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2 US shrugs off Iran's revolutionary
spirit By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
"We feel the pain of war
..." - Ali Larijani, head of the Iranian
National Security Council and the country's chief
nuclear negotiator, speaking at a security summit
in Germany on the weekend.
The recent
discourses of Iran's leaders make intriguing
reading, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei suggesting that US President George W
Bush is not prone to rational thinking, yet
capable at the same time of being persuaded by
rational
discourse. Other officials in
Tehran articulated a non-belligerent, peaceful
cognitive demeanor aimed at disarming the United
States' hostile intentions.
Celebrating
the 28th anniversary of their revolution, which
overthrew a US client state and heralded a new,
systemic conflict between Iran and the intrusive
Western superpower, millions of citizens have
poured on to the streets of Iran in an impressive
display of unity and determination to withstand
the external pressures aimed at subverting the
fruits of a revolution paved with blood and honor.
Such are the force and magnetism of Iran's
enduring revolution that more than a quarter of a
century later, it remains subjected to the
ferocious velocity of the same counter-reaction
led by the United States as it was in 1979, when
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rallied the nation
against the yoke of a dependent monarchical
dictatorship and founded a new political system
mixing Islamist principles with the republican
system of checks and balances.
The
emphatic memory of Khomeini, for example his
famous utterance "America can't do a damn thing",
still reverberates throughout the country,
delivering yet another blow to theorists of regime
change in Iran.
Lest we forget, the
origins of the United States' quagmire in the
Persian Gulf region trace back to the Carter
Doctrine, formulated by president Jimmy Carter
after the US Embassy hostage crisis, which set
aside previous US misgivings about direct
intervention by using local proxies, ie, president
Richard Nixon's "twin-pillar" approach relying on
Iran and Saudi Arabia as security guarantors.
Instead a rapid reaction force was set up under a
new CentCom originally headquartered in Florida
and then moved closer to the theater of conflict
in the Persian Gulf, with "over the horizon"
expeditionary forces and stockpiles in the Indian
Ocean.
Democratic president Bill Clinton
was no improvement either, articulating the "dual
containment" doctrine that targeted defiant
regional powers - Iraq and Iran - culminating in
Bush's 2003 war on Iraq, albeit under the partial
veneer of the "war on terror" and the "axis of
evil" discourse warranting military "preemption".
Today, that discourse is focusing on Iran,
with similar accusations of Iran-al-Qaeda
connections to the ones we saw prior to the
invasion of Iraq, except that this time Vice
President Dick Cheney, who led the false charges
against Baghdad in 2002-03, has handled the mantle
down to his daughter Elizabeth, a former deputy
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern
affairs, and a host of other mostly "anonymous"
officials who have learned a precious lesson from
the Iraq fiasco about the need to stay out of the
public limelight.
But Iran is not Iraq -
an state artificially created out of the ruins of
the Ottoman Empire by the neo-colonial Western
powers, which from the outset resorted to
manipulation of ethnic and sectarian divisions in
their "divide and conquer" policy in Iraq.
By comparison, Iran has a long state
tradition and was never directly colonized, even
though its history is punctured with episodes of
foreign invasion, territorial dismemberment and
dominion under external influences. A strong and
powerful Iran has always been inimical to imperial
interests, perhaps more so today than ever before.
Yet as tumultuous post-revolutionary
history, marked with war and repeated cycles of
crisis, clearly shows, Iran's revolution has a
dialectical logic of evolution that has been
nourished by the dynamism of the very forces that
oppose it: the US "anti-thesis" keeps the
revolution's thesis alive.
Yet somehow
this basic knowledge about Iran's enduring
revolution consistently bypasses Western pundits,
who never tire of counseling the US government to
"engage" in order to "liberalize" Iran. Such
flawed analyses are blind to the structural
conflict between Iran and the "unilateralist"
power of the United States and the limits of
engagement caused by it, ie not full
rapprochement, but rather a limited thaw in
relations is the best that can be hoped for at
present.
Nor is Iran isolated today as
Iraq was in 2003, irrespective of biased
commentaries to the contrary. In fact, as both
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran's
national security chief, Ali Larijani, made clear
in their statements against US unilateralism at
the global security summit in Munich on the
weekend, Russia and Iran have a common perspective
on global security, which may be buttressed
further if the present talks of a gas cartel
materialize and Iran's entry to the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization goes ahead.
Speaking of the need for "shared paradigms
between the big powers and regional powers",
Larijani may have had China in mind as well, which
today ranks as Iran's No 1 trade partner. Echoing
Russia's sharp turn against the United States'
global security policy, which has prompted the
Kremlin to accelerate its nuclear-weapons
modernization program, Larijani pointedly noted
the "militarist" essence of US "unilateralism".
And while Putin stated
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