SPEAKING
FREELY Iran: Let the democratic process
work By Hamid Dabashi
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
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The "war on terror",
as US President George W Bush defines it, is a
moving target. The current record of his
administration is the active fabrication of a
public enemy No 1 followed by a major war every
two years, one on the trail of the other.
In 2001, it was Osama bin Laden and
Afghanistan, in 2003 it was
Saddam Hussein and Iraq,
in 2006 it is Mahmud Ahmadinejad and Iran.
The current concern over an impending
attack on Iran intensified
this month when US journalist
Seymour Hersh reported that the Pentagon had in
fact put into operational gear its plans for a
major attack against Iranian nuclear facilities.
The tangible possibility of yet another
US-led war, generated by this report, can be read
in one of four ways: (1) the veteran American
journalist has indeed teased out of his varied
sources a genuine plan according to which the US
military intends to dismantle the clerical
regime's ambition to achieve nuclear capabilities
for peaceful and/or belligerent purposes; (2) he
is being used by his Pentagon sources to launch a
psychological operation (psy-op) against Iran; (3)
a combination of both, for psy-op after all is in
fact integral to any military planning; and (4)
dissident US generals, now openly criticizing
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are putting
the report of this pending invasion out to
generate a public outcry against the Bush
administration.
Any one of these readings
that one might choose to believe, and indeed their
common denominator, amounts to the same: a sudden
and irreversible consolidation of the Islamic
Republic against all its internal and external
opponents - once again immunizing it to any
peaceful process of democratization, as perhaps
best epitomized in the course of the reform
movement spearheaded during Mohammed Khatami's
presidency (1997-2005).
After the Central
Intelligence Agency-engineered coup of 1953 and
the toppling of the democratically elected prime
minister Mohammad Mossadegh, one might
persuasively argue this is the
second-most-significant time that the US has
effectively thwarted the democratic aspirations of
Iranians.
If the damage of such military
adventurism were limited to Iranian people's
struggle for freedom and democracy, one could just
add it to the litany of other legitimate
grievances that people around the world and
human-rights organizations have with the US. But
the problems that a potential or actual attack on
Iran would today generate are manifold and
open-ended.
The most immediate result of
even the rumor of a pending US attack on Iran is
the adversarial consolidation of a recalcitrant
Islamic Republic, which thus resumes a warring
posture, and any internal or external criticism of
its abusive records will amount to treason and
siding with the strategic maneuvers of an even
more rebarbative power in the region.
The
assumption of a popular uprising against the
Islamic Republic once the US and/or Israel attack
Iran is delusional and dangerous. Quite to the
contrary. The issue of nuclear energy (and
potentially nuclear arms) has already become a
matter of national pride for Iranians, and people
across a wide range of the political divide
vociferously endorse it.
The deeply
fragmented class divisions within the Islamic
Republic also indicate that should the US attack
Iran, it is the poorest and most disfranchised,
the 15 million militarized poor who voted for
Ahmadinejad - namely the Pasdars, the Basijis and
the Hezbollah - who will be immediately mobilized
for the protracted guerrilla warfare that will
ensue, while the middle-class audience of
expatriate, mostly Los Angeles-based, propaganda
against the Islamic Republic will all run for
cover.
Those analysts, Americans or
expatriate Iranians, posing to defend the cause of
democracy and/or human rights in Iran from the
safe distance of US think-tanks, promising that
Iranian people are all pro-American and thus will
welcome the US Army, will have to be held
accountable for their dangerous delusions should
the US attack Iran and tens of thousands of
Iranians and Americans are maimed and killed -
with women in particular yet again the most
under-reported victims of such crimes against
humanity.
The emerging assumption that
Ahmadinejad is yet another Adolf Hitler is
factually false and rhetorically lame. His
outlandish remarks about the Holocaust and Israel
notwithstanding, Ahmadinejad is deeply in trouble
and severely challenged from within the clerical
establishment itself. The tug-of-war that is
currently under way inside the leading organs of
the Islamic Republic has very much sidestepped
Ahmadinejad.
He is not a player in the
high-power clerical clique. By virtue of the
mandate the Iranian electorate handed him and the
modicum of integrity invested in his office
because of its previous occupant, he carries
certain limited authority, but not much power.
Any potential or actual US/Israeli attack
on the Islamic Republic will significantly change
that balance, will unify the clerical
establishment and popular resentment alike, and
will lead to a Shi'ite/Islamic alliance across the
Iranian borders and well into Iraq, Palestine and
Lebanon - an alliance that will aggravate the
already volatile region in terms of even more
violent guerrilla operations, making even more
room for al-Qaeda-like globalized terrorism.
Add to this condition the fact that the US
simply lacks the military wherewithal to engage in
a prolonged war inside Iran, and thus the only
plan of action would be some sort of a US/Israeli
hit-and-run operation - which will be immediately
replicated in kind and most probably extend into
US and European territories.
There are
myriad similar problems that all follow the simple
logic of violence breeding more violence. Even the
threat of using the so-called "tactical" nuclear
weapon will open a Pandora's box of unfathomable
brutality.
The only sensible solution to
the current crisis is to keep US and Israeli hands
off the Islamic Republic, withdraw any military
plan, suspend all financial aid to self-serving,
ill-informed expatriate opposition groups, or
those that discredit the legitimate oppositional
forces inside Iran - and thus allow the democratic
process to work itself out.
This is not
just the best alternative. This is the only
solution - for any investment in the
self-promotional promises of the so-called Iranian
oppositional forces and their neo-conservative
cohorts in major US think-tanks is a waste of
taxpayers' money in the US and an affront to the
dignity and agency of Iranian people themselves.
If the international community at large
has an issue with Iranians going nuclear, and it
must, then it will have to wed that legitimate
concern to the region at large, include Israel,
Pakistan, Russia and the US (the four nuclear
powers surrounding the Islamic Republic) in the
equation, and subject them all to an identical
application of the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop
Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and
comparative literature and society at Columbia
University in New York. He is the author of
Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation
of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. His
forthcoming book, Iran: A People Interrupted,
is scheduled for publication this year from the
New Press.
(Copyright 2006 Hamid
Dabashi.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
