knowable” future always situated just beyond their grasp, they can maintain their own expert authority without assuming the responsibility for what this knowledge produces in practice.
From different vantage points, anthropologists have demonstrated the ways states deploy techniques of “legibility” and “illegibility” to govern their populations. In the specific context of national security, scholars have largely focused on how the security state makes its targets and enemies more “legible” through the use of technologies like drones (Gusterson 2016; Tahir 2017), video games (Allen 2017), and training simulations and war games (Masco 2014; Simons 1997). Nearly all of these studies make clear that such tools reveal far more about US anxieties, fantasies, racism, and desires rather than those of the “enemy” they purport to study. As Catherine Lutz (2001, 87) writes, war games often show “American anxieties played out as if to tame them.”
While building on these interventions, my work among US security experts working on Iran goes one step further to investigate how the counterterror state’s investments in—and desires to—make their enemy legible is predicated on their object of study remaining persistently “unknowable.” Not unlike Jonathan Rosa’s (2019) conception of “languagelessness,” which he argues has rendered Latinx communities in the United States incomprehensible to the white, English-speaking majority, through the geopolitics of illegibility, the US foreign policy and security community systematically dismisses the voices of Iranian officials and/or those Iranian actors who can articulate or represent the geopolitical logics of their country as inherently unintelligible. This takes place even within the carefully curated confines of a simulation in which they can largely manipulate and control the variables.
As a concrete example, many of my interlocutors complained about Iran’s “expanding influence” in Iraq. As one think tank expert told me, “I just can’t wrap my head around what Iran’s playing at in Iraq. I mean what’s their real end game here?” When I pointed out that unlike the United States, Iran shares nearly a thousand-mile border with Iraq, fought a bloody eight-year war with the country (fueled by the United States), has had thousands of years of cultural, economic, religious, and political exchange with its neighbor, and currently has to contend with hostile US military bases across Iraq, he quickly dismissed my points. “Yes, yes, we all know that. But why is Iran really inside Iraq?”
Others similarly questioned Iran’s supposedly “hidden” motivations to exert its power in Iraq in ways that represent Iran as a state actor acting outside of its own historical and geographic context, while deflecting the very same questions about why the United States (as a nonregional hegemon) continues to occupy Iraq. For instance, in 2015 testimony before Congress that I attended, Tony Badran, an analyst at the right-wing think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), stated: “Washington cannot lose sight of the fact that Iran remains an unreconstructed revolutionary actor, and it cannot just simply be integrated into a new security architecture. . . . And so we need to roll back that influence and disabuse it of this dream of regional hegemony.”[4] As with the war games I started out with in this essay, both these experts begin with the assumption that Iran’s geopolitical machinations are anything but self-evident, logical, or legitimate, while wholly denying the United States’s own role as the primary imperial, occupying power in Iraq.
Ultimately, the end result of this geopolitics of illegibility on Iran is not only that it renders the lives of people in Iran (along with Iraq and the wider region) as “ungrievable” (Butler 2010) among US policy elites—as evidenced by their continued support for indiscriminate, punitive sanctions and over two decades of intensive war, military occupation, and violence—but it collectively absolves these elites of their failures to provide the durable regional security they have promised by sustaining this posture of confrontation with Iran.
References Cited
Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2014. “‘Peacekeeping’ as Occupation: Managing the Market for Violent Labor in Somalia.” Transforming Anthropology 22 (1): 31–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12026.
Allen, Robertson. 2017. America’s Digital Army: Games at Work and War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Bajoghli, Narges. 2019. Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Dubowitz, Mark. 2013. The Iran-Syria Nexus and Its Implications for the Region. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg82308/html/CHRG-113hhrg82308.htm.
Fallows, James. 2004. “Will Iran Be Next?” The Atlantic, December. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/12/will-iran-be-next/303599/.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2016. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lenoir, Timothy. 2000. “All but War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex.” Configurations 8 (3): 289–335. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2000.0022.
Lutz, Catherine. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press.
Masco, Joseph. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pollack, Kenneth. 2012. A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Crisis Simulation of a U.S.-Iranian Confrontation. Washington DC: Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/us-iran-crisis-simulation-pollack-paper.pdf.
Rosa, Jonathan. 2019. Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press.
Siegal, Robert. 2012. “Simulated War between U.S.-Iran Has Grisly End.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2012/09/24/161706698/simulated-war-between-u-s-iran-has-grisly-end.
Simons, Anna. 1997. The Company They Keep: Life inside the U.S. Army Special Forces. New York: Free Press.
Stampnitzky, Lisa. 2013. Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tahir, Madiha. 2017. “The Ground Was Always in Play.” Public Culture 29 (1 81): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3644373.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Zenko, Micah. 2015. “Millennium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and Its Legacy.” War on the Rocks, November 5. https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/.
Notes
[1] Iran is listed as a primary security threat to the United States in all five Presidential National Security Strategy (NSS) documents since 2002—spanning the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.
[2] Even among my DC-based policy and security interlocutors, most concede that Iran’s geopolitical power has grown since 9/11, even as the United States has made greater efforts to curb Iran’s power. According to these same sources, Iran has increased its political, economic, and military influence across Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, while the United States has struggled to maintain its waning control over these societies.
[3] My experiences with this community began when I worked at a prominent foreign policy think tank from 2006 until 2009. Since then, I have interacted with its members in various capacities. During my doctoral research from 2014 until 2016, I interviewed as many experts as I could who were working on and commenting on Iran within DC. Some of them self-identify as “Iran experts,” while others are identified by the broader community as experts on Iran. I also tracked their publications and attended their public (and a few private) talks, Congressional hearings, and more-informal gatherings.
[4] Tony Badran. 2015. “State Sponsor of Terror: The Global Threat of Iran.” Hearing before Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade. House Foreign Affairs Committee. February 11. Washington, DC. Full transcript available: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg93283/html/CHRG-114hhrg93283.htm
Cite As
Razavi, Negar. 2022. “Unknowing the Enemy: Iran and the Geopolitics of Illegibility in Washington.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.