In my previous
article, I was surprised by how much debate a passing remark I made about
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ill-fitting suit sparked. Quite a few
readers accused me of preferring style over substance. But that was missing the
point entirely.
My comments on his appearance and approach were meant to
illustrate how little Ahmadinejad understood and how badly he handled the
carefully choreographed, glitzy, black-and-white world of American politics and
media. Besides, being unrepentantly scruffy myself, I am hardly going to be
snobbish, as some accused me, about the appearance of others.
As I prefer to judge people by their substance, I have
great admiration for plenty of unconventional dressers, such as Mohandas Gandhi. Iran’s first
democratically elected leader, Mohammad
Mosaddeq, was apparently fond of wearing pink pyjamas and had the eccentric
habit of bursting into tears in parliament.
Whereas some posters claimed that Ahmadinejad’s modest
attire was a sign of his moral rectitude, I am not so naïve as to read much
into a politician’s wardrobe. To his credit, the Iranian president still lives
in the same modest Tehran apartment he occupied when he was the mayor of that
city, but his personal thrift does not necessarily mean he has his people's
best interests at heart.
In fact, the only clear message his dress sends out in the
Iranian context is that he is not a cleric, unlike most of Iran’s previous
post-revolution presidents. But that doesn’t make Ahmadinejad any more secular
or less of an ideologue. He is an old guard of the Iranian revolution and,
lacking his own popular support base, has been almost entirely dependent on the
largesse of the hardline clerics for his political survival.
The amount of admiration expressed for Ahmadinejad by
certain posters surprised me somewhat. A couple even went so far as to accuse
me of being a neocon apologist.
Such remarks are symptomatic of a certain worrying trend
in the Middle East. Disillusionment at the region’s internationally pliant but
domestically repressive regimes and anger at Anglo-American and Israeli
militarism have combined to ensure that leaders seen to be defying the west or
Israel, no matter how recklessly or for whatever selfish reasons, are elevated
to the level of cult heroes in the eyes of millions – usually outside their own
countries.
A reverse process is operating in many parts of the west,
particularly the United States, where the same defiant figures are portrayed as
irredeemably bad and irreducibly evil, while the unsightly corruption of
co-operative ruling elites is airbrushed out.
The current crop of cult heroes are Ahmadinejad, Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah and the late
Saddam Hussein, to name the
most prominent examples (a related phenomenon is the Israeli penchant for
electing leaders who shoot first and fail to ask questions later, such as Ariel Sharon).
But what people who subscribe to this narrative overlook
is that, just because the neo-cons are the ‘bad guys’, that does not make their
opponents the ‘good guys’. If Bush and his neo-con cronies are guilty of “manufacturing
consent”, these cult heroes have been culpable of attempting to manage
discontent and divert it into dissent beyond their own borders.
Nasrallah’s reckless and unnecessary provocation of an Israel
itching for a fight, and the unrestrained Israeli fury it unleashed, was
claimed by Hizbullah as a “divine victory”. The disturbing
images and descriptions of wholesale destruction my wife brought back
shortly after the 2006 war – as well as the cluster
submunitions that litter
south Lebanon – left me wondering what the Hizb would define as defeat.
Nasrallah may have been feted in the Arab world as a hero,
but it was millions of ordinary Lebanese who paid the price for his
recklessness and miscalculated gamble, cynically designed to revive Hizbullah’s
raison d'etre and waning popularity following the 2000 Israeli pullout from
south Lebanon, and resist increasingly vocal calls within Lebanon for the shia’a
militia to disarm or become part of the regular army.
Although Hizbullah’s social and charity arm has served
Lebanon's marginalised shia’a community well and is the de facto government of
southern Lebanon, its military wing has done an enormous disservice to Lebanon
as a whole – and more and more Lebanese are asking why that was.
On the other side of the border, the decision of Ehud Olmert (who, like
Ahmadinejad, is an unpopular ex-mayor) to go to war was a cynical attempt to
bolster his own slim popularity ratings with a show of military prowess which
backfired dramatically against him. Olmert’s recklessness has also set back
prospects of the eventual acceptance of Israel into the Middle Eastern fold and
future generations of Israelis will pay for his folly with their insecurity.
It is a testament to how badly the Bush-Blair duo’s
invasion of Iraq has turned out that millions of Iraqis now look back on Saddam
Hussein’s terrible years with a certain amount of fondness. In addition, the
late Iraqi dictator has a surprisingly large fan club
across the Arab world.
But to forgive him his many sins and eulogise his “faith
in Arab unity [and] his confrontation of the Arab world’s enemies” – as
Abdel-Bari Atwan did at the time of Hussein’s execution in the London-based
newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi – is turning the tragedy he inflicted on his
long-suffering people and the divisions he imposed on the region into farce.
In the case of Ahmadinejad, rather than take the tough
socio-economic reforms required to create jobs for the legions of unemployed
young people and provide the two-thirds of the population who are under the age
of 30 with the modern, more liberal lifestyle they yearn for, he has been grandstanding
on the international stage.
The nuclear powers are certainly hypocritical in their
stance towards Iran’s ambitions in this area. But even if Iran truly intends
its nuclear programme only for civilian purposes, the question still remains:
why does it need an expensive and wasteful scheme of this sort?
Wouldn’t the vast resources being pumped into this
programme be better spent boosting the country’s creaking oil-refining
capacity? It is a sad sign of the regime’s warped priorities that this OPEC
member has had to introduce an oil rationing programme under Ahmadinejad’s
watch because it is experiencing a shortage of refined petrol.
If the Iranian government is worried about the
consequences of post-oil Iran, wouldn’t it be a lot more sensible and less
controversial to invest in solar power, given the abundant supply of sun the
country enjoys? Concentrated solar power
(the cheap and more low-tech cousin of photovoltaic technology) not only has
the potential to produce all the electricity Iran could ever need, but also has
the added advantage that it can desalinate seawater and reclaim desert land to
boot.
It seems likely that the regime is engineering an
unnecessary crisis to appease the hardliners and silence critics as unpatriotic
at a time of national need. Of course, Ahmadinejad’s gamble is that Washington
is too embroiled in Iraq to attack Iran. But what if this calculated
brinkmanship triggers an unexpected chain reaction? If America decides to take
military action against Iran, it will be the Iranian people who will pay for
Ahmadinejad’s and Washington’s folly.
But why are recklessly defiant leaders the subject of such
admiration in the Middle East? I believe the reason for this is the inflexible
structure of the post-colonial order in this strategically important region.
The model that has prevailed since the early 20th century has
tolerated repressive client states and punished, marginalised or radicalised
moderate leaders who wanted to steer a more independent course.
A classic example is Mosaddeq. A secular, enlightened and
democratically elected leader, he wanted to retain more of Iran’s oil wealth to
fuel the country’s development. When the British refused to raise the royalties
Iran received from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) in
1951, Mossadeq went on to nationalise the Iranian oil industry.
This so infuriated the British that they persuaded the
Americans to join them in engineering a coup – Operation Boot to the British
and Operation Ajax to the Americans – to depose Mossadeq and reinstate the
shah, Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi, whose repressive rule paved the way to the 1979 revolution.
“The coup that ended Iran’s independence in 1953 would
provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979. If the shah was to be
deposed, there would be no flirtation with constitutional rights, no
half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries to restore western power in Iran,”
Robert Fisk writes in his monumental tome, The Great War for
Civilisation.
At around the same time as Mossadeq, the Free Officers
deposed the king and came to power in Egypt in 1952, probably with an eye cast
to the drama playing out in Iran. The popular and populist Gamal Abdel-Nasser had started
off as a great admirer of the west and wanted to build good ties with America
which had even given his coup clandestine support. For his entire term in
office, he was suspicious of communism.
However, his attempts to steer a non-aligned and
independent policy – along with India and Yugoslavia – angered Britain, France
and the United States. And, in the Cold War rhetoric of the time, if he wasn’t
with the west, he was against it. The Free Officers’
precarious position, their desire to modernise Egypt, as well as the allure of
power, led them to abandon their original plans to introduce democracy in Egypt
and step aside for free elections.
And Egypt, the rest of the Middle East, and the wider
world is suffering the long-term consequences of short-sighted western
interventionism and the radicalisation it sparks.
