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COMMENT
Demonizing Iran:
Another US salvo
By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - In his State of the
Union address, US President George W Bush once
again demonized Iran as "the world's primary state
sponsor of terror", accusing it of pursuing
nuclear weapons, abusing human rights and being
led by a few unelected leaders. He also had a
message for the Iranian people, "As you stand for
your own liberty, America stands with you."
Two cheers for the "great crusader" for
America's new manifest destiny - to spread the
fruits of liberty and freedom in all four corners
of the world, to topple the world's tyrants and
deliver their subjects from modern political
serfdom. Among others heartened by his stern
anti-Iran message there must have been many
members of US Congress, presently working overtime
to pass a new bill titled the "Iran Freedom
Support Act", which puts the US government
squarely on the side of the opposition groups
contesting the Islamic regime.
The pending
bill not only recycles the pre-existing sanctions
against Iran, by lumping conventional weapons with
weapons of mass destruction, it actually tightens
the sanction regime by calling for punishment of
any foreign government or company that trades such
goods and material with Iran. Also, the bill calls
for a substantial increase in US financial support
of the TV and radio programs opposed to Iran
beamed inside the country.
For a country
boasting of democracy, there is ironically not a
minimum required debate on this important bill,
which, if passed, would pretty much box the Bush
administration in a head-on collision course with
Tehran. The combined forces of Iran's dissidents
abroad, composed mostly of monarchists and
supporters of the armed opposition group, the
People's Mujahideen, and the neo-conservatives and
friends and allies of the state of Israel have for
all practical purposes shut down the deliberative
process on Iran policy in Washington, making it
impossible for anyone to dare voice even slight
criticism of the unbounded, unreconstructed and
ultimately unproductive and even dangerous course
of action cooked up in various committees and
sub-committees in both chambers of US Congress.
But, hypothetically speaking, we can
imagine an opponent of this bill, counseling a
vastly different course of action vis-a-vis Iran,
presenting the following arguments:
Iran has proven a valuable ally against the
Taliban, and its constructive role in Afghanistan
since its liberation deserves recognition in
Washington.
While Iran for all the known national security
reasons has meddled in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq to
some extent, it is wrong to perceive this as
purely a negative influence, given the powerful
presence of pro-Iran Shi'ite groups in the interim
Iraqi government and Iran's leaders steering the
Shi'ites along the electoral road to power.
Iran has signed security agreements with its
Persian Gulf Arab neighbors, including Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, and has invited Iraq to
sign a similar agreement which calls for regional
cooperation.
Iran, through the regional organization, the
Economic Cooperation Organization, has been a key
promoter of regional cooperation and, as a result,
has established cordial relations with, among
others, Turkey and Azerbaijan (whose leader
visited Iran recently).
Iran has fully cooperated with the United
Nations' atomic agency, the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), whose inspectors have spent
more than 1,000 days in Iran over the past few
years, notwithstanding the last IAEA meeting in
November, when Iran's nuclear dossier was largely
"normalized" after Tehran's suspension of its
nuclear fuel cycle, an initiative which Bush
himself "welcomed" as a positive step forward.
Iran has been receptive toward the post-Yasser
Arafat leadership and many official and
semi-official voices in Iran, including newspaper
editorials, evince a rethinking of Iran's policy
toward the Palestinian issue, making it feasible
to think that if the current trend continues, Iran
can be counted on to pressure Hamas and other
Islamist groups to give non-violence a chance.
Now, of course, all of the above is
foreign music to the ears of Washington
policymakers, who would rather cling to their
caricature of Iran as an integral aspect of the
"axis of evil" warranting even military action
following the "pre-emptive" warfare doctrine of
the Bush administration, as if that doctrine has
not already caused enough havoc on the
international system. In fact, the anti-Iran
climate in the US is presently so polluted, so
poisoned, by the Manichean imagery of the Islamic
republic, as evil pure and simple, that it
precludes a rational discourse pertaining to an
important Middle East country that has proven
unwilling to bow before the mighty "New Rome" and,
instead, clinging ever so stubbornly to its notion
of independence and political integrity
uncontaminated by the American power.
This
is not to absolve the Iranian regime of many of
its shortcomings, above all the human-rights
situation, calling for drastic improvements, but
comparatively speaking, Iran's rights situation is
much better than is the case in Saudi Arabia and
other pro-US countries in the region. After all,
Iranian women constitute more than half the
student population and many important positions in
society are occupied by women, a fact acknowledged
even by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace
recipient.
But, alas, a lone superpower
left with a US$4 trillion military-industrial
complex and hardly anyone to fight needs
functional enemies, and who better than Iran to
fulfill the role of evil (sub) empire,
notwithstanding the recent remark of a US State
Department official that Iranians as a "nation"
still think about empire-building. Doubtless, the
same official would react negatively if, God
forbid, anyone accused the US of illusions of
world empire.
This aside, the sad, and one
might say even tragic, aspect of this whole
situation is that the Bush administration and US
Congress are gearing up for a new and more
energetic anti-Iran offensive precisely at a time
when the pool of shared or parallel interests
between Iran and the US has expanded considerably,
perhaps more than ever before, calling for a
serious reconsideration of the present belligerent
approach by Washington in the direction of
conciliation and negotiation.
There is
still time and opportunity left for a serious
breakthrough in the diplomatic deadlock and
perhaps even achieve a rapprochement, should both
sides reflect deeply on their overall relations
and the misperceptions handicapping a sound
reciprocal policy. Yet, misperceptions bred and
cultivated by deliberate propaganda, culminating
in outright demonization, have now become
Washington's new orthodoxy with regard to Iran,
and one can only hope that the unhappy lessons of
war in Iraq can act as a timely catalyst in
casting question marks on this foreign policy
orthodoxy.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11",
Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with
former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2,
2003. He teaches political science at Tehran
University.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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