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Iran: The living
fossils' vengeance
By Spengler
Traditional society persists
long past its best-used-by-date in the Middle East
due to subsidies from the oilfields or, in the
case of Palestine, from the United Nations. Rural
folk who long since would have left the land and
its rigid habits of mind remain suspended in time
like living fossils, watching as the world leaves
them
behind. Rural Persia voted with one voice to hold
the world at bay, and elected Mahmud Ahmadinejad
as the country's next president. It is pointless
to complain about vote fraud and intimidation;
there is no doubt that Adhmadinejad won the votes
of Iran's rural poor.
"Almost no one in
Washington expected the landslide victory of the
conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
as Iran's next president," wrote David Sanger in
the New York Times on June 26. Yet the surge of
support for the ultra-Islamist mayor of Tehran
should be no surprise.
From an economic
standpoint, Iran is a changeling monster, an oil
well attached to an iron lung, as it were,
maintaining with subsidies a rural population that
is no longer viable. Oil and natural gas earn
US$1,300 a year for each Iranian, roughly a fifth
of per-capita GDP. The Islamic republic dispenses
this wealth to keep alive a moribund economy.
Government spending has risen by four-and-a-half
times during the past four years, financed via
the central bank's printing press, pushing
inflation up to 15% per annum, while unemployment
remains at 11%.
Iran's government
spending, money creation and inflation
(annual rates of change)
|
Government
spending |
Liquidity
(M2) |
Inflation |
|
2001 |
22% |
29% |
11% |
|
2002 |
43% |
30% |
16% |
|
2003 |
99% |
26% |
16% |
|
2004 |
29% |
30% |
15% |
Note: Years are Persian equivalents,
beginning in
March
Source: Bank of Iran
Iran's poor want more of the same
policies, albeit with less skim for the elites,
and that is what Adhmadinejad promised them. Rural
Iran will support the Islamists, because the
Islamists will support them for ideological
reasons. The young people of Tehran may look to
the West with hope, but their cousins in the
countryside see only the ruin of their way of
life. If the traditional economy disappears, will
Iranians produce better manufactures than China,
or program computers like the Indians? Their fate
would be economic emigration, like their neighbors
the Turks.
Poverty is not the issue. The
17 million Iranians who cast their ballots for
Ahmadinejad voted to remain in poverty, with a
bare minimum of security provided by the Islamic
state. On the contrary, they cannot imagine their
lives outside of traditional society, in which
Islam regulates every facet of existence. Fewer
than three-quarters of Iranian women can read,
that is, fewer than half of rural women are
literate. The country has only one phone line for
every five people, a fifth as many as France. Most
of the country remains sunk in misery, but the
humblest Iranian farmer still has the pride of a
conqueror in his heart.
That is the great
gift of Islam, which offers much more to the
faithful than the ordering of traditional life. It
promises to impose the system of traditional life
upon the world. Islam is the vengeance of tribal
society upon the cosmopolitan empires, first
against the Sassanids and Byzantines, then against
the Holy Roman Empire, and now against the West.
The Muslim does not cower in his village waiting
for the inevitable encroachment of a hostile
world, but seeks to impose his will on the world.
As I wrote elsewhere (Does Islam have a prayer?
May 18, 2004),
Islam acknowledges no ethnicity
(whether or not one believes that it favors
Arabs). The Muslim submits - to what particular
people? Not the old Israel of the Jews, nor the
"New Israel" of the Christians, but to precisely
what? Pagans fight for their own group's
survival and care not at all whom their neighbor
worships. A universalized paganism is a
contradiction in terms; it could only exist by
externalizing the defensive posture of the
pagan, that is, as a conquering movement that
marches across the world crushing out the pagan
practices of the nations and subjugating them to
a single discipline. If the individual Muslim
does not submit to traditional society as it
surrounds him in its present circumstances, he
submits to the expansionist
movement. That is why Adhmadinejad's
belligerent attitude towards Iranian nuclear
weapons cannot be separated from his charitable
stance towards the country's rural poor. Islam
promises not only protection against the
threatening world, but the opportunity to force it
to submit to Islam's own standards.
Ahmadinejad's victory leaves American
policy in an untenable position. To the extent
that the United States enhances the military
prowess of Iraq's Shi'ites to the level required
to suppress Sunni insurgents, Iran may harvest the
political benefits. Iraq is now led by Ibrahim
al-Jaafari's Da'wa party, which operated in exile
out of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War. At a
Baghdad news conference with Iran's foreign
minister on May 18, al-Jafaari said in English,
referring to the 138,000 American troops in Iraq,
"Let me add that the party that will leave Iraq is
the United States, because it will eventually
withdraw. But the party that will live with the
Iraqis is Iran, because it is a neighbor to Iraq."
In their provincial smugness, President
George W Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice understand none of this. The more the Middle
East opens its political process to the will of
the people, the worse things will be for
Washington.
It is not that the people of
Iran are wrong about Admadinejad, like the people
of Lebanon about Hezbollah, or the people of Gaza
about Hamas. Rather, they are the wrong people to
begin with, in that their lives as presently
organized are not viable in the modern economic
world. Iraq's Sunnis, I observed recently, commit
suicide bombings at a rate not observed since
Japan's kamikaze, because the present state of
affairs offers them nothing but misery and
humiliation (Why Sunnis blow themselves
up, June 13, 2005). For the peoples of
the Middle East, extremism, terrorism, and even
suicide attacks represent an asymmetrical bet.
What the United States offers by way of democracy
and modernization is an abyss with no bottom;
fighting one's way out offers at least a slim
chance of success, particularly if one builds
nuclear weapons.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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