The Successes of Iran
This post was prompted by what strikes me as being an especially insightful and eloquent mini-essay that was posted on the 15th of last month on a site that for me is a real find, called "The Downside World News." The article is titled "The Iranian Coup" and its author is one Ghassan Charbel Al-Hayat. I don't know his nationality.
Before going into what he meant by the "Iranian Coup," Al-Hayat first, in an interesting refrain style, spoke of the responsibility Arab citizens have for keeping track of elections outside of their own countries, first in the U.S., then in Israel, and finally in Iran. So the first paragraph reads:
The Arab citizen is expected to keep track of American presidential elections. Certainly, the point is not for him to develop a desire to imitate Americans, but simply to secure the future of his children. After all, the man who will occupy the Oval Office will be the general leading the world’s sole superpower, until further notice. His decisions will affect the world’s security and stability. His actions could beget disasters for both his country and the rest of the world. It is enough to refer to the foolishness of invading Iraq to verify that US elections, as remote as they may seem, are of concern for our stability, economy, and hopes for the future.
He goes on in the same vein about Israeli elections and then he comes to Iran. But instead of the "Coup," it was the following passage that really caught my attention:
...The ability to deal with a neighbor like Iran, to cooperate with it, and perhaps to occasionally contain its impulsiveness, requires the knowledge of its demands, fears and appetites.
I write this in light of what I have heard from an Arab official who said: “We have to admit that, as a result of its aggressive policies, rising energy prices and the American adventure in Iraq, Iran has achieved a series of successes that have enabled it to gain control of certain assets in the Arab world.” When I asked him to clarify further, his response was: “It is not possible to build a stable Iraq without Iran’s approval and without taking its interests and a significant portion of its demands into consideration. It is not possible to elect a president in Lebanon without Tehran’s approval. It is not possible to resume dialogue between Fatah and Hamas without its approval either. Iran is present in Gaza through its allies. It is present in the Mediterranean through Syria and Hezbollah. It has, through all of this, the ability to influence the region’s two most prominent issues: the security of oil and the security of Israel.”
For a long time there's been a regular drumbeat of articles about the Bushie threats against Iran, so many of them in fact, and so many in a deliberately overwrought style that sometimes I wonder if the authors' aim isn't to encourage an attack using American forces on that much smaller country. Many charges have been leveled against Iran as justification, but the two main crimes of which they are supposed to be guilty are, first, a desire to develop nuclear arms, though the U.S.has been overloaded with them for over 60 years, and, second, the hand the Iranians have in the affairs of Iraq to the point of helping terrorists, though the terrorists had no foothold in Iraq till the Bush invasion of 2003 made that possible and an inviting prospect.
I don't expect the GWBush administration in its waning days to attack Iran. Instead I think all the rhetoric and the marshalling of forces above and around Iran is psychological warfare, trying to discourage Iran from developing nuclear arms and to encourage it to stay away from its next door neighbor. But that warfare is failing to much the same extent that a military attack would, except in a different way, as indicated especially by the second paragraph in the last excerpt that I included above.
Al-Hayat gave hardly any details of the "Coup" that he thinks the Iranians are engineering in the Middle East, except that it's of a purely political nature. Meanwhile the article, which isn't long, is well worth reading, as many others appear to be on that Downside World News.
Before going into what he meant by the "Iranian Coup," Al-Hayat first, in an interesting refrain style, spoke of the responsibility Arab citizens have for keeping track of elections outside of their own countries, first in the U.S., then in Israel, and finally in Iran. So the first paragraph reads:
The Arab citizen is expected to keep track of American presidential elections. Certainly, the point is not for him to develop a desire to imitate Americans, but simply to secure the future of his children. After all, the man who will occupy the Oval Office will be the general leading the world’s sole superpower, until further notice. His decisions will affect the world’s security and stability. His actions could beget disasters for both his country and the rest of the world. It is enough to refer to the foolishness of invading Iraq to verify that US elections, as remote as they may seem, are of concern for our stability, economy, and hopes for the future.
He goes on in the same vein about Israeli elections and then he comes to Iran. But instead of the "Coup," it was the following passage that really caught my attention:
...The ability to deal with a neighbor like Iran, to cooperate with it, and perhaps to occasionally contain its impulsiveness, requires the knowledge of its demands, fears and appetites.
I write this in light of what I have heard from an Arab official who said: “We have to admit that, as a result of its aggressive policies, rising energy prices and the American adventure in Iraq, Iran has achieved a series of successes that have enabled it to gain control of certain assets in the Arab world.” When I asked him to clarify further, his response was: “It is not possible to build a stable Iraq without Iran’s approval and without taking its interests and a significant portion of its demands into consideration. It is not possible to elect a president in Lebanon without Tehran’s approval. It is not possible to resume dialogue between Fatah and Hamas without its approval either. Iran is present in Gaza through its allies. It is present in the Mediterranean through Syria and Hezbollah. It has, through all of this, the ability to influence the region’s two most prominent issues: the security of oil and the security of Israel.”
For a long time there's been a regular drumbeat of articles about the Bushie threats against Iran, so many of them in fact, and so many in a deliberately overwrought style that sometimes I wonder if the authors' aim isn't to encourage an attack using American forces on that much smaller country. Many charges have been leveled against Iran as justification, but the two main crimes of which they are supposed to be guilty are, first, a desire to develop nuclear arms, though the U.S.has been overloaded with them for over 60 years, and, second, the hand the Iranians have in the affairs of Iraq to the point of helping terrorists, though the terrorists had no foothold in Iraq till the Bush invasion of 2003 made that possible and an inviting prospect.
I don't expect the GWBush administration in its waning days to attack Iran. Instead I think all the rhetoric and the marshalling of forces above and around Iran is psychological warfare, trying to discourage Iran from developing nuclear arms and to encourage it to stay away from its next door neighbor. But that warfare is failing to much the same extent that a military attack would, except in a different way, as indicated especially by the second paragraph in the last excerpt that I included above.
Al-Hayat gave hardly any details of the "Coup" that he thinks the Iranians are engineering in the Middle East, except that it's of a purely political nature. Meanwhile the article, which isn't long, is well worth reading, as many others appear to be on that Downside World News.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 7:41 PM
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