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Fueling
mistrust
By Roger Howard
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
Imagine your reaction if, during last
November's US presidential contest, the mullahs of
Iran had suddenly launched a tirade of criticism
against the American system of democracy and
beamed their message onto American television sets
and radios for all to hear: democracy in the
United States, the mullahs might have claimed, is
a corrupt process that is determined largely by
the influence of the wealthiest donors, and a
process that wholly fails to address the religious
needs of a secular, materialist culture.
Most ordinary Americans, it can be fairly
said, would be outraged by the sanctimonious tone
and intrusive nature of those who know nothing
firsthand of what they condemn. They would
probably deeply resent such comments as
unwarranted and deeply unfair, and view the
Iranian regime with even more mistrust, and
perhaps loathing, than ever before.
Now
listen to some of the comments ventured by
administration spokesmen about Iran's presidential
elections on Friday. The election, as State
Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 19,
"will represent another setback for democracy ...
because the political process and the media are
controlled and manipulated by an unselected few".
Such control and manipulation, he continued,
inevitably frustrated President George W Bush's
declared aim of sponsoring democratic reforms
"from Damascus to Tehran" that would make the
wider world a better and safer place.
The
strong criticisms of Iran's domestic politics that
have been expressed by the president and his
spokesmen are also being beamed into Iran more
vigorously than ever before: since late last year
the administration has granted millions of dollars
to fund satellite television and radio stations
that, from their studios in the United States,
transmit often radical messages straight into the
homes of ordinary Iranians. What's more,
Washington is now actively funding political
groups that, from their exiles, support the cause
of democracy inside Iran.
The real
criticism of this highly sanctimonious tone is not
that such comments are in any way unfounded.
Iran's elections will be, as administration
spokesmen claim, not far from a sham. The clerical
regime has already barred more than 1,000 hopefuls
from standing in the race in the same way that, in
February last year, thousands of potential
candidates in the parliamentary elections were
similarly barred by hardliners who feared the
reforms they championed. This week there is only
one presidential candidate who is standing with an
openly "reformist" agenda, Mustafa Moin, and his
supporters have been subjected to a vicious
campaign of harassment and intimidation by the
regime's vigilantes - or thugs - who carry out its
dirty work.
The trouble with voicing such
strong, brazen criticisms of another country's
domestic politics is not that they are without
foundation, but that they fuel mutual mistrust and
suspicion. Among ordinary Iranians, they are more
likely to irk, stirring resentment at foreign
interference in the same way as the mullah's
imaginary tirade against American ways. Among the
leadership, however, they can only heighten fears
that Washington is committed to regime change in
Iran, perhaps with the same insidiousness that was
once deployed against Mohammed Mossadeq, the
Iranian prime minister who was toppled by the
Central Intelligence Agency in 1953.
If
Tehran's fears of American aggression are
heightened even more, the prospect of some
diplomatic rapprochement between the two
countries, more than 25 years since they were
broken off, inevitably becomes even more illusory.
Not only that, the Iranians could start to take
preventive measures against a possible US assault,
covert or otherwise, that would create a dangerous
Catch-22 situation by convincing Washington that
Tehran was determined to undermine American
strategic interests in the Middle East.
Imagine this scenario. Deeply alarmed by
the sharp tone and heightened pitch of American
criticism, Tehran secretly deploys more
Revolutionary Guards into Iraq, hoping to build up
close contact and cooperation among the Shi'ite
people, who could take Iran's side in the event of
an American assault. Detecting this deployment,
however, Washington becomes even more certain that
Iran lies at the heart of the Iraqi insurgency
against the post-Saddam Hussein government and
orders a punitive raid against suspected militant
hideouts right along the border with Iran.
This is hardly a recipe for peace in the
Middle East. It is more like the darkest days of
the Cold War, when both East and West remained
convinced of each others' bad intents only to find
that the mistrust between them was creating,
rather than just manifesting, the "threat" each
posed.
How, then, can American politicians
reconcile their interest in promoting democracy
and freedom across the world with the need to
defuse, not fuel, the dangerous state of mistrust
between Iran and the United States? Instead of
making more precise references to "democracy",
"the barring of candidates" and "harassment",
perhaps it would be less intrusive simply to
implore the mullahs not to frustrate the will of
the Iranian people.
If we return to the
imagined scenario with which we began, it would be
hard to protest the Iranian mullahs if they merely
expressed a comparable wish to see a new president
be fairly elected in the United States. Let the
American people freely decide what's good for
them, this message might more succinctly be
saying, and leave Iranian politics to the
Iranians.
Roger Howard is a
freelance journalist covering security and
international affairs and a contributor to Foreign
Policy In Focus. He is the author of Iran in
Crisis (Zed Books, 2004).
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) |
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