Are Iranian Rulers Ready for Democracy and Rapprochement with the U.S.?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Late in December, the Iranian city of Bam suffered a terrible earthquake, and some 30,000 lives were lost. Aid poured in from everywhere in the world, including Canada, and even from what the Iranian Shi’ite theocracy refers to as the “Great Satan,” the United States.

This was a tragedy of immense proportions, and no person could fail but be touched by the anguish and suffering, as thousands more mourned their dead and slept in the cold beside their demolished homes.

Yet, despite this disaster, the Iranian government accepted American aide grudgingly, finally conceding that the U.S. can have a humanitarian sensibility in “certain cases.” It seemed that for a while they were considering trading the lives of their own people for an ideology.

The Achilles heel of the West, on the other hand, is clearly its sense of decency, which means it can be taken advantage of. The U.S. sent in experts and huge amounts of relief supplies, making the country one of the largest international donors.

Yet, unfortunately, by pouring aid into Iran, was not the U.S. helping--since money is fungible--Tehran free up funds with which to finance ongoing terrorist operations in neighboring Iraq, where American soldiers are being killed, as some have alleged?

I suppose Washington thinks it is winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Iranians this way. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked that he sees a “new attitude” in Iran and hoped that relations between the two countries might improve.

But Iranian President Mohammad Khatami downplayed speculation that Washington’s contribution might result in a resumption of diplomatic relations, severed in 1979 following the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Also, the 12 members of the Guardian Council, who are conservative clerics chosen by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, soon afterwards disqualified more than 80 legislators, all reformists, from seeking another term in upcoming parliamentary elections in February. They were deemed to oppose Ayatollah Khamenei’s absolute rule.

In response, parliament passed a bill to overturn the disqualifications, but the Guardian Council vetoed the legislation on the grounds that it contradicted the constitution and Sharia (Islamic) law. Unless Iran’s constitution is amended, the clerics retain the ultimate power.

Given this reality, and also the evidence of the past 25 years, when it comes to predicting the chances of reformers loosening the grip of the religious hierarchy in Iran, it is wise to remain skeptical rather than hopeful.

Living a life of Western guilt: Some professors, journalists seem embarrassed by their privileged status

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian, January 3, 2004, p. A7

As a new year begins, one of the priorities of the Paul Martin government will be to mend fences with the United States and to muffle the knee-jerk opposition to American foreign and domestic policies that has become so much a feature of contemporary Canadian discourse.

This will be easier said than done, because the anti-Americanism currently evident in Canadian cultural and educational institutions such as national CBC radio and television and many universities demonstrates the irrelevance of those technically presiding over these largely autonomous bodies.

After all, the head of the CBC, and the presidents, deans and other administrators of most universities, are not political extremists. Yet this seems to make little difference. It’s the people doing the actual work--the journalists, the professors--who control these and exercise ideological hegemony.

Obviously, formal ownership only goes so far. It is the dominant ideology which is the most important factor in determining the output of these intellectual workers. Top management does not usually have much influence over that.

For example, the fact that most media outlets are owned by corporations does not change the fact that the journalists who work for the media are usually left liberals or social democrats, and these journalists often reflect that outlook in their work.

But perhaps it is necessary to fit all this into the context of the whole “cultural relativism” syndrome. A considerable number of professors and journalists seem acutely embarrassed by what they perceive as their own privileged status and that of the West, especially the United States, in general.

They bend over backwards to elevate “the other” in the non-western world, whether it be Saddam Hussein, Saudi Wahabbists, in some cases even Al-Qaeda. They see these opponents of the West as oppressed and noble, morally more worthy than their own privileged selves. These intellectuals have sat at the ideological knees of the left-wing theorists Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said.

Their fundamental premise, though often unarticulated, is simply that all military actions by western countries, especially those mounted by the U.S., are bad and all “Third World” people are good--even Ba’athists and the Taliban.

Many of these people, after all, opposed the war in Afghanistan to rid that country of medievalist torturers.

Other arguments they put forward to cast western actions in a bad light are merely after-the-fact rationalizations, which need not be consistent. I wonder, for example, how many of the people who today denounce the Israeli security fence as an “apartheid wall” are the ideological descendants of the left-wingers who in 1961 rationalized the building of the Berlin Wall as a way to “save socialism” in East Germany?

They will, true to form, ignore the fact that it was not moral suasion or “soft power,” but the defeat of Saddam, that convinced the leader of another rogue state, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, to abandon his own program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Nor will they acknowledge that it was the “demonstration effect” of the Iraq war that has brutal regimes in Iran, North Korea and Syria now looking over their shoulders and beginning to take America’s message to heart.

But why are such intellectuals so uncomfortable with their “privileges?” Is this the remnants of 1960s radicalism? Why has this indoctrination not “evaporated” over the years, as it were?

Most of these people presumably have children. Even if they feel undeserving, do they really want to bring down the world their kids will live in? Don’t they realize their very institutions would be shut down by some fanatic or fuhrer, their books burnt? It seems not.

And so we are confronted with the anomaly of much of the left deploring the defeat of the most glaring example of fascism in our time in Iraq, of feminists opposing the collapse of a regime that routinely used rape as a way of keeping a population in submission, and of the heirs to the civil rights movement upset that systematically terrorized ethnic groups such as the Kurds no longer face the threat of wholesale repression.

It will be interesting to see how historians regard people who opposed the war against Saddam with few good arguments beyond their antipathy to the people who were fighting it, whose most strenuous objections were often cynical and beside the point, and who were reluctant to see its outcome as positive.

If we are really living in the era of the “clash of civilizations,” these ideologues seem to have hoisted a white flag and crossed over to the other side.