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2 Iran revisits the Khomeini
legacy By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
It is now 18 years since ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic
Republic of Iran in place of a well-entrenched
US-backed monarchy, passed away and, in light of
the recent US-Iran dialogue in Baghdad, this
year's commemoration has been interlaced with a
heightened official attempt to reaffirm Iran's
"Khomeinist" credentials.
Khomeini's
successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has used the
occasion to instill the pan-Islamist and
religious-nationalist ethos
of
Khomeini, by calling for Shi'ite-Sunni unity,
criticizing the world's "hegemonists", upholding
Iran's "nuclear rights", and reminding the nation
that Iran cannot expect to achieve its rights "by
pleasing with the world-domineering" forces.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, on the other
hand, shifted attention to Israel by stating that
the "countdown for the demise" of Israel has
begun, a comment decried by US and Europeans -
Spain, for example, subsequently summoned Iran's
ambassador and branded Ahmadinejad's statement
"unacceptable", as did the French and other
European governments.
In the United
States, the reaction has been even worse, with
nine out of 10 Republican presidential hopefuls
explicitly endorsing the dangerous notion of a
nuclear strike against Iran's nuclear facilities,
without any of them bothering about international
law or the morality of it, let alone their dubious
justification contradicted by the International
Atomic Energy Agency's lack of finding of any
evidence of military diversion of nuclear
materials after extensive inspections.
At
home in Iran, however, in light of the misgivings
of certain hardliners regarding Ahmadinejad's
overtures toward the US, his incendiary
anti-Israel statement was likely meant to appease
them and was for domestic consumption first and
foremost. Still, certain Iranian pundits have
openly wondered about the ill-timing of such
comments, particularly as nuclear talks between
Iran and the European Union have been making some
decent progress.
Regarding the latter,
after his latest meeting with EU foreign-policy
chief Javier Solana in Madrid, Iran's chief
nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, stated that "new
horizons have opened up and if the other side has
the will, we can reach a speedy solution". While
Larijani denied that Spain has put forth any
proposal with respect to the nuclear standoff,
both the choice of location and Iran's growing
trade and energy ties with that country reflect
the importance, now and in the future, of Madrid's
Iran policy, not only for Spain but also for the
entire European Union.
Per media reports,
European voters question the United States'
rationalization for a missile-defense system in
Eastern Europe, and the majority of them do not
consider Iran a threat. Thus Larijani's dismissal
of the White House's claim that the defense system
is meant to protect Europe from Iran's missile
threat as "the joke of the year", elaborating, in
his "constructive" meeting with German Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, that Iran has
neither the long-range missiles to reach Europe,
not the alleged hostility or ill-intent against
Europe attributed to it by Washington.
Meanwhile, in a direct rebuttal of recent
reports, eg in the Washington Post, about Iran's
alleged supply of arms to the Taliban, Afghan
President Hamid Karzai told a joint press
conference with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates
at his side that he regarded Iran as "a very close
friend" that has helped Afghanistan's
reconstruction during the past five years.
Karzai called the allegations of Iran's
pro-Taliban meddlings as "baseless", and even
Gates reluctantly admitted that the US has no
"proof" that Iran was supplying arms to Taliban,
thus disputing the claim of a "senior US official"
who told the Washington Post just last week that
the US had solid evidence to this effect.
Even with respect to Iraq, Iran continues
to claim that the US has not proffered any
evidence that it is channeling arms into Iraq, and
a former military commander has told the Iranian
press that the opposition People's Mojahdein
seized a lot of Iranian military hardware prior to
the late president Saddam Hussein's downfall, and
those could be the weapons recently put on display
by the US in Baghdad to prove Iranian complicity.
"Iran is at present very concerned about a
Ba'athist coup in Iraq," a Tehran political
analyst has told the author, pointing out that
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has expressed
the same concerns lately.
According to a
number of Iran experts, the US may soon resort to
the "Iraq card" in the nuclear standoff. "The US
should not play around with the lion's tail,"
Ahmadinejad has warned, referring to Iran's
national symbol.
National reckoning
with the Khomeini legacy Today, the concept
of "Iranian theocracy" has become a fixed staple
of Western commentaries on Iran, increasingly
intermixed with the more pejorative
"Islamofascism".
Even respected political
theorists such as Leszek Kolakowski have succumbed
to the inapt comparison of today's Iran with Nazi
Germany. In the Journal of Democracy, Kolakowski
has written: "The principle of majority rule does
not by itself constitute democracy. We know of
tyrannical regimes that enjoy the support of a
majority, including Nazi Germany and the Iranian
theocracy."
Taking this argument a few
steps further, historian Bernard Lewis has taken
the lead in theorizing the "Islamofascist"
pejorative by warning that the situation is
similar to that preceding World War II, and that
the West's inability to stop Iran's march toward
nuclear weapons is akin to the 1938 appeasement of
Adolf Hitler. A well-known pro-Israel
neo-conservative, Norman Podhoretz, has
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