US Dilemma Of Dealing With Iran
Hazem Saghieh Al-Hayat - 21/04/06//
The US would be making a mistake with Iran, just like they did with Iraq, if they think that the Iranians are waiting for US-stamped liberation.
They would be making an even bigger mistake if they believed some of the Iranian refugees and exiles, like some Iraqis they believed in the past.
This, however, does not mean that the people of Iran agree on supporting their regime, which was also the case with Iraqis and their unseated authority, but they do believe that their regime's viewpoint regarding the current dispute over uranium enrichment is a fair one.
Given that the US is denying Iran what Israel, India and Pakistan are enjoying, Iranians are giving very civilized reasons for their views, whereas the US, which thinks that the Iranian people are only waiting for US salvation, have not done much to explain theirs.
Still, one could say that even if the US did explain its views in the best of ways, it would not find anyone listening in Iran, partly due to the deteriorating US image in the Muslim world.
'The shortest way to perplex the Iranians is to tell them the truth' is quite an ironical statement inasmuch as it is serious, that has a deep conspiratorial undertone.
As a result of their history, the Iranians believe that they have always been the victims of Western conspiracies and schemes. This feeling has been added to their sense of being Iranian Shiites in the midst of a Sunni sea that encircles them from their east and west.
Iran entered the 19th century with two treaties it had signed with Russia: Gulistan in 1813 and Torkmanchay in 1828, which resulted in the loss of Caucasian lands and the annexation of Herat, which was part of the ancient Persian Empire, to Afghanistan.
Iranians later waged a number of attacks to reclaim Heart, but the support provided by the Britons to the Afghans in return for threatening Persia, forced the latter to recognize the new borders of the independent state of Afghanistan.
Iran, like Turkey, had ethnical extensions outside, the patriotism of which was linked to cross-border propensities, which have always been suppressed by Russia and Britain, supporting Iran's obsessions that it was an ideal victim.
The discovery of oil in the early 20th century only amplified this feeling of victimization.
The Russian-British competition led to the division of Iran into two strategic areas of influence between 1907 and 1908. The core of such an action like this, which was unexceptional in imperialist history, was that Iran was never colonized in the sense of penetration from the outside, such as a few countries like Ethiopia, Northern Yemen and Afghanistan.
Britons and Russians kept repeating their attempts during World War I, towards which Iran practiced neutrality.
Another strike took place during World War II. After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Britain and Russia tried anew to divide Iran into two centers of power. The then-Shah, Reza Khan, was forced to abdicate due to his sympathy to Germany. His son, Muhammad Reza Shah, was replaced in his stead.
The game of using Iran in major powers' conflicts knew no limits. During World War II, the Tehran conference of 1943 stressed the independence of Iran, but the latter's refusal to provide Moscow with oil concessions it had asked for, prompted the Soviets after the war to set up two 'people's' republics in Iranian Azerbaijan in the Kurdish Mahabad style.
The Russians, the protectors of the two republics, did not withdraw until in 1946, after receiving promises to receive oil concessions. The Iranian parliament, however, declined to endorse these promises while the army pounded the two northern republics.
These bitter experiences with the European powers have created some sympathy, though meager, with the US and its policies.
But again, the post-WWII circumstances have brought Washington closer; and later came the overthrow of the Muhammad Musaddaq government in 1954 through a CIA-designed coup that was carried out by General Zahidi.
This is how the US took its place on Iran's blacklist of most hated conspirators. The blacklisting this time was more frantic than the case with the European powers, mainly due to the nature of the stage that has seen decolonization and calls for national liberation, not to mention the emergence of a group of Iranian politicians who studied in the West and returned to lead a petit bourgeois in administration, the army and education.
The Iranians, through the first Khomeini uprising of 1963 and then later via the Islamic Revolution of 1979, replied to the US, followed by the captivity of US Embassy workers in Tehran, which was an unprecedented and harsh endeavor that trampled all diplomatic norms and traditions.
In return, the adjectives 'Western' and 'pro-Western' served as fatal weapons for Khomeini in the face of anti-Revolution civilians who had lived in Europe and the US, such as Mehdi Bazargan, Abu al-Hassan Bani Sadr and Ibrahim Yazdi, who fell one after the other.
Washington's position in support of Iraq during the first Gulf war, sometimes overtly and sometimes indirectly, has driven the Iranians indignant in the same way Americans were after the occupation of their embassy.
Moreover, Saddam Hussein was viewed as a person who was carrying out an 'American conspiracy' to abort the revolution in Iran in alliance with Sunni Arab conservatives who were backing the Afghan Jihad against the Soviets.
A thin line was finally crossed. Rafsanjani was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986, and the Arab-Israeli peace summits were inaugurated in Madrid and Oslo in 1991 and 1993, to cause the most damage to the Iranians, even more than the breakthroughs made by Khatami's presidency.
Khatami's development of good ties with pro-US regimes, his cancellation of the death sentence against Salman Rushdie (the author of the controversial novel, Satanic Verses), and the cooperation with Washington in the Afghan war, were but procedural steps that offered little relief for the severe damage.
Bush's early 2002 famous speech in which he included Iran into what he called an axis of evil was explained as desire for a regime change, reminiscing old dark chapters with the major powers.
It has turned out amidst all fears that the occupation of Iraq was only the beginning of a long-arm policy run by evil intentions.
In the same sense, the current President Ahmadinejad's character provides, in a nutshell, an idea of how far Iranian obsessions about persecution, victimization and agonies of the past.
The man, who is void of qualifications, knowledge, discretion or weight, reveals a popular readiness to become a paradigm of persecution and victimization, regardless of any other demand.
In a reality like this, it seems pitiful that Condoleezza Rice should ask the US Congress to allocate 75 million dollars to enhance democracy in Iran, and the US Congress reduce the sum to 19 million dollars.
The bet on 45-year-old Reza Pahlavi, who could stir some elders' emotions about the time of his father, is not addressing the majority of the citizens born after a sweeping revolution, particularly within the fact that the son of the late Shah has never visited his country since the overthrow of his father in 1979.
Stranger than this, is the bet by some US administration figures on the Mujahideen-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), as some officials in the State Department are being pressured to stop classifying them as a 'terrorist organization', while the movement's leader, Mariam Rajavi, is still refusing to declare a renunciation of violence in return.
It is a fact, however, that the MKO's military importance has fizzled out during the final years of the war on Iraq. The remaining fighters, estimated by the New York Review of Books to be around 3500, were disarmed by the US forces and detained in a camp on the Iraqi-Iranian borders.
The MKO had all the elements that Iranians have hated, and which reminded them of collaboration with strangers: they had collaborated with Saddam Hussein and in 2002 offered sensitive information regarding Tehran's nuclear program, as allegedly provided by Israeli intelligence.
In its turn, there was a wave of protest that came with Khatami, in which intellectuals, students and some middle-class symbols were imprisoned, exiled or intimidated after Bush announced his support of it.
Since mid-2003, the streets of Iran have not witnessed a single mass march of protest.
As for what Seymour Herche has remarked about the power of Azeri, Kurdish and Arab minorities, his claims clash with the geographic margin of these movements. The projects of these groups, if there are any, have contradicted the traditional US view of a unified Iran.
On the other hand, an economic sanction is a double-edged weapon, particularly when Iranian oil and economies of influential countries like Russia, China, India and Japan overlap.
With a case like this, a trigger-happy Washington is finding it very difficult to control Iran, which is lubricating its past with oil and uranium enrichment, as means to progress into the future.
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