COMMENT
Iranian fight against hegemony turns 30
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
On Tuesday, Iran celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution that
dislodged a well-entrenched United States-backed monarchy. With the blood,
honor, courage and determination of an entire nation, Iran's sovereignty was
restored, ending decades of national humiliation following the 1953 coup
engineered by the US and British secret services.
"The revolution lives on," President Mahmud Ahmadinejad stated last week,
providing yet another reminder to Western pundits that their sounding of the
death bells for the Islamic revolution have been premature.
Among historians, on the other hand, debate about the event's significance and
ranking in the annals of modern world revolutions
still rages. Some, such as American sociologist and political scientist Theda
Skocpol, have compared it to the French and Russian revolutions as representing
a landmark historical event ushering in the socio-political transformation of
Iran while re-mapping the geopolitical landscape of the region.
With its immense popularity, charismatic leadership and an inner yearning to
expand its horizon beyond Iran's borders by virtue of its Third World Islamist
liberation ideology, the revolution was the harbinger of significant changes.
This was not only in Iran, but also in the behavior of American power, the
patron of so many client states in the Persian Gulf which were confronted with
the prospect of Iran exporting its revolution.
The revolution's so many tumults, such as the American hostage crisis, prompted
a new level of American military interventionism in the Middle East under the
guise of the Carter Doctrine that discarded the previous Nixon Doctrine, which
relied on local client states, above all Iran and Saudi Arabia, to maintain
regional stability.
Coinciding with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Iranian
revolution's anti-hegemonic logic set into motion the direct Americanization of
Middle Eastern affairs that culminated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq after a
failed experiment in 1980 that used Iraq to crush the revolution via Saddam
Hussein's blitzkrieg inside Iran in September 1980.
Ahmadinejad's request last week from the Barack Obama administration to
apologize to Iran - for the 1953 coup, support for Saddam during the bloody
eight-year war, the downing of an Iranian passenger airplane, etc - raised
eyebrows in the US media. Some pundits dismissed it out of hand, while others
pointed out that the Bill Clinton administration had already apologized for the
coup.
True, Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, once expressed regret
for the US's role in toppling Iran's democratically elected government in 1953
and for imposing a harsh one-man dictatorship on the Iranian people that lasted
a quarter of century.
But Albright failed to address the US support of Iraq's brutal invasion of Iran
that was met with inexcusable indifference at the United Nations Security
Council, thanks to US and British diplomats who prevented a resolution calling
for an immediate ceasefire.
Only when it became obvious by 1981 that Saddam's invasion had backfired and
Iran had commenced its hot pursuit of the enemy inside its territory did the US
and its Western allies nod to a half-hearted peace initiative at the UN. But
even then, such feeble efforts were stymied by the sinister objective of
locking the "two rogue states" of Iran and Iraq in a deadly quagmire, like "two
scorpions in a bottle", to paraphrase former US secretary of state Henry
Kissinger.
As a result, the West had no qualms about providing Saddam's Ba'athist regime
with chemical weapons, which were used for ethnic cleansing as well, following
the dubious rationale that Iraq was containing the tide of the Islamic
revolution about to sweep the oil region that bankrolled Saddam's war.
In retrospect, it is clear that the eight-year war's agony, heroism, pain and
suffering was also responsible for the revolution's grandeur, justifying its
classification alongside other great revolutions.
Indeed, the revolution's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, deserves
a spot next to other modern revolutionary leaders such as Russian Vladimir
Lenin, China's Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Mahatma Gandhi of India and
Fidel Castro in Cuba. What would the Islamic revolution be without the rich
legacy of the war that ultimately strengthened Iran, albeit through exorbitant
costs to an entire generation of Iranians whose sacrifices ensured the
territorial integrity of the nation?
"Iran today is a much stronger nation than in the past because the Iranian
people are no longer afraid of blood," Fereydoun Hoveida, Iran's last envoy to
the UN before the revolution, once told this writer. He added, "Compare this
with Iran's previous war during World War II, when the whole army stopped
fighting after five days."
Characterizing the revolution as a "divine gift" not only to Iran but to the
entire Islamic world, he said Khomeini and other leaders of the Islamic
Republic consistently fueled the trans-national identity of the revolution
commonly known as "populist".
Therefore, it comes as little surprise that today Iran finds itself in alliance
with other Third World countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and
Bolivia, representing an important anti-hegemonic pattern of politics in world
affairs. This small cluster of nations, together with a number of other
countries such as South Africa, represent a vanguard of the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM), that has grown from 77 nations to some 118 nation-states today.
Without doubt, the future of NAM rests to some extent on its ability to
articulate a sound global counter-hegemonic strategy featuring its own version
of "smart power". Or, better said, smart counter-power that introduces timely
new adjustments to the moves of hegemonic powers, such as Washington's recourse
to a populist African-American politician to achieve America's global interests
by a smarter blending of hard and soft power.
The new face of American hegemony has contained within it certain elements of a
post-hegemonic approach to global affairs. The challenge before US President
Barack Obama is to demonstrate to the world that the exercise of American power
can be for the "collective good" of the international community, that is, as
"good power" and not simply imperialistic power.
Unfortunately, that does not seem very likely and, instead, we are likely to
witness a recycling of the all-too-familiar American (neo) realist projection
of power that is bent on maintaining the post-Cold War "unipolar" moment,
despite the new official rhetoric on multilateralism.
With respect to Iran, the Obama administration is wasting little time in
reminding Tehran that all options - including the military option against
Iran's nuclear program - are on the table. The diplomatic dialogue is already
in the process of getting subsumed by the Iran-phobic "nuclear threat", so
aptly exploited by Israel's leadership which is, in turn, committed to
maintaining its own sub-imperialism of a Pax Israelica.
As an extension of American power, Israel is confronted by Iran under the same
anti-hegemonic logic that has pervaded the nation for 30 years, when the
takeover of Israel's consulate building in Tehran preceded the takeover of the
US Embassy in 1979. As a result, any US policy change toward the Middle East
that is not accompanied by a noticeable change of the Israeli policy of
expansionism and growing power projections well beyond Israel's boundaries is
apt to be seen as inadequate by Tehran and its allies in the region.
Yet, by all indications - including the massive Israeli attack on Gaza this
past month - the only realistic change we can expect to see from Israel is its
post-Gaza war focus on Iran as the next target.
Indeed, so much is clear in the incendiary anti-Iran comments by right-wing
Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Nethanyahu, whose Likud party is in a close
run to win this week's elections. What Israeli politicians and pundits, who
consistently try to lure moderate Arab leaders into an anti-Iran regional
alliance, fail to realize is that many in the Middle East view Iran as a
credible deterrent capability with regard to Israeli hegemony.
Any vacuum of Iranian power in today's Middle East simply benefits Israel's
expansionism and American domination of Persian Gulf affairs, that is, a giant
leap backward for the incandescent interests of the turbulent region. The next
Middle East war, between Israel and Iran, may have been already hatched in
Gaza. But then again, given the Iranian entwinement of war and revolution
mentioned above, this will in all likelihood be another self-defeating attempt
to turn cold the furnace of the Islamic revolution by adding fresh logs to it.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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