Ironically this makes it a good time for a public discussion of these matters. and the world recession. President Obama said recently that if Iran continues on its present path its acquisition of a nuclear weapon is ‘inevitable’.
Diplomacy and statesmanship between the west and Iran, more recently negotiations over sanctions between members of the Security Council, has encouraged a softly-softly approach in which the perception of threat has taken a back seat to a body language appropriate to diplomacy. This same attitude has permeated society in the west, but now the question needs asking: is the world prepared for Iran’s nuclear challenge? Do enough people understand what the regime’s aims and principles are, so that we can be prepared to meet this challenge in the most effective way, or are we sleep-walking towards an end result we may come to regret?
The pace of developments has been so slow that it lends itself in some quarters to feelings of resignation and talk of appeasement on the one hand, and emotional over-reaction on the other. It’s necessary to have an assessment of what the aims and core beliefs of Iran’s elite are, if we are to make any sense of their drive toward nuclear weapons and ensure an appropriate response.
In terms of threat-assessment, much of the attention so far has been directed towards understanding Iran’s foreign policy; much ink has been spilled in trying to explore the extent to which Iran has proved itself to be aggressive or cooperative in relation to the west. While these discussions are useful, not enough has been said publicly about what the core principles of the regime are, and in particular, the principles of its hardline rulers. The foreign policy aims can not always be grasped by looking at it as a problem in international relations; the machinations of the hardliners cannot be understood except against the background of their guiding principles.
Despite attempts by some observers at revisionism, the hardline elements in Iran are still devotedly fundamentalist, though this may allow for a degree of non-secular nationalism. In giving some background to the present dispensation, it will be most useful to start with an account of the historical influence of Islamism on Iran’s political development.
Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), was an Egyptian writer much studied thoughout the Muslim world, who has had an influence on the development of terrorist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda, lived for a while in America and later wrote a denunciation of American culture and civilization. Qutb objected to American jazz, which he thought an expression of the ‘primitivism’ of blacks, the mixing of sexes and the ‘seductive’ women.
Qutb’s ideas were also influential in Iran, and shed light on the thinking of Ayatollah Khomenei and his followers. Khomenei’s concerns were based in part on the facts of history; British colonialism, US interference in Iran’s internal affairs, Israel’s displacement of the Palestinians formed the background to his concerns. However, Khomenei went beyond the facts to create a caricature of the US, as Qutb had done. America became Great Satan, and Israel Little Satan.
The key to his way of thinking is that it is faith-based rather than rationalistic, and the fact that it is faith-based is in itself a protest against the secular west with its rationalising systems. Within a totalitarian system, or one which is developing in that direction, the operative faith is that of the man who is in a position to dictate Truth or receive messages from a higher power.
Ayatollah Khamenei, who in his younger days translated Qutb into Persian, echoes the theme of western cultural contagion and helps to place it within the mainstream of ruling ideology. Ray Takeyh, one of the leading experts on Iran and a former adviser to President Obama, in his book Guardians of the Revolution (2009), quotes Khamenei: ‘we are subject to the cultural assault of our enemies.’ What is the nature of this assault? How is it possible that the US, thousands of miles distant, manages to threaten Iran culturally? Further down the page Takeyh provides Khamenei’s answer: ‘because of the lure of its ideals and seductive culture.’
US values are not necessarily carried to Iran at the point of a gun; it is rather their power to ‘seduce’ which endangers the minds of the citizenry. The west doesn’t have to be proactive to be a threat; it is the values themselves that are to be feared. This sends out a message of basic insecurity and aggression, and is aimed at Iran’s young people and others who find western ideas attractive. The way to deal with these ideas, it seems, is to eliminate them.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a more recent advocate of the doctrine of Satanism. His Holocaust denials and threats to wipe Israel ‘off the map,’ are consistent with the views of his hardline predecessors. Unfortunately, a different spin is often put on this by western observers, who sometimes claim that these views are simply par for the course in the Middle East, and that Ahmadinejad is simply courting popularity with the ‘Arab street.’ The argument that this is ‘only’ opportunism begs the question of whether it agrees with essential hardline thinking, which seeks to demonise Israelis, Jews, heterodox Islamic tendencies, the west, and all who think differently.
Little Satanism is the underlying sentiment behind Iran’s attitude toward Israel, and support for Hezbollah and Hamas, in which Jihad has been re-branded as ‘resistance.’ This means essentially resistance to the existence of Israel. This helps to explain Iran’s refusal to recognise Israel and opposition to the Middle East peace process.
One of the reasons it is difficult to get a clear picture of what the hardliners believe is that Iran has experienced pendulum swings from one political extreme to another since the revolution. This means that the publicly stated aims and principles of the regime at any given time have also swung back and forth, sometimes reflecting fundamentalist notions, at other times reform, democracy, nationalism or Shi’ism; there is sometimes a mixture of ideas espoused from the top. It has been difficult to keep track of, and difficult to know where the pendulum is pointing at any given moment, but all this diversity also obscures the hardline mentality, and it is the hardliners who are currently in control.
Experts and observers have expressed a number of different views about the regime’s foreign policy, based often on snapshots of the changing scenery, and some have extrapolated from this: Iran is democratic, realist, pragmatist, nationalist, Marxist, Shia-inspired; notions based on the public face and complexion of the regime at a given moment.
At present there are few who want to claim that Iran is democratic.
The clerics’ flirtation with Marxism came to an abrupt end in a purge and against the left under Khomenei. There is little reason to suspect that secular nationalists will fare any better.
The hardline-fundamentalist perennial philosophy is so popular and enduring among the elite because those in power want as little contact with the outside world as possible, and a doctrine of intolerance is the best means for achieving this while at the same time creating a basis for unity among the hardliners themselves.
It is not so important to figure out the exact nature of the regime or its core beliefs at any given moment. What is more important is the existence of the pendulum swings, which mean that we cannot tell at any moment which faction or tendency will be in control. In the future it may be that the hardliners will be in control of a nuclear weapon.
The problem is that a nuclear armed Iran led by hardliners may not be containable or deterrable, as some of those resigned to its possession of the bomb believe. Offering ‘carrots’ may not be enough to pacify the most extreme elements. No incentive may be enough to make them feel safe, or to resist the urge toward aggressive behaviour if they believe that their security depends on the elimination of western values and civilization, and deterrence may not be a coherent strategy for the west when applied to leaders who are paranoid. For the hardliners the best defence is offence, which should worry us all.