Back to Blog Reload - Comment on this post

Puzzled over Persia

Posted by thehim - January 31, 2005

On Friday in Davos, Switzerland, Senator Joe Biden had an exchange with the Iranian Foreign Minister that illustrated not only how tense relations are between the U.S. and Iran, but also how difficult it's becoming for our top diplomats to do anything to stop that regime from obtaining nuclear weapons under the status quo. From the Seattle PI:

Biden's warning to Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was tempered, with the U.S. senator also urging his own government to rethink its positions.

"You have to grow up and my administration has to grow up, with all due respect, and find out if there is any common ground," he said. "We are on the course of unintended consequences."

I just finished reading The Persian Puzzle by Ken Pollack. A history of Iranian-American relations, it gives tremendous insight into how we got to this point. The current roadblock in American-Iranian relations is defined mainly by the 1979 revolution that transformed the country from being one of the few in the region to be pro-Israel and progressive, to being a strict theocracy where conservative hard-liners are essentially above the law in exerting their influence. The heart of that roadblock comes from the view in Iran that America is a "Great Satan" who is always plotting against the Iranian people. The revolution thrived upon this largely irrational fear over American influence, and the end result was theocracy. But this type of government wasn't the expected outcome of the revolution for some, as Pollack explained:

And so for many Iranians, the revolution was welcomed simply because it got the central government off their backs. One American official tells the story that he traveled to Iran shortly after the revolution to survey several American government facilities throughout the country. During the course of that trip he headed out into the Qashqa'i tribal regions around Shiraz, where he found that the people were ecstatic about the revolution. In talking to them, he found that their enthusiasm for the revolution focused on two wonderful benefits: they no longer had to pay taxes, and they could now hunt in the shah's game preserves. They knew little about Khomeini and less about what should or could follow the shah - just as long as they did not have to pay taxes and could hunt in the shah's game preserves.

The participants in the Iranian revolution were hardly limited to the highly religious. As Pollack noted, it was one of the most widely popular revolutions in world history, with support from all segments of the population. The shah was a corrupt and physically weak leader, his security forces were doing whatever was necessary to keep the peace, and his support from America was falsely seen by many in Iran to be a sign that America was behind it all. After the revolution, it was not clear right away who would assume power. Eventually, the religious mullahs would prove to carry the most weight, and former exile Ayatollah Khomeini became the leader of the revolution and the new Iran.

"Khomeini was the archetype of the medieval prophet emerging from the desert with a fiery vision of absolute truth", Gary Sick has written. "His God was a harsh and vengeful deity - full of fury, demanding the eye and the tooth of retribution for human transgressions of divine law. Khomeini, in more than a decade of angry exile, had elaborated the doctrine of a utopian Islamic state and then endowed it with a sacred inevitability. This philosophical system was as stark as it was comprehensive. It held the answers to all questions, and the answers were absolute and final."

The key to his ascension, though, was his unflinching opposition to America. The United States was the "Great Satan", and his strong opposition to American influence among the strong anti-American sentiment, quieted all the more pragmatic voices of the revolution and allowed Iran to become ruled by a man who believed in velayat-e-faqih, the "rule of the jurisprudent". In the following passage, Pollack explains how the Iranians willingness to see Khomeini as a savior overruled any reasoned analysis of his actual views.

Nevertheless, Khomeini held a magnetic appeal for a great many segments of Iranian society. The Iranian body politic has traditionally revered piety, austerity, and consistency to a specific set of values among its leaders, and Khomeini practiced each to an extreme. This alone made him seem virtually messianic in his devotion to his ideals and to his religion. Khomeini also had the gift of being able to speak to the people of Iran in their own language and in the idiom of Islam, which they found comforting. He stressed that Islam offered a complete guide to life; in a modern world where many Iranians felt that they had lost their bearings, this too was reassuring. He also managed to be all things to all people: the bazaaris saw him as the quintessential mullah-champion of their interests. Ignorant of most of his specific beliefs, the modern middle class misconstrued him to be a reformer who would complete the work Mossadeq had left unfinished. The lower classes saw him as a revolutionary who would undo all of the injustice of the old system and raise them up to be equals with the rest of society in every way. Even many among the traditional land-owning classes saw him as a reactionary (a good thing, as far as they were concerned) clergyman who would re-create the old system the way it had been before the Pahlavis had ruined things. And, of course, all Iranians appreciated his single-minded determination to oust the shah and extirpate the American influence from Iran.

Over time, Khomeini would demonstrate that virtually every aspiration attributed to him (with the exception of his personal austerity and his blind hatred for the shah and the United States) was untrue - but it never seemed to matter. His reputation for piety and devotion, coupled with his fiery charisma, left Iranians blinded to the reality. Although he had made no secret of his intention to create a theocratic system based on the radical concept of velayat-e-faqih, few during or even immediately after the revolution were aware of it and most simply assumed that the "Islamic Republic" he kept talking about was whatever they hoped it would be. It was the best of all possible worlds, and each individual inevitably defined that differently. Even fifteen years after his death, Khomeini has the same hold over many Iranians. In his book Persian Pilgrimages, Afshin Molavi tells of a cab driver and part-time tour guide in Mashhad who explained to him that "I supported Khomeini because he promised us a better economic life." Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth: in response to an aide pressing him to concentrate more on alleviating Iran's economic problems, Khomeini had famously retorted, "We did not make the revolution to lower the price of watermelons." But Khomeini remains the embodiment of all good things to many Iranians - whatever those good things may be.

Khomeini was obsessively - even mindlessly - opposed to the United States. At times he got so carried away by his own hatred that he said things that on their face were farcical, such as proclaiming shortly after his return from exile that "The Great U.S. Satan has dominated our country for the past 2,500 years." Throughout the course of the revolution and thereafter, Iranian moderates among the leftist, the liberals, and even the clergy were willing to accept a new relationship with the United States. Khomeini simply refused and blocked every effort at reconciliation. Khomeini redefined the goal of the revolution as the total cleansing of American influence from Iran, including America's puppet, the shah. Consequently, the success of the revolution was predicated upon the hardest possible line toward the United States, and anyone suggesting moderation was by definition betraying the revolution. Although at times Khomeini referred to the shah as "Yazid," the caliph who had had Husayn martyred at Karbala back in the seventh century, more often it was Jimmy Carter he called Yazid, while the shah was merely "Shimr" - the general who had actually struck the blows against Husayn and his companions. The Imam's constant theme about the United States was that (echoing Mosaddeq about the British), "All our problems come from America."

The story of the Iranian revolution was interesting to me in that I see the clear parallels to America's current conservative "revolution". It has taken root among people of all classes who feel they will benefit economically from "getting the government off their backs". Ironically though, this belief also allied them with religious extremists bent of greater government power over morality in order to obtain it. Many economic conservatives who supported Bush in this last election don't share any ideology with people like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, they just naively believe that lower taxes and a greater trust in "market forces" are the keys to "freedom."

I realize that America would never go so far as Iran down the path of theocratic rule before rejecting it (hell, even chess was illegal there), but any shift away from constitutional freedoms in this country should be worrisome for any of us who appreciate the liberty we have. Not to mention the growing belief among Americans that Moslems should be treated as second class citizens. As we saw in Iran, it can be a quick transition to a repressive society if there's a common enemy that everyone feels threatened by. In the case of Iran, the mullahs gained and sustained their power by being the ones most fervently opposed to the Americans. In our current conservative revolution, even as we talk about fighting a war on actual terrorists, the real enemy of the right has become "liberals", the nebulous term that means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but seems to encompasses the ACLU, Hollywood, the homeless, college professors and pretty much anyone else that questions the President. The fear among the right over the power and influence of "liberals" is as irrational as the Iranians' view of America as the "Great Satan". Yet it managed to win George W. Bush a second term, because in wartime, the "liberals" are the enemy and can't be trusted.

The problem that American progressives have in curtailing the influence of these modern-day phony conservatives is similar to the problem that America has in dealing with Iran. How do you deal with a group of people who have an irrational fear that you're their enemy?

The natural tendency is to become more extreme, but this is a mistake. I see far too many people who believe that the answer for progressives in America is to completely disengage with Republicans and to just assume they are out to get us with everything they do. This is counterproductive, just as it is in dealing with Iran. Pollack defended the decisions made by the Clinton Administration in their relations with Iran throughout the 90s. Even though the reform movement at that time didn't end the mullah's reign, Iran was moving in the right direction and was closer to throwing out the theocratic regime than at any other time in its short history. That happened in part because those in the Iranian government who advocated more relations with the west found honest brokers in the Clinton Administration to deal with. In turn, they gained more influence at home among a younger population disillusioned with an overly strict regime. It's difficult for progressives in the Democratic Party to have to engage with people that are convinced that gay marriage will destroy our society, but unfortunately, many people that crazy are now affecting policy here, and progressives have to create the divide that will eventually isolate these people within their own party.

If there's any nitpick I have with the book, it's that Pollack neglected to mention a very important side-effect the War in Iraq had for Iran. He explained the somewhat forgotten fact that the Iranian regime was happy to see us take out Saddam, and the government in Tehran so far has refrained from doing anything to disrupt our plans (we did a good enough job of that on our own). Pollack also noted that with our hands full in Iraq, the Iranians had more leeway to accept toothless deals from the Europeans that had no effect on their ability to build nuclear weapons. But what he didn't mention was how useful it was for the Iranian government (whose state media referred to the Iraq War as the "War for Oil") to perpetuate the notion of America as an evil imperialist entity. By conducting the War in Iraq in the way we did, we gave the mullahs great ammunition for perpetuating the stereotype of America as the "Great Satan". And that, as much as anything else, hurts our ability to effect real change there today.

Now Senator Biden sounds like he's caught in the middle of his own unsolvable Persian Puzzle. Pollack explains at the end of the book that our options in Iran aren't great. It's hard to put pressure on them without the Europeans and the Japanese never being fully on board, and we can't leave them alone, or they'll just do whatever they want. War is clearly not a feasible option, but ignoring them isn't the answer either. The only way to continue is to use the carrot and stick approach, reward them for good behavior, threaten them with sanctions for bad behavior. Pollack concedes that they'll probably still end up with nukes, but it's better than making anti-American sentiment more powerful through bombing raids or an invasion. The Bush Administration seems to be straddling the two extremes. They occasionally hint at war, but end up doing nothing. Diplomacy for them is sadly not an option.

The lesson in all of this is a lesson that the folks who expected a cakewalk in Iraq will never understand, and one that progressives in this country should take to heart. You can't be a liar and expect others to be honest. You can't be irrational and expect others to be rational. You can't be aggressive and expect others to be passive. You can't disengage and expect others to be proactive. A nuclear Iran is likely to become a reality soon. What they decide to do with that power still very much rests within American hands. Unfortunately, we now have to influence our own irrational liars as well as theirs.