The Encirclement of Iran: This Charade Has to Stop

By Farish A. Noor

Even for the most jaded and disillusioned among us, the demonisation of Iran
over the past few weeks and months reads as a tedious repeat of the same old
tired script: Long before the American war machine shakes up its tired
timbers, the boom box is cranked up to the max. Stories of alleged plots to
re-start Iran’s nuclear research programme with the hope of reviving a
nuclear weapons research agenda have been circulating for weeks and months,
leading us to the impending climax as Iran is hauled before the
less-than-representative UN Security Council.

We all know what will happen next, for another country was forced not to
long ago to walk the same tortured path: Iraq. Two uneven wars later the
country has been turned into a de facto American colony and the latest
victim to fall before the path of Empire. Iran’s leaders may talk about
their country’s proud ‘one thousand year history’ and its civilisational
legacy left for humankind, but all the towers of Babylon and the pride of
Assyria could not prevent Baghdad being reduced to a pile of rubble by
American tank-busters and rockets, so why should the ancient kingdom of
Persia fare any better? (American smart bombs, it ought to be noted, were
not trained in ancient middle-eastern history and have little regard for
historic monuments or Persian poetry…)

There is now much talk of ‘isolating’ Iran, imposing sanctions and
restrictions on travel for Iranian diplomats and citizens, including Iranian
students, artists, scholars, intellectuals and even its football team. All
of this is designed to deny Iran the oxygen of publicity it needs to plead
its case before a wider global audience, and to drown out the voices of
common sense and rationality that still prevail in that beleagured country.
Even consensual voices like Ali Larijani, who stated that Iran was prepared
to compromise and co-operate with other countries in its development of
nuclear energy, have been sidelined and silenced altogether.

Commentators in the Western liberal press have bemoaned this silencing
campaign as a counter-productive measure, as it would mean marginalising the
small yet vocal liberal current in Iran itself and driving the populace into
the waiting arms of the more belligerent sections of the Iranian political
elite led by its populist leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Such comments however fail to note the very obvious fact that the political
elite of Washington have no intention in engaging in any kind of meaningful
dialogue with progressive and moderate Iranian intellectuals in the first
place. For dialogue would entail a meeting of minds on common ground, and
the acceptance of the fact that both sides would have to compromise. Iran
may be brought to the table to talk about the practical realities of living
in a world where nuclear energy is regarded as a necessary hazard at best, a
lethal and untrustworthy form of energy-production at worst. But in any such
dialogue the West, and most notably the United States, would also be forced
to look at itself closely and recognise the contradictions and errors of its
foolhardy foreign adventurism, the appalling abuse of human rights by its
own security forces in places like Guantanamo Bay, and its complicity in the
deteriorating environmental situation and global energy crisis we are all
facing. Would the powers-that-be in Washington be willing to engage in any
such dialogue on those terms? Dont bet on it.

So the soap-opera with its host of lame-duck characters and cliched rhetoric
plods on at its snails pace. Iran is harrangued and demonised on a daily
basis for a host of evils, both real and imagined. We are told again and
again that the country is in the grip of a motley crew of fundamentalist
mullahs whose views on women, Jews, democracy and freedom of speech are
medieval, outdated and reactionary. But doesnt this apply to all the other
Arab states that are also in the stable of America’s partners and strategic
allies in the middle-east? And for heavens sake, it doesnt take a genius to
note that the treatment of women in Iran is still much better than the
treatment of Muslim women in nearby Saudi Arabia.

Despite these blatant contradictions and painful ironies, the isolation of
Iran continues unabated. The deafening silence of the governments of the
Muslim world - from Morocco to Malaysia - sounds like a postmodern concert
of silence conducted without instruments. The conduct of the neighbouring
Arab states are even more appalling, considering the obvious designs that
America and its allies have on the Arab and Muslim world on the whole. Yet
not an iota of sympathy or solidarity has been issued in this time of
impending crisis, when it is clear that Iran is about to end up as target
no. 3 in the short list of America’s marauding conquests across Central Asia
and the Middle East. On a global level the marginalisation of Muslims as a
whole - as witnessed by the neglect and indifference shown to the earthquake
victims of Muslim Pakistan - means that beyond the West-Islam dialectic
there is even less thought spent on the issue, as the clueless pundits in
Asia, East Asia, Latin America and Africa take their news straight from the
mouth of CNN where, needless to say, Iran has already been cast as the bad
boy and fall guy.

How and where will all this end? Unless serious-minded policy makers are
prepared to take into account the fact that Iran is no minor player in the
Central Asia-Middle Eastern scene, and thats its influence extends deep into
Shia Iran and in places like Palestine, Jordan and Syria as well, we are
likely to witness a repeat of the same military adventurism that brought the
US into Afghanistan and Iraq.

There will undoubtedly be talk of another ‘mother of battles’ and idle
speculation about ‘thousands of allied deaths’. But in the end we will be
treated to yet another anti-climax of a vastly superior and technologically
sophisticated army wiping out an enthusiastic yet technologically inferior
foe. In the event of a war, the numbers of dead Western soldiers will be in
their hundreds, while tens of thousands of Iranians will end up sacrificed
for the sake of geopolitics. Not too long ago there was a word to describe
situations such as these, and though the word is seldom heard today it bears
repeating nonetheless: Imperialsm.