LONDON- The only question to be resolved, following the startling result of the Iranian parliamentary election, is how quickly the U.S. will now move to bury the hatchet. Its Cold War with Iran has gone on for over 20 years. This is unnecessarily prolonged, a prisoner of now distant memories of hostages taken in the U.S. embassy by hot-headed street fighters of the then recently successful revolution that had toppled the Shah and installed in his place the rigid, autocratic, Islamist regime of Ayotallah Khomeini.
No observer brought up outside a theoistic regime can summon up much sympathy for the excesses of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath. Like the French Revolution, on which, in some part, it was modeled, once in power it immediately discarded any liberal tenets it held and became so rigid and uncompromising that normal idiosyncracies were regarded as a profound threat to the regime and were trampled on as if the human beings involved were some kind of vermin. The viscious Islamic dictatorship of Khomeini had as much to do with the essentially compassionate teachings of the Koran as Richard the Lion Heart, whose crusading armies ripped half of Europe asunder on their way to “defeat the infidel”, had to do with Christ’s admonition to turn the other cheek.
The West had much to complain about. But it overlooked its own complicity in demolishing an earlier version of Iranian democracy and it hopelessly exaggerated the threat posed by the histrionics of Ayotallah Khomeini. By working to isolate Iran the West forsook what influence it might have had to temper the revolution’s excesses. Indeed, the depths of hostility plumed during the first decade of the revolution- only ended by Khomeini’s death- infused itself deeply into the whole relationship between the West and the Islamic world. Five years ago Nato’s Secretary General, Willy Claes, was telling the world that Islamic militancy was “the single greatest threat” to the Nato alliance and western security.
Such superficial reading of what has been happening in the Islamic world took no account of the tensions within Moslem society that has led almost all these countries to move- albeit in varied ways- to stymie extreme Islamist influence or grabs for power. And it totally failed to see, until quite recently, how even within the ultra Islamist state, Iran itself, popular forces were working within to modernise the revolution, to discard its repressive and violent elements, and to replace it, as it has now done in glorious fashion, with viable democratic institutions.
Although the 1977 presidential election in Iran, when 70% of the voters spurned the theocrats’ candidate, made obvious what many observers had been writing about- the liberal currents bubbling beneath- it has taken the best part of three years for the U.S. to seriously consider mending relations. And it is still- even after this stunning election result- not up to the starting line yet.
The crux of the matter for Washington is no longer the supposed threat of Iranian-sponsored, world-wide terrorism. That much is admitted. It is Iran’s continuing hostility to a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine and its resolute pursuit of an armoury of nuclear weapons.
A little common sense is in order. Iran’s hostility to Israel is an old reflex. Iran is not an Arab nation and the emnity does not run as deep as it does in, say, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. If these countries, none of them democracies, can bring themselves to think of peace with Israel, then Iran will not, after this election, be far behind. For Iran’s electorate today the passionate issues that can ignite a crowd are economic opportunity, women’s rights and cultural freedom, not foreign policy.
The question of nuclear weapons is more difficult. Partly because the outside world doesn’t exactly know quite what Iranian ambitions are. Partly because the U.S., Britain and France among western nations are so compromised already with their own lack of progress on nuclear disarmament that they have relatively little moral leaverage on any new would-be nuclear power. And partly, and most important for this neck of the woods, the West has not uttered one sustained word of criticism of Israel’s substantial nuclear arsenal. ( Until very recently Washington pretended “not to know”.)
But is Iran, in fact, trying to build a nuclear weapon? One can only surmise it is from circumstantial evidence. The rivalry with Israel and Iraq combined with its undoubted scientific abilities would suggest it might be. It is not so much because Iran would believe for a moment it could use its own nuclear armoury to neutralise Israel’s and it could then successfully engage it with conventional forces. It is more a simple question of international standing. It would enable Iran to claim it is the one Muslim nation who most faithfully supports the Palestinians.
But all this is surmise and, anyway, no longer carries the urgency it used to. More serious is the issue of Iraq. If Iraq had possessed nuclear weapons during its long war with Iran, 1980-88, it may well have used them, and who would have said nay? After all it did use chemical weapons and hardly anybody in the western world cried foul.
The big question in the year 2000, post these dramatic elections, do any of these calculationsstand up? They do in part and that is America’s dilemma. But if Washington pushed Iran too hard on the nuclear issue, when it manifestly has no clever answer to what to do about the threat from Saddam Hussein, it is going to miss its opportunity for a historic rapprochement with Iran. Rather, if for no other reason, it should think that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
It may seem to be a bit of a long shot, but a policy of a new start and a warm embrace for a newly emergent democracy would be the best. Leave the stick at home and use the carrot. Maybe the new Iran, where the long awaited Islamic Reformation appears to have finally arrived, will see its contribution to a better planet is not to emulate the Christian and Jewish world and develop these horrendous and quite evil weapons of mass destruction.
