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3 Real US battles with Iran still lie
ahead By Mahan Abedin
As the war of words between Iran and the
United States continues to escalate, the
psychological-warfare campaign of the latter is
assuming greater and more sinister proportions, so
much so that there are now good reasons to believe
the US has orchestrated the kidnapping of a former
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps general in
Istanbul.
Unfortunately for Iran, the US
psychological-warfare campaign seems to be
working. This is evident on both the domestic and
external fronts.
Domestically, the Mahmud Ahmadinejad government
and its allies - who favor a tough approach to
nuclear negotiations - are being increasingly
attacked by a broad range of political forces.
Moreover, on the foreign-policy front, the Islamic
Republic continues to lose ground. Having acceded
to Saudi Arabia's new and more forceful diplomacy,
the Iranians have now acquiesced - albeit very
tentatively - to US security designs in Iraq, as
evidenced by their participation in the Baghdad
security conference this month.
Ancient
battles and modern disappearances Hollywood's 2007 film adaptation of Frank
Miller's graphic novel 300 has generated
controversy everywhere, including in the United
States, where critics are divided over its look,
style, visuals and, more important, grossly
partisan depiction of the ancient Persians. While
the film's director (Zack Snyder) and executive
producer (Frank Miller) protest that it is merely
a historical fantasy, this does nothing to ease
the violence it inflicts on modern perceptions of
the ancient Persian Empire.
The film
300 focuses on the Battle of Thermopylae in
480 BC, where a small Spartan army was able to
resist a much larger Persian force for several
days before being defeated. True to form, this
latest Hollywood portrayal of antiquity is wholly
and unashamedly biased toward the ancient Greeks.
The splendid spectacle of 300 lean and sculptured
Spartan fighting machines fending off a vastly
larger Persian army (which often appears in
demonic form) is clearly pleasing to contemporary
Greeks.
More ominously, it is sending all
the wrong signals at a critical time in
Iranian-Western relations.
To Iranians
(both inside and outside their homeland),
300 inflicts grievous violence on their
national heritage. Not surprisingly, the Persian
blogosphere has been campaigning fiercely against
the film, with an online petition to Warner
Brothers Studios attracting more than 35,000
signatures in the first few days alone. [1]
Meanwhile, official Iran has interpreted
the message of the film as US psychological
warfare. Presidential cultural adviser Javad
Shangari dismissed 300 as "part of a
comprehensive US psychological warfare aimed at
Iranian culture". The daily Ayandeh-No (New
Future) went even further by running the
sensational headline "Hollywood declares war on
Iranians". Most recently in his Iranian New Year
(Nowrouz) message, Ahmadinejad implicitly attacked
Hollywood (and by extension the US as a whole) for
"trying to tamper with history by making a film
and by making Iran's image look savage".
This kind of official reaction to specific
US cultural products is unusual, even more so
because the plot is centered on Iran's pre-Islamic
past, which tends to be ignored by the Islamic
Republic and its supporters.
The fact that
an Iranian president has had to address the issue
in his New Year message speaks volumes about the
heightened threat perception in Tehran, where
every US move in the Middle East (official or
otherwise) is laboriously analyzed against a set
of Iranian values, interests and ambitions.
Where is General Asgari? Ancient
battles aside, the disappearance of a former
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general
in the Turkish city of Istanbul is being widely
interpreted as the latest covert US operation
against Iranian interests. Ali Reza Asgari, a
former deputy defense minister under the Mohammad
Khatami government and a former top commander in
the IRGC, disappeared in Istanbul in early
February. The Washington Post was the first major
Western newspaper to claim that the former general
had defected to the United States. Citing an
anonymous senior US official, the paper claimed on
March 8 that the former minister was cooperating
with Western intelligence agencies. [2]
The London Times quickly followed the
Post's lead in sensationally identifying the
former general as the "father of Hezbollah" and,
citing Israeli sources, claimed that Asgari had
defected with his family. [3] The Times'
diplomatic editor confidently asserted that he had
defected and - highlighting the alleged
defection's significance - quoted Ali Ansari, a
British-Iranian academic based at St Andrew's
University, claiming that "there has never been a
defection from Iran in the 27 years since the
revolution". [4]
Strictly speaking,
Ansari's comment is not true. While there has not
been a single case of a senior political figure or
a senior diplomat defecting, there were plenty of
defections from the Iranian military, in
particular the air force, in the 1980s. However,
the defections stopped with the end of the
Iran-Iraq War in 1988. It seems that a combination
of greater political liberalization and the
impressive competence of the Islamic Republic's
intelligence services put a stop to the defections
altogether.
It has now emerged that much
of the information in the Western and Israeli
media has been inaccurate.
First and
foremost, Asgari is 43 years old, not 63 as has
been widely alleged. Second, it has now emerged
that his family, including his wife, are safe in
Tehran and desperately waiting for
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