Averting the clash
Iran Today
Dilip Hiro
Politico’s, 447pp, £9.99
Iran’s nuclear ambitions have hit the headlines in recent months with an increasingly tense standoff between the Islamic republic and the international community. As Dilip Hiro’s book concludes, ‘All-in-all, a major crisis is in the making’.
What do we really know about Iran? Hiro has provided an incisive and easy-to-read account of the complexity of modern Iran; anyone interested in the difficult policy options facing the UK today should read this excellent book.
Condoleezza Rice has described Iran as a ‘totalitarian’ state; yet the reality is much more complicated. The Iranian people do enjoy a partial and certainly imperfect form of democracy – unlike in most of the Middle East, the outcome of elections can have a genuine impact on the policy direction of the country.
In May 1997, the reformist Muhammad Khatami won a convincing victory to become president of Iran. His eight-year presidency put into sharp focus the debate between reformists and conservatives. Here, both Robin Cook and Jack Straw responded with a policy of constructive engagement with Khatami.
Hiro’s balanced and comprehensive account places contemporary Iranian politics in their full historical context, including the disastrous role played by the CIA in overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1953. It took almost half a century for a US leader to acknowledge that this coup was ‘a setback for Iran’s political development’, as secretary of state Madeline Albright said in 2000.
Khatami’s reformist era came to an end last year with the election of the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. He quickly achieved worldwide notoriety with his vile denial of the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel, as well as his hardline stance on the nuclear issue. However, he owed his election in large part to a focus on the social and economic concerns of the poor. There is a parallel here with Hamas’ success in the recent Palestinian elections: Ahamadinejad won support for his strong stance against corruption.
Rightly, the present focus is the nuclear question. It is important to acknowledge that Iran has entirely legitimate security concerns. This is a country that was invaded by Saddam’s armed forces and endured a bloody eight-year war, during which most of the world sided with the tyrant Saddam. Legally, Iran has every right to develop a civil nuclear power programme; the challenge for the world is to secure an outcome which both enhances Iran’s security and ensures that they do not acquire nuclear weapons.
Hiro makes a convincing case that engagement with Iran is the path most likely to promote reform and human rights. Indeed, there is a real danger of an unholy alliance between the neo-conservatives in Washington and the ultra-conservatives in Tehran. None of this is to deny the appalling abuse of human and democratic rights in modern Iran, including the persecution of religious minorities (notably the Bahai), the execution of young men simply for being gay, and the oppression of ethnic minorities, notably the Kurds.
The position of women in Iran is complex: they are far from having full legal equality but do have rights that are denied to women in many other Middle East countries. Hiro’s chapter on the role of women and young people is particularly good, and left me with a sense of some optimism for the future cause of reform in the country. Young people in particular have played a central role in the reformist movement since the 1979 revolution.
This is a well-researched account of today’s Iran. There is no doubt that Ahmadinejad’s election represents a significant setback for Iranian reformists. Nevertheless, there remains a responsibility for progressives across the world to engage with Iran and support those struggling for reform and human rights. This book provides an insightful description of modern Iran and will help to promote a deeper understanding of Iran in the wider world.
Stephen Twigg is director of the Foreign Policy Centre
Bible belt basher
God’s Politics, Why the American Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It
Jim Wallis
Lion, 384pp, £9.99
The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. But many centre-left progressives suspect that religion is the root of all division in the modern world. Fundamentalist Christians and militant Islamists, in equal measure, subscribe to theocratic world views based not on class war but holy war – and the liberal world quakes, uncertain whether to take up the pen or the sword to defend itself.
In the US, religious fundamentalism has helped determine much of American politics, especially under George W Bush. Evangelical preachers suggest that the US should ‘take out’ the left-wing president of Venezuela. They campaign against abortion and gay marriage. They state that God has made them prosperous and might just help you prosper too. The rich man is still in his castle and the poor man at his gate. It’s a tough, hard-hearted and often hypocritical ideology, which the right has capitalised on to dramatic electoral effect.
It’s also wrong, of course. Fundamentalist readings of the Bible fall at the first hurdle. After all, if Adam and Eve were literally the first humans and only had two sons, where did the next generation come from? It’s also un-biblical. Jesus, just like the prophets, said remarkably little about sexual morality, but a lot about unjust employers, kings who turned their back on the needs of the poor and dispossessed, and social justice.
So the irony about the Bible belt in the US has always been its selective morality and its failure to understand what Jesus really had to say.
Nobody has exposed this better in recent years than Jim Wallis, whose new book is an often startling and always engaging read. The son of a military, God-fearing Republican family, he understands the community he is preaching to. He recalls his mother’s own, conservative-based moral injunctions that, if there was a bully at school, he should fight with him; and if there was a child that nobody else would play with, he should make him his friend.
Wallis also knows the tough world of inner-city ‘urban war zones’, the environment in which he built his radical evangelical sojourners community.
He has critical messages for nearly everyone. He tells the militant atheist, former wrestler, later governor, Jesse Ventura (who had complained that religion was a crutch for the weak) of Desmond Tutu’s strong and courageous defiance against armed apartheid security police while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. He (sometimes inaccurately) excoriates Christians who backed the war in Iraq. He points out that God can never be privatised without profound problems, but that ‘without a personal God, liberal faith will never grow’.
He is not without a sense of humour – perhaps thanks to the fact that his wife Joy was ordained in the Church of England and advised Richard Curtis and Dawn French on The Vicar of Dibley.
The overwhelming impression I am left with is that, in a fast changing world, religion has lost none of its force. The advances of the 18th and 19th century may have led many to question faith. But Matthew Arnold would not today be writing of the sea of faith receding down the shore. The waves of religion are ever more forceful now, and if the democratic west refuses to understand religion out of a liberal sensitivity, we may end up being engulfed by a tide we cannot resist. Far too few progressives understand either Islam or Judaism, let alone Christianity.
I don’t agree with everything in this book. I disagree about the war and I find the concept of a personal God who intervenes if enough people pray to him deeply offensive. But Wallis gets one thing absolutely right: ‘The answer to bad and even dangerous religion is not secularism, but better religion. And the best religion to counter the religious right is prophetic faith’.
Chris Bryant is MP for Rhondda and a former youth chaplain
Genre trouble
Classic Political Clangers
David Mortimer
Robson Books, 153pp, £6.99
Forgive my immodesty, but I’m a bit of an expert on so-called ‘clangers’. If you had grown up with my family you would be too. My mum couldn’t open her mouth without obliviously sending shockwaves through whichever hapless gathering she was in, to the horror of a few and amusement of many.
However, this childhood experience has clearly led me to a different understanding of the word ‘clanger’ than David Mortimer, who has assembled a century’s worth of political clangers here. For example, Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany, Kennedy’s ill-fated invasion of Cuba and the Watergate scandal all make it into Mortimer’s book. Despite there not being a dictionary definition of ‘clanger’, I’m pretty sure that telling a nation to go and get a quiet night’s sleep while a demonic despot prepares to unleash fiery hell on the world doesn’t qualify. I thought clangers made you laugh.
Classic Political Clangers is the latest in a series of ‘clanger’ books from Mortimer. The others are mostly sporting, from golf to football, with one foray into showbiz. And herein lies the problem, as the intricate and sometimes inimitable world of politics gets squeezed into a formula not suited to mining the subject for the humour and humiliation expected of the genre. The result misses its target with disappointing regularity, as Mortimer describes events and situations in rich detail, but never breaths life into the characters themselves.
Perhaps it illustrates just how unique the skill of good political commentary really is. Reading this book, you often long for the searing wit of Gore Vidal or Simon Hoggart, who delight in the absurdity of political life and yet retain a lightness of touch that never feels unduly cruel. Sadly, Classic Political Clangers bears few of these hallmarks, resembling a Dennis Nordon Christmas blooper script all too frequently.
Another frustration is Mortimer’s failure to resist sarcasm, which all too often translates into a sanctimonious romanticism about the good old days that never really existed, as his book stands in ironic testament. Take his description of Jim Callaghan in 1969, who ‘resigned “on a point of honour”, a phrase that will be unfamiliar to younger readers but is the kind of thing politicians once used to do’. Estelle Morris, anyone?
There probably is a market for this kind of book, but it will exclude anyone with more than a passing interest in politics. The rest of us would be better off re-reading a Gore Vidal essay, and preparing for next Christmas when half a dozen copies of Classic Political Clangers will undoubtedly wind up under the tree, sent from distant relatives unable to find that perfect gift.
Peter Kyle