Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting to think this time will be just like previous periods of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel’s position, changes in the regional and global balance of forces, and national election campaigns, all point to this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially graver risks than five or six years ago.

We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack, escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people, Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at the same time, top US military and intelligence officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not decided whether to even begin a building process.

In 2004 Israel’s prime minister denounced the international community for not doing enough to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the Israeli military was reported to ‘be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran’. In 2006 the US House Armed Services Committee issued a report drafted by one congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In 2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them that ‘all options’ remained on the table.

The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other military and intelligence officials that Iran actually did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear weapons.

The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten years, and that producing enough fissile material would be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved ‘more rapid and successful progress’ than it had so far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further, asserting ‘with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme … Tehran had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of mid-2007’. The NIE even admitted ‘we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons’. That made the dire threats against Iran sound pretty lame. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that Newsweek magazine described how, ‘in private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, the president all but disowned the document’.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA - the UN’s nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee report, calling some of its claims about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others ‘outrageous and dishonest’. And outside of the Bush White House, which was spearheading much of the hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks, hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream media went ballistic.

Then and now

All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: ‘Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.’ Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know ‘if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons’. The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation.

According to the Independent, ‘almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions.’ Former head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said ‘it is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF leadership do not support military action at this point.’

But despite all the military and intelligence experts, the threat of war still looms. Republican candidates pound the lecterns promising that ‘when I’m president…’ Iran will accept international inspectors - as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team inside Iran for many years now. We hear overheated rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to their people - as if Iran’s leaders had not actually issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that would be very difficult to reverse.

Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political. It doesn’t reflect actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons (however non-existent) and the urgency for attacking Iran (however illegal). And the danger, of course, is that this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them believe they cannot back down from their belligerent words.

Israel at the centre

One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns regarding oil and the expansion of US military power were first and primary. Even back then, Israel recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US policymakers and shape US policy - in dangerous ways. During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face, to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to pledge US military support for any Israeli action, however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US interests.

Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, ‘an existential threat’ to Israel. Even a theoretical future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of Israel, but would be a threat to Israel’s longstanding nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real threat motivating Israel’s attack-Iran-now campaign. Further, as long as top US political officials, from the White House to Congress, are competing to see who can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.

Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before. The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once counted on as allies are being challenged by the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt’s Mubarak was overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure at home, and the threats to Syria’s regime mean that Israel could face massive instability on its northern border - something Bashar al-Assad and his father largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.

Syria’s two struggles in one

The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in Syria, and unfortunately one may destroy the potential of the other. First was Syria’s home-grown popular uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and organically tied to the other risings of the Arab Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, had prospered under the regime, despite its political repression. As a result, unlike some other regional uprisings, Syria’s opposition was challenging a regime which still held some public support and legitimacy.

The regime’s drastic military assault on largely non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of military defectors, which of course meant waging their democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime remains strongest: military force. The government’s security forces killed thousands, injuring and arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against government forces increased, and the internal struggle has taken on more and more the character of a civil war.

The further complication in Syria, and its link to Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional and global struggle. Syria is Iran’s most significant partner in the Middle East, so key countries that support Israel’s anti-Iran mobilisation have turned against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining its closest ally. Perhaps because the Assad regimes have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself has not been the major public face in the regionalisation of the Syrian crisis. But clearly Saudi Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in the region. The Arab League, whose Syria decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran’s rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there - in the interest again of undermining Iran’s key ally far more than out of concern for the Syrian people.

Diminishing US power

Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US, which means that military power remains central. The nature of that military engagement is changing - away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, special forces, and growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and sea-based weapons.

Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only in desperation since it would prevent Iran from exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the region. Along with the possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US strategic moves played a large part of Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria.

In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts, particularly the most recent murder of a young scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than actually undermining Iran’s nuclear capacity. So far, Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on its threat of a military strike - despite the virtually unanimous opposition of its own military and intelligence leadership - there is little reason to imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US and Israel are not the only countries whose national leaders face looming contests; Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge political challenges as well.

The consequences of a strike against Iran would be grave - from attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets, to going after US forces in Iran’s neighbours Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the Pentagon’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait of Hormuz … and beyond. An attack by the US, a nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran’s hard-line leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater power – both at home and in the Arab countries, and the calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran. Indeed, the Arab Spring’s secular, citizenship-based mobilisations would likely lose further influence to Iran – threatening to turn that movement into something closer to an ‘Islamic Spring’.

Nuclear weapons-free zone

At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved through negotiations, not threats and force. Immediately, that means demanding that the White House engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained negotiations to end the current crisis - perhaps based on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must reverse its current position to allow the White House to use diplomacy - rather than continuing to pass laws that strip the executive branch of its ability to put the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the real conclusions of US intelligence and military officials, that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that drove the US to war in Iraq.

In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a multi-country move would insure Iran would never build a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises, each one more threatening than the last.

When Shariati raised the banner of ‘Red Shi’ism’, it was not intended to suggest that the revolution was Marxism cloaked in a Shia rhetoric, as a few in the west may assume. Shariati was contrasting the revolutionary ethos that he and his colleagues were projecting with that which he termed ‘Black Shi’ism’ – the Shi’ism of ‘mourning’, as he called it.

‘Black Shi’ism’ was the dead hand of static, hidebound passivity: the Shi’ism that had sold out the people for a comfortable place under the establishment sun. It was the Shi’ism of ‘quietism’ and passivity that advised the people to bear the travails and deprivations of today and to await the reward in Paradise tomorrow.

The Shi’ism of transformation

‘Red Shi’ism’ was the Shi’ism of transformation; it was dynamic, and it made the radical assertion that people’s day-to-day needs were not just a call upon the state – they were a prime responsibility of Islam. Imam Khomeini thus endorsed not just material welfare but good education and healthcare for all the people as a pre-eminent responsibility of Islam, rather than one appertaining to the state alone.

Shi’ism, in the course of the revolution, was being transformed. After years as a static force of waiting and enduring, it became again a dynamic movement for political, social and economic change – and social justice. It was a return to Shi’ism’s true roots, which had always been planted in the bloodstained soil of a search for justice, Shari’ati and his colleagues believed.

Thirty years on and still this aspect is misunderstood. The Iranian revolutionaries are widely seen, in the west, to have been a coalition of forces, in which leftists played a major part, that overthrew an autocratic Shah. And that was it – full stop.

While Shariati was no doubt aware that the ‘Red Shi’ism’ tag would appeal to leftist components in Iranian society, and help unite the coalition, the adjunct attack on ‘Black Shi’ism’ was far from irrelevant. A major, if not the essential, component of the revolution was a struggle of ‘religion versus religion’. It was not just a struggle against the US; it was not just a struggle against secularism – it was a struggle against the more dangerous foe of clerical conservativism that had emptied Shi’ism of its fundamental commitment to justice.

Indeed, according to Imam Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, ‘What made him [revered by the people as their] “Imam” and led to the historic and victorious Islamic movement, was the fact that he fought the backward, stupid, pretentious, reactionary clergy.’

It is, in a sense, a continuation of this same struggle that is taking place in Iran today in the wake of the recent presidential elections. As a leading Shia cleric said to me, ‘No revolution can stand still; either it goes forward, or [effectively] it goes backward.’ He was expressing his concerns that the forces of passivity, of ‘Black Shi’ism’, and of the closed, security mindset, were again imposing stasis.

What is confusing in present events is that some of the forces that are being accused of holding back the progress of the revolution represent some of its very pillars from 1979. Should, therefore, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani really be called a ‘reformist’, as much of the western press likes to label him? Do these labels make sense now, in the wake of the election? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s so-called ‘conservative’ platform was essentially the complaint that some of those clerical pillars of 1979 – the circles and family around former presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani – had pursued self-interest and self-enrichment at the expense of the people. Ahmadinejad seeks to break the hold some of these hugely wealthy clerics, through their charitable foundations, have on the controlling heights of the economy. Should he more appropriately, then, be labelled a ‘reformist’?

Ahmadinejad, in accusing Rafsanjani, reputedly one the wealthiest of Iranians, was effectively likening the ex-president to a Gamal Mubarak, the ‘businessman’ son of President Mubarak of Egypt. Not surprisingly, Rafsanjani, already bitter at his defeat at the previous election, became enraged at the implied threat to his position, and determined to neutralise it.

Western governments like to project their policies as supporting ‘reformists’. But what does this mean? Was Mir Hossein Mousavi a reformist while in office as prime minister? I believe that much of the confusion among some western policy-makers about what is happening in Iran stems from their fixation on seeing Iran through a cold war prism.

There is an influential current in the west that sees the Iranian revolution as little more than a hollow tyranny that is resented by a majority of Iranians, who still yearn for freedom. Basically, this is the ‘colour revolution’ narrative transposed from the cold war. It implies that given a solid poke from the west, the vacuous edifice of the Iranian state would implode, together with Islamist resistance more generally.

This optic is wrong. Iran is not facing a popular uprising by the people against the revolution. It is more complex than this simplistic template. There are divergent Iranian views, which cut across institutions and classes, about how to resolve the present stasis and recover the momentum of revolution, and there are forces of passivity and entrenched interest at play. There are going to be difficult decisions, but none of this is likely to pose a threat to the revolution itself. Those opposed to the revolution represent a small minority, even within the Mousavi camp, and are mostly drawn from one segment of Tehran. As events have shown, the opposition did not have legs: it did not broaden, it shrunk.

This cold war-esque misreading of events suggests that 50 years after the first Islamist revolutionary resistance movement was formed in Najaf in Iraq, the Islamist revolution is still barely understood in the west. Many remain bemused. Why is there an Islamist resistance at all? ‘Against what are Muslims in revolt?’ westerners ask.

Even now, there seems little clarity about the causes and thinking behind the Iranian revolution. Was it nothing more than a populist kick against power and the Shah’s heavy-handedness that was hijacked by the ayatollahs, as many assert? Do they really imagine that it was this, and this alone, that mobilised tens of millions and remains an inspiration for many movements today? Such explanations, rooted in western historicism, seem blindingly inadequate. In Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution, I argue that the revolution was essentially a grand ‘refusal’ to accept an understanding of the self or of the world about us dominated, for the past 300 years, by a particular western consciousness, and to evolve the Islamist alternative.

Islamism, in short, is not irrational – it is no whimsy of divine caprice. It is accessible to reasoned explanation, and it is grounded in a profound difference of view with contemporary understanding of the human being and with the Cartesian notions of procedural rationality and dualism.

Twin pillars of modernity

Western modernity has stood on two pillars. The first has been described by historians as the ‘great transformation’. It began in Europe in the 18th century, and was based on a moral philosophy that saw human welfare yoked to the efficient operation of markets. Humans, pursuing private desires and needs, would intersect with others, through the market mechanism, to maximise not just individual welfare, but community wellbeing too.

Closely associated with this was another idea, taken up by English Puritans, that had its roots deep in Anglo-Saxon history. It saw the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence also at work in politics to bring about another ‘ideal’ outcome. This view held that the jostling and hurly-burly of political contention between the Anglo-Saxon tribes in the earliest of their societies had given rise to a spontaneous harmony and political order. From this political ‘market’, English Puritans believed that the Anglo-Saxon institutions, representing the epitome of personal freedom and justice, had spontaneously arisen.

Such key ideas about politics and economics were transported to the Americas with the Pilgrim Fathers to become, for those such as Thomas Paine, the archetype for the US system of government. The concept of the nation-state, democracy and human rights all flowed from this Protestant current. These powerful ideas have dominated western thinking for more than 300 years. By the 1920s, they had brought Islam to the brink: it was in crisis – and holding on by its fingernails.

Of course the ‘great transformation’ did not come about either naturally or spontaneously: The wish to create efficient markets had required massive state intervention and the subordination of other important social, communal and political objectives to this overriding end. Making markets ‘free’ was, and is, an artefact of state power. Historians describe it as a utopian project that would be incompatible with any contemporary form of democracy. The transformation had brought stresses that took 19th-century Europe to the brink of revolution – and beyond.

In the century leading up to Islam’s crisis in the 1920s, the transformation had been exported to the Muslim world. There was a rush by the west to create ethnically unitary nation states in the former western provinces of the Ottoman Empire. A powerful nation state with a monopoly of violence was seen as the only structure with enough instrumental power to force through the social changes required to impose market liberalisation on Muslim societies.

As in Europe earlier, the impact of transformation was truly traumatic. Approximately five million European Muslims were driven from their homes between 1821 and 1922 – as the west created nation-states in former Ottoman provinces.

The Young Turk determination to emulate Europe’s secular liberal-market modernisation in Turkey came at terrible cost. One million Armenians died, 250,000 Assyrians perished, and one million Greek Orthodox Anatolians were expelled. Kurdish identity was suppressed, and finally Islam was demonised and suppressed by Kemal Ataturk. Islamic institutions were closed and the 1,400-year-old caliphate was abolished.

Islam was in crisis. Disorientated and demoralised, under siege from enforced secularism in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere, and with Marxism enticing away its younger members, it began a journey of discovery. It sought a solution to its problems by finding a new ‘self’.

Islamists returned to the Qur’an in search of the insights that would help them to find the solutions to their problems. The Qur’an is no blueprint for politics or a state; in fact it takes a jaundiced view of theological speculation. It is, as it states frequently, nothing new. The Qur’an is intended as a ‘reminder’ of old truths, already known to us all. One of which is that for humans to live together successfully they must practice compassion, justice and equity towards each other. This insight lies at the root of political Islam.

Complete inversion

It is a principle that represents a complete inversion of the ‘great transformation’. Instead of the pre-eminence of the market, to which other social and community objectives are subordinated, the making of a society based on compassion, equity and justice becomes the overriding objective – to which other objectives, including markets, are subordinated. It is not, therefore, a form of social democracy. Social democracy accepts the principle of market efficiency but attempts to mitigate its effects on those who are its victims. Islamism, by contrast, seeks to invert the market paradigm completely.

It is revolutionary in another aspect. Instead of the individual being the organisational principle around which politics, economics and society is shaped, the western paradigm is again inverted. It is the collective welfare of the community in terms of such principles – rather than the individual – that becomes the litmus of political achievement.

In short, Islamists are re-opening an old debate, one that is at the root of both western and Islamic philosophy. It was originally posed by Plato when he questioned the ends and purpose of politics. Is politics no more than a race by politicians as to who can claim to satisfy human appetites, desires and wants more fully, or is there ‘telos’, a ‘higher purpose’, to politics – such as justice, for example?

Some westerners are troubled that after two centuries of settled opinion, their vision is being questioned anew. One US conservative commented to me recently that with Descartes, the west had discovered ‘objective truth’ through science and technology. It had made ‘us’ rich and powerful and Muslims could not bear that, he believed. They knew that ultimately they would be forced to acquiesce to western ‘truth’. But what is happening is very far from this simplistic vision.

Islamists see all too clearly the limitations to the Cartesian process of thinking: its internalisation of the moral order within the ‘self’; its displacement of any wider external ‘order’, with Cartesian ‘reason’ emerging as the power to ‘make’ rational ‘order’ according to correct procedural standards; and the notion of the vantage point of ‘I think’ somehow placing the mind and ‘self’ outside the world about us – detaching us from both things and feelings.

Descartes separated the material world of ‘real’ things – which could be touched, tasted, felt or viewed, and were to be explained and classified through scientific rationality – from the world of ‘ideas’ associated with fantasy, superstition, magic and illusion. There was ‘reality’ and, separate to it, the make-believe and illusionary figments of human thinking unrestrained by reality. This narrow duality formed the stepping stone to modern notions of the western ‘self’ and individualism in its many variants.

This duality also gave the west its concept of the ‘rational order’ – a moral order – that is ‘made’ by humans through the exercise of internal human will and action. Until this time, most humans held to a ‘rational’ and moral order to the world about us that was external to ourselves. This order was to be ‘discerned’ from a contemplation of the signs in nature and within us.

The Islamist revolution, therefore, is much more than politics. It is an attempt to shape a new consciousness – to escape from, and challenge, the most far-reaching pre-suppositions of our time. It draws on the intellectual tradition of Islam to offer a radically different understanding of the human being, and to escape from the hegemony and rigidity of Cartesian literalism. It is a journey of recovery of insights from that ‘other history of Being’, as the French philosopher Henri Corbin termed it, that is far from over.

Free to think again

It has many shortcomings and setbacks – as recent events in Iran have shown – but its intellectual insights offer Muslims (and westerners too) the potential to step beyond the shortcomings of western material consciousness. This is what excites and energises. A Hezbullah leader, when asked what the Iranian revolution had signified for him, replied unhesitatingly that Muslims felt themselves free to think once again.

It is not possible, therefore, to make sense of the Iranian or wider Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too. It is the omission of this latter understanding that helps explain repeated western misreadings of Iran, its revolution and other events in the region.

Hezbullah is using techniques that stand outside of the usual repertoire of western politics in order to transform Muslims. It is not because Hezbullah provides better community services that its leader, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, is revered throughout the Muslim world.

Hezbullah is using myth, archetypal narrative and symbolism to explode the Cartesian severance between subject and object, and between objective reality, on the one hand, and fantasy, make-believe and superstition on the other. Hezbullah uses these means to re-ignite creative imagination. The opening of this intermediary layer in Cartesian dualism allows people to begin imagining themselves in a new way; and by imagining themselves differently, to begin to act differently. As they begin to imagine themes differently and act differently, the way they see the world about them changes also.

Of course there is another side to Islamism. Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed, from the outset, a struggle between a narrow, literalist and intolerant interpretation in opposition to the intellectual tradition grounded in philosophy, reasoning and in transforming knowledge. It is the latter that informs movements such as Hezbullah and Hamas.

Perversely, for the past 50 years, it is to the literalists, often called Salafist, that the west has looked to circumscribe ‘threats to its interests’ in the Middle East in a repetition of cold war containment thinking. Western commercial ties and its hold over the region seemed threatened by the upsurge of revolutionary spirit among Islamists.

The US and Europe turned to a more docile and apolitical variant of political Islam, which they believed would be more compliant. But in so using the literalist puritan orientation, the west has misunderstood the mechanism by which some Salafist movements have migrated through schism and dissidence to become the dogmatic, hate-filled and often violent movements that really do threaten westerners, as well as their fellow Muslims.

This transformation of a narrow literalism into a more dangerous form occurs because the west has tried to use a particular puritan current – Saudi-orientated Salafism – for its political ends. Salafists of this type – that is, those who follow a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and certain sayings attributed to the Prophet, and who try to practice an exact imitation of the conduct of the early Muslim believers – are for the most part, peaceful, pious and reformist Islamists who stand aloof from politics and from national and local elections. They are properly ‘apolitical’.

But the US and Britain have primarily used this current to try to contain an Islamist resistance that has unsettled its protégés and frightened Israel.

A coincidence of interest over oil and military matters has given rise to a 50-year Saudi-western alliance; but also – more importantly – to one of the two flawed premises underlying the moderate/extremist template of today. By this way of thinking, if apolitical, docile Islam is the moderate element to be supported, then Hamas and Hezballah by definition become the ‘extremists’ to be opposed and ultimately eliminated.

Wrong side of the divide

The west is situated on the wrong side of the divide – backing narrow literalism and dogma versus intellect. It is perhaps not surprising that a literalist and dogmatic west has contributed to literalism in Islam also. But by holding on to this flawed perception that it is supporting docility and ‘moderation’ against ‘extremism’, paradoxically the west has left the Middle East a less stable, more dangerous and violent place.

Traditionally, those on the left in Europe have assumed a cautious, if not jaundiced view of the Iranian revolution, retaining a suspicion of all religiously-inspired movements. Michel Foucault, the celebrated French philosopher, came close to censure and ejection from intellectual life after writing a series of articles from Tehran describing the sense of freedom generated among Iranians inspired by the revolution that caused outrage on the left. To a certain extent, his reputation never fully recovered.

The 1979 revolution was an event that has never conformed easily to western notions of what ‘a revolution’ should be. I have tried to show in this short article that the Iranian revolution should not be dismissed as some discontinuity of history, an aberration to be explained away rather than to be understood.

The wider Islamist revolution faces a huge struggle against a burgeoning, western-backed, narrow, intolerant, reductive, anti-heterodox Islam that is pumped up with petro-dollars. But this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that political Islam of the Hezbullah, Hamas and Iranian variety is founded on one central principle – the struggle for justice, placing equity, compassion and social justice as its overriding objectives, to which other objectives should be subordinated.

Ali Shariati was clear that the ‘prophetic function’ of the Shia religion ‘acted as a vehicle of protest against accepted values and present policies of the dominant society’. He might well have added the rider, ‘whoever they may be’. Given that he saw the ‘true’ function of religion as a struggle against ‘religion misused in support of the status quo’, there can be little doubt that Shariati, were he alive today, would be reminding some of those pillars of ’79 of those original ideals for which they all risked life and liberty.

Alastair Crooke is the author of Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution (Pluto Press, 2009)

To begin with, he reduces the 1979 revolution to a religious uprising whose demands and aspirations, he claims, were to establish an ‘Islamic alternative’ with an ‘understanding of the self or the world’ different from ‘a particular western consciousness’ imposed on them for 300 years. One has to assume that he is not aware of the fact – and hence admonishes those who are – that the revolution was essentially against the Shah’s dictatorship and US dominance, and for political freedoms, democracy and social justice. He further reduces the religious inspiration of the revolution to the thoughts of Ali Shariati.

We read that ‘it is 30 years now since the Iranian revolution, and it is approximately 30 years since Ali Shariati … coined the term “Red Shi’ism” to describe the ideas propelling the upheaval that was to mobilise and energise tens of millions in Iran.’ Some factual errors merit correction here.

First, Shariati, who died two years before the revolution, was one among several major Shi’i voices which participated in the anti-Shah movement. They included Seyyed Mahmood Taleghani, Mehdi Bazargan, Morteza Motahari, not to mention Ruhollah Khomeini. While to some outsiders, all these clerical and lay Shi’i figures may seem similar, they were in fact very different and each had their own separate and significant followings. Second, Shariati’s concept of Red Shi’ism was coined much earlier before the time of the revolution.

Crooke grieves that Red Shi’ism is still ‘misunderstood’ and says ‘the Iranian revolutionaries are widely seen, in the west, to have been a coalition of forces, in which the leftists played a major part.’ This is an established historical fact, only denied in the formal history of the Islamic regime. The revolution was indeed an informal ‘coalition of forces’. This included the secular left and liberal, religious and non-religious intellectual women and men, artists, poets, lawyers, students, workers and civil servants, and other elements of the new and traditional middle classes.

As an example, the workers’ showras (councils) that were formed in private and public institutions prior to the Shah’s downfall, crippling the country’s economy by shutting down the national oil company, major industrial plants, factories, educational institutions and ministries, were predominantly formed by left and liberal individuals. In the Union of the Councils of the largest public conglomerate of the country (IDRO, the Industrial Development and Renovation Organisation of Iran, with over 110 major state industries), of the 16 co-founders from different industrial units, none, including the present author, was religious. In fact, we had to actively solicit and recruit a few religious people to join the founding body.

Crooke’s portrayal of Shariati’s relations with the left is also problematic. We read, ‘Shariati was no doubt aware that the “Red Shi’ism” tag would appeal to leftist components in Iranian society, and help unite the coalition.’ This is puzzling, for a few lines above Crooke had taken to task those who misunderstood the revolution as consisting of a ‘coalition of forces’, yet here he offers that Shariati wanted to ‘unite the [non-existent] coalition’.

The main problem, however, is that one of the concerns for Shariati and other Muslim reformers at the time (unlike the new genre of Muslim reformers discussed below) was to counter the political influence of the socialist left among youth and students. It is true that Shariati’s anti-clericalism and anti-Shah stances had gained the respect of the left, but Shariati was no friend of the left and never wanted to ‘unite the coalition’.

Backward and reactionary

Crooke also has serious misconceptions about Khomeini. Linking Khomeini to Shariati’s Red Shi’ism, he writes, ‘Khomeini thus endorsed not just the material welfare, but good education and healthcare for all the people, as a pre-eminent responsibility of Islam.’ In fact, Khomeini’s focus was cultural ‘purification’ of society; and his famous saying, ‘economy is for donkey[s]‘ (eghtessad mal-e khar-e), points to the fact that material welfare was never his priority. Neither was education on his agenda (especially in the case of women).

Crooke tries to substantiate his claims about Khomeini by quoting none other than the Ayatollah’s son, Ahmad, who stated that the reason why his father became an ‘Imam’ and popular with the masses was that ‘he fought the backward, stupid, pretentious, reactionary clergy’. The fact, however, is that Khomeini himself was the embodiment of the backward and reactionary clergy.

It is with this flawed understanding of the Iranian revolution that Crooke ventures into his analysis of the recent electoral coup and we learn of his support for Ahmadinejad. In the same manner that he failed to recognise any significant roles played by non-religious or non-Islamist forces during the 1979 revolution, he contends that the recent upheavals reflect clashes between the ‘red’ and the ‘black’ Shia.

He bemoans the fact that some of the pillars of the revolution, such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, are ‘holding back the progress of the revolution’ in pursuit of ‘self-interest and self-enrichment’. Granted that Rafsanjani and many other clerics opposing Ahmadinejad are corrupt. But so are many of the clerical and non-clerical supporters of Ahmadinejad. On corruption, lies and false qualifications, both sides can compete very effectively.

Claiming that ‘Ahmadinejad seeks to break the hold of some of the hugely wealthy clerics’ does not add up unless Crooke can provide at least some instances when Ahmadinejad actually dealt with such corruptions during his presidency.

Crooke boldly declares that ‘Iran is not facing a popular uprising … and those opposed to the revolution represent a small minority.’ He conveniently concludes that events have shown that ‘the opposition did not have legs: it did not broaden, it shrunk.’ An interesting choice of analogies given the way in which the current regime broke the legs, limbs, backs and heads of the peaceful demonstrators on the street and in prisons.

The world saw millions of Iranians frustrated with 30 years of this ‘Islamic alternative’, waging nonviolent demonstrations. The Islamic Guards and Basijis under the direct order of the Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad ruthlessly suppressed the opposition. They killed, detained and gang-raped young women and men. Hundreds were brutally tortured, mutilated and murdered in the name of the ‘revolution’s progress’. The demonstrations shrunk, but not the opposition, which has actually expanded, particularly after the disgusting news of systematic rape and beating to death of detainees in different prisons.

The real rationalists

Moving on to discuss Islam and Islamists in general, Crooke argues that Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed both literalist and rationalist traditions. He is absolutely right. But the analysis becomes absurd and tragically funny when to him the champions of the rationalist trends in Iran are the likes of Khomeini, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

Leaving aside the obvious flaws in this argument, one can hardly accept as ‘rational’ some of the bizarre actions of the present state under Ahmadinejad. This includes dropping a copy of some government policies and programmes into a well in Chamkaran, where he believes the 12th Shia Imam is in occultation, for his approval. Or his claim of having seen a halo around his head while speaking at the UN general assembly.

Can we imagine putting this sort of ‘rationalism’ in the category of great Islamic rationalists such as Al-Kindi, Razi, Farabi, Biruni, Avicenna, Averros and countless others? A very minimal knowledge of the Islamic traditions of thought would show that Khomeini and Ahmadinejad, and their counterparts in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, are the continuation of literalist, anti-rationalist traditions. An Islamic rationalist trend does exist in present day Iran through the likes of Mohammad Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Reza Alijani and others, who live under constant threat and harassment by Crooke’s heroes.

These rationalists do not seek a ‘radically different understanding of the human being’. They do not reject modernity. Unlike their predecessors, they believe in the separation of religion and state, are against the establishment of an Islamic state, and thus cannot be identified as ‘Islamist’ anymore. We can see the same trend in other Muslim-majority countries, from Turkey, Sudan, and North Africa to Indonesia.

Crooke is right in criticising the west for its one-sided support of Israel and siding with the Salafis of Saudi Arabia. But Khomeinists, Hezbullah and Hamas are not the alternative solution to the problems of the Middle East and the so-called Muslim world.

On the contrary, the future of Muslim-majority countries is in the hands of the educated secular men and women, both religious and non-religious citizens, who want to live and love like their western counterparts. They don’t want an ‘Islamic alternative’. What they want is a democratic society, where everyone is free to believe in any religion or ideology, free to choose their dress, what to eat and drink, and who to love. These are human needs, rights and desires.

Saeed Rahnema is professor of political science at York University, Toronto

Ali Shariati, a mediocre writer-thinker influenced by Frantz Fanon’s ideas on post-colonialism, was never considered the ideologue of the 1979 revolution. In 1970s’ Iran, leftist ideas were much more popular than Shariati’s complaints about the ‘invasion’ of western ideas and lifestyles. Shariati’s main concern was not social and economic injustices and inequalities but rather the development of modern trends and the influence of western lifestyles and culture. He was more enraged by the breakdown of traditional social mores and the growth of women’s participation in economic and social life. His vision was not forward looking but very backward, traditionalist and misogynist.

The 1979 revolution began as a wave of protests by different sections of the society against the dictatorship, for more freedom, greater economic equality and socio-economic justice. These protests soon developed into a mass movement against the regime.

In the midst of the cold war, the fear of an increasingly popular leftist movement in Iran brought the western states around the table in a summit held in Guadeloupe to change the course of events in Iran. In a short time, to our shock and bewilderment, the Islamists, who were marginalised in the initial phase of the protests, took over the leadership of the anti-monarchist movement. Khomeini, who was no more than an exiled clergyman, hardly known by the majority of the population, became the leader of the mass movement as a result of careful planning by western powers. Overnight, he became an international media celebrity. A ‘leader’ was born. A revolution for freedom, equality and justice was aborted. This was the beginning of 30 years of bloodshed, oppression, misogyny, gender apartheid, stoning, mutilation and a most heinous political system.

Khomeini, contrary to Crooke’s assumption, did not, in any meaningful practical sense, endorse either ‘the material welfare’ or ‘good education and healthcare for all the people’. It seems that Crooke has accepted the demagogical populist rhetoric of Khomeini and the like as actual facts. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor has become much wider under the Islamic regime; real wages have fallen significantly. According to official estimates, around half of the population lives under the poverty line.

The Islamic Republic has faced opposition to its rule from the outset. The first mass protest was organised by women against the forced veiling ordered by Khomeini on 8 March 1979. This protest led to a week of rallies, meetings and sit-ins in defence of women’s rights, which resulted in a temporary retreat by the regime. The regime was only able to begin its forced veiling and gender apartheid after the brutal clampdown on all opposition groups. In June 1981, it organised a coup d’état-like assault in which thousands were arrested, brutally tortured and summarily executed. It is estimated that there were in the region of 150,000 political executions during the 1980s.

The women’s question has haunted the Islamic regime from the start. The Islamic Republic has been in continuous conflict with the women’s liberation movement, which has grown considerably in the past decade in opposition to the misogyny and gender apartheid of the Islamists. Despite brutal assaults on this movement, the regime has not succeeded in silencing it.

The current mass unrest is proof of people’s hostility to the repressive ideology of the Islamists in Iran. Just as the coming to power of an Islamic regime in 1979 created a renaissance of Islamism as an ambitious political movement, its overthrow will help marginalise political Islam. The left should be clear which side it is on.

Azar Majedi is a writer and chair of the Organisation for Women’s Liberation – Iran. www.womensliberation.net

It is worth emphasising the properly political essence of this movement and its potential for self-transcendence, moving beyond its present demands. This politicisation of large masses may be difficult to observe from the outside, particularly due to 30 years of isolation and media misrepresentation of Iran (including the tendency to dwell on ‘security’ matters critical to the western states, such as the nuclear issue, terrorism and so on). That is why any examination of the current situation needs to be set in the context of the recent history of radical politics in Iran.

Many Iranians are recalling the 1979 revolution and the 1997 reform movement. Many of the protesters’ slogans are new versions of those adopted in 1979. The routes of demonstrations are the same as those against the shah. But this does not mean that people are imitating the 1979 revolution; there are many new possibilities and creativities, many formal and thematic inventions.

Calling the regime’s bluff

The expression ‘people reloaded’ tries to capture this sense of repetition without mere imitation. For 30 years, the regime has claimed that freedom and, more recently, justice have been realised, praising the Iranian people for their political commitment and courage. Now people are taking these claims literally, calling the regime’s bluff. People are trying to redeem the lost hopes and aspirations of the revolution, as they did once before by electing Khatami in 1997. But this time, we are much more resolute and creative.

As for the 1997 reform movement and its aftermath, the crushing of the student protest in 1999, the affinities become even more explicit. Khatami, along with Mir Hossein Mousavi, is one of the most significant leaders and supporters of the protest. It is as if people are trying to redeem the 2nd of Khordad (May 23, 1997), to revive the unfinished hopes and dreams of those days. But this time, the protest is by no means limited to students and intellectuals. Although Khatami in 1997 was elected with 20 million votes from the most varied sections of the nation, the movement was characterised by the political and cultural demands of the middle-class, of students and educated people. But, apart from this, what is the true significance of the 2nd of Khordad Front, the pro-Khatami reform movement, for politics in Iran?

On the 2nd of Khordad, for the first time since the revolution, we encountered a dichotomy between the republican state and the totalitarian system of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is known as Nezam (System), which is based on the principle of Velayat-e-Faghih, the supreme divine authority of high-ranked mullahs. This duality was intensified as a result of the fact that the leader of the opposition, Khatami, was at the same time the head of the state. It was the only occasion when this duality, which is, in a sense, one between the development of productive forces and cultural, political backwardness, between secular democracy and religious fanaticism, became explicit. Before and after that period, the state and Nezam have been basically in accordance, although the system used the state as a tool for bureaucratic management of its internal and external affairs, and this on many occasions led to a disruption of day-to-day functioning of the state as the chief organ of socio-economic development.

One of the reasons, if not the main reason, why elections in Iran are of such importance for democratic movements, despite attempts at boycotting them, lies precisely in the significance of this duality. In other words, elections have been the only occasions when it has been possible for the people to challenge this archaic and theocratic system, particularly as regards their social life and economic welfare. Since the second world war, the Iranian state has acted simultaneously as an instrument of plundering – at the service of the power elite – and the main agent of development. This explains why the state has been the main object of popular movements. But the state has always somehow managed to escape popular control, thanks to its economic independence based on oil revenue.

Since the revolution, the process of building a modern bourgeois state has always been sacrificed to the requirements of the Nezam. This, at times, has led to a conflict between capital (both the Iranian private sector and international capital) and state. As long as the state remains dependent on the Nezam (as the advocate of regression and anti-modernism), the state/capital cannot function as the means of socio-economic development – a process that has its own discontents, aptly and righteously exposed by the Marxist tradition.

Fighting on two fronts

For this reason, the progressive and socialist opposition in Iran is faced with the unprecedented, hard task of fighting on two fronts: against religious fanaticism and the authoritarian factions in a semi-democratic government, as well as against Iran’s integration into global capitalism (as a backward, raw material producing country). In this sense, the Iranian intelligentsia is very similar to that of 19th century Russia and Germany. We are a handful of schizophrenics who are both for and against progress, development, capitalism, state management and so on. In other words, for us, the Faustian problematic is formulated in a typically Hamletian way.

However, we should not forget that despite all these complexities, the key fruit of the 1979 revolution was politics itself – that is, the process of politicisation of people as distinct from both Nezam and any form of state-capital-nation building. For all these reasons, any radical politics in Iran must entail a dialectical relationship with the state. Due to the aforementioned dualities, our politics cannot bypass the state in an anarchistic way. This is as a result of both the state’s role in socio-economic development and the political necessity of strengthening the civil society.
We are neither dealing with a pure politics a la radical French philosopher Alain Badiou, nor with a classical Marxist politics, limited to class struggles. Nor are we dealing with the liberal-democratic politics of human rights – which was, by the way, the dominant discourse of opposition in Iran before Mousavi. Our radical politics includes all these elements, but is not reducible to any one of them. To use Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben’s terminology, it is a politics of ‘people against People’ – that is, voiceless, suppressed people against ‘People’ as officially constructed by the state. The current movement materialises, in many respects, this very politics.

Ahmadinejad and the left

The question that has confused the western (left) intelligentsia, and caused the most varied misunderstandings regarding Iran, is whether Ahmadinejad is a leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-privatisation, anti-globalisation figure. A common answer is positive. That is why certain misguided western leftists tend to regard the current mass movement in support of Mousavi and against Ahmadinejad as the struggle of neoliberalism against anti-imperialism, of privatisation and liberal democracy against the enemies of US global hegemony.

As regards the other confused camp, the western, more or less, Islamophobic liberals, who are inclined to identify Ahmadinejad with Al-Qaeda and refer to Mousavi, because of his Islamic-Republican career in the 1980s, as another version of Islamic, anti-democratic ideology, one could say that they too are caught up in an illusion based on easy Euro-centrist generalisations and lack of familiarity with the Iranian historical context. We should thus answer the simple question: what is actually at stake?

Apart from the French revolutionary triad of liberty, equality, fraternity, which is common to all modern emancipatory politics, one could maintain that the main bone of contention in this struggle is precisely politics itself, its life and survival. Our government is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now the republican moment, which has always been downgraded by the conservatives, is being annihilated. It is precisely through this very outlet that any popular politics, from social movements of dissent and class politics to the defence of human rights, might survive.

Another common analysis, heard from both supporters and opponents of the mass protests in Iran, is that this is a youth movement, at its best similar to the 1968 student protests in the west. The young generation in Iran, the analysis goes, armed with the internet, socialised by social networking sites, tired of Islamic ideology, has awakened, claiming the right to live its own way of life, and so on. According to this approach, which is evoked by a number of journalists, it is only the middle-class intellectuals, students, feminists and other educated people in large cities who are rallying on the streets, communicating with each other thanks to the internet and mobile phones.

The people versus the People

What is striking is that the state discourse in Iran widely promotes this very analysis. The ruling elite, using a populist rhetoric, tends to single out a certain section of the nation and call it the People. The state television, Seda-va-Sima, is the main place where this People is represented, indeed constructed, mostly through the usual populist tactic of one nation versus the evil external enemy as the cause of all trouble. It presents a unified, pure, integrated image of the People, all devoting themselves to Nezam, all law-abiding, religious, and so on. This image of the People is daily imposed on the masses and inscribed onto the body politic.

Against this formally constructed People, with the state as its formal face, there has come out another people, a subaltern, muted people, claiming its own place, its own part in the political scene. The June 2009 election was a decisive opportunity for this people to assert itself through the figure of Mousavi, who from the beginning insisted on people’s dignity as a key political right.

But why him? Why not, say, Karroubi, the other reformist candidate? Has Mousvai, the present leader of the mass movement, appeared on the scene in a purely contingent way? Has he by mere chance, by force of circumstances, as it were, turned into the leading figure, reform-freedom-democracy incarnate? The answer is negative.

To elucidate this, we have to draw attention to the tradition from which he has emerged and to which he has repeatedly referred during his electoral campaign. As noted previously, this tradition is rooted in the 1979 revolution and has been revived in the 2th of Khordad movement. In contrast, Karroubi’s ‘politics’ was based on a subjectless process in which different identity groups would present their demands to the almighty state and act as their passive, divided, depoliticised supporters.

In fact, Karroubi’s campaign, with its appeal to the western media, using the word ‘change’ in English, and profiting from celebrity figures, was the one that could be called a western liberal human-rights-loving, even pro-capitalist movement. The fact that millions transcended their differing identities and immediate interests and joined a typically universal militant politics by risking their lives in defence of Mousavi and their own dignity should be enough to cast out all doubts or misguided pseudo-leftist dogmas.

The most striking consequence of the revival of politics in Iran is a reconfiguration of everything and everyone. Under the midday sun of politics a minimal shadow separates everyone from him/herself, from his/her cultural, economic, and social identity. Persons and factions that were hitherto classified according to their lifestyles and statuses, and who were considered politically indifferent or even hostile to politics per se, came together to choose to join the movement led by Mousavi.

From their point of view, everything has become crystal clear and the border separating true and false is no longer a matter of scrutiny. In this political high noon in Iran, their choices are for them as certain as 2+2=4. To one side of this political divide belong the universal values of liberty, equality and dignity of citizenship, while all the personal and factional idiosyncrasies remain on the other side.

Morad Farhadpour and Omid Mehrgan are translators and philosophers based in Tehran

US sabre-rattling against Iran is worrying. A military attack must be resisted. However, opposition to Washington’s war-mongering and neo-imperial designs is no reason for socialists, greens and other progressives to go soft on Tehran.

Iran is an Islamo-fascist state – a clerical form of fascism based on a confluence of Islamic fundamentalism and police state methods. It differs, of course, from traditional European-style fascism, being rooted in religious dogma and autocracy. This makes it no less barbaric. Iran under the ayatollahs has a history of repression that is even bloodier than Franco’s clerical fascist regime in Spain. Sadly, it merits far less outrage by the left.

Tehran’s tyrannical religious state embodies many (though not all) the characteristics of classical fascism: a substantially corporatist political and economic system maintained by a highly centralised repressive state apparatus. This repression includes bans on non-Islamist political parties and free trade unions, and a regime of unfair trials, detention without charge, torture, executions, media censorship, gender apartheid, violent suppression of peaceful protests and strikes, and the persecution of left-wingers, students, feminists, journalists, gay people and religious and ethnic minorities. Even lawyers and human rights defenders – are imprisoned and tortured.

The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also pursuing a racist, neo-colonial policy against Iran’s minority nationalities, such as the Arabs (who are abused even more harshly than the Israelis abuse the Palestinians), Kurds and Baluchs.

It used to be axiomatic that left and progressive movements fought fascism, wherever it is found and whatever its form. We do not appease or collude. Well, not until recently. Nowadays, there is a whole section of the left that has abandoned the freedom struggle in Iran. It goes to extraordinary lengths to downplay the excesses of the tyrants in Tehran.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament invited the Iranian ambassador as a guest speaker to its 2005 annual conference. It preferred to host the representative of an Islamo-fascist regime, rather than the leaders of Iran’s left-wing opposition and anti-nuclear peace movement. Indeed, CND members who objected to the feting of the ambassador of a dictatorship were forcibly ejected from the conference.

A similar fate befell Iranian refugees who joined the Stop the War Coalition marches. When they backed the call ‘Don’t Attack Iran’ they were welcomed, but as soon as they also condemned Tehran’s depotism they were denounced by some of the left and shoved out the of the demonstration by thuggish StWC stewards.

No democracy
We are told by these muscular leftists that Iran is a democracy and that President Ahmadinejad is elected. Nonsense. But even if this were true, so what? Tony Blair was elected but that did not make the Iraq war right. Israel is a democracy but this is no justification for its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and its occupation of Palestine.

The truth is that Iran is no democracy. Liberal, secular, green, socialist and national minority political parties are outlawed. All candidates for election are vetted by a clerical council and those who dissent from the mullah’s orthodoxy are barred from standing for public office. Moreover, the conservative media favours establishment candidates and denies, or restricts, coverage of reformists and progressive ideas.

Human rights abuses in Iran are often dismissed by sections of the anti-imperialist left as ‘exaggerated’ or ‘neo con fiction’, despite incontrovertible evidence from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and from Iran’s underground left-wing, student and trade union movements. This shocking denialism is wholly divorced from reality and is a sordid betrayal of the Iranian people’s struggle for liberty and justice.

Some left-wingers argue that since the US is the main upholder of the unjust global economic system we must therefore support those who oppose the US. Because Tehran is against the US, we should support, or at least not undermine, the Iranian regime.

The left groups and activists who hold this view are the mirror image of the neo cons. Their stance on Iran is determined by an international political agenda and power play, not by the interests and rights of the Iranian people. They have allowed opposition to US imperialism to trump social justice and human rights in Iran.

For nearly 40 years I have campaigned in solidarity with the Iranian people, supporting their struggle against dictatorship – first against the western-backed Shah and then, since 1979, against the ayatollahs.

The Shah was bad enough, but the Islamists who overthrew him are far worse. They have out-butchered the Shah many times over; executing or assassinating an estimated 100,000 Iranians in the last 30 years. Many of those murdered – usually after gruesome torture – were left-wingers, trade unionists and other progressive Iranians.

The traditional socialist maxim used to be: fight the tyrants, support their victims; solidarity with oppressed people everywhere. This was the response of the entire left to the Shah’s brutal misrule. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iranian freedom struggle.

But in 1979, defying all its historic values and ideals, large chunks of the Iranian and international left backed the Islamist revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. Their reasoning was that by supporting an anti-US movement this would help weaken US global hegemony. Many of us warned at the time that this opportunistic alliance with fundamentalist Islam would spell disaster for the Iranian left and progressive movements.

Sure enough, beginning a couple of years after the Islamists seized power, tens of thousands of leftists, workers, secularists, students and women’s rights campaigners were arrested, tortured and executed.

Despite this bloody history of tyranny, some left-wingers and anti-imperialists still shy away from campaigning against the Tehran regime.

The police-state oppression in Iran is some of the worst in the world. According to Human Rights Watch, in March 2008 an Iranian parliament member, Hossein Ali Shahryari, confirmed that 700 people were awaiting execution in Sistan and Baluchistan province, which is only one of Iran’s 30 provinces. Many of those on death row are Baluch political prisoners. This staggering number of death sentences is evidence of the intense, violent repression that is taking place under the leadership of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The regime’s terror is wide-ranging. Student leader Meisam Lofti was executed in 2007 on false charges of being a gang member.

Members of minority faiths, like the Baha\’is and, sometimes, Sunni Muslims, suffer severe harassment.

Truly barbaric
The regime’s crackdown includes the enforcement of harsh morality laws. In 2004, in the city of Neka, a 16-year-old girl, Atefah Rajabi Sahaaleh, who had been raped and sexually abused by men for many years, was convicted of \’crimes against chastity\’. She was hanged by the method of slow, painful strangulation, hoisted by a crane in a public square. This strangulation technique, sanctioned by the Iranian President, is deliberately designed to prolong the suffering of the victim. As you can see here, the hanged person is left dangling and writhing for several minutes before they eventually asphyxiate and die. Truly barbaric.

On 5 December 2007, Makvan Mouloodzadeh, a 21-year-old Iranian man, was hanged in Kermanshah Central Prison, after an unfair trial. A member of Iran’s persecuted Kurdish minority, he was executed on charges of raping other boys when he was 13. In other words, he committed these alleged acts when he was a child. According to Iranian law, a boy under 15 is a minor and cannot be executed.

At Makvan’s mockery of a trial, which was condemned by Human Rights Watch, the alleged rape victims retracted their previous statements, saying they had made their allegations under duress. Makvan pleaded not guilty, telling the court that his confession was made during torture.

He was hanged anyway, without a shred of credible evidence that he had even had sex with the boys, let alone raped them. The lies, defamation and homophobia of the debauched Iranian legal system was exposed when hundreds of villagers attended Makvan\’s funeral. People don’t mourn rapists.

Labour activists are also victimised. Mansour Osanloo, leader of Tehran’s bus workers syndicate, remains in jail – together with other trade unionists. He was sentenced to five years jail in July 2007 for his peaceful, lawful defence of worker’s rights.

Oppressing his own people is not enough for Ahmadinejad. His regime also exports terror abroad. It supports the Hezbollah fundamentalists in Lebanon, who, like Israel, indiscriminately attack civilian areas. In addition, many of the death squads in Iraq are trained, armed and funded by Tehran. These include ex-Badr Brigade members who, during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, lived and trained across the border in south-east Iran. Nowadays, they assassinate political, sexual and religious dissidents; usually gunning them down in their home, workplace or street. No trial. No evidence. Summary execution, aided by Ahmadinejad’s government.

Regime change from within
The case for regime change in Iran is overwhelming, but it must come from within – by and for the Iranian people themselves – not as a result of US neo-imperial diktat.

Many Iranians hope for a non-violent Czech-style ‘people power’ democratic revolution, involving mass strikes and street protests by socialists, liberals, secularists, democrats, women, students, trade unionists, religious dissenters and minority nationalities. Others believe that the nascent insurrections by Arabs, Baluchs, Azeris and Kurds will burgeon into full-scale revolutionary war that will encircle and topple the Tehran regime.

Progress towards securing a democratic, progressive Iranian government is one of best ways to thwart a possible military strike by Washington. Such a government would pose no threat to anyone. This would make it much harder for the neo cons to persuade the American public and military to go to war. They would no longer have the excuse that Iran is a terroristic, fundamentalist, anti-semitic dictatorship that is striving to develop nuclear weapons and which poses a serious threat to international peace and security.

If Iran ceased to be a fanatical religious tyranny, the case for war would be seriously weakened. The pro-war Republicans and Democrats in the US would lose the battle for hearts and minds. Most public opinion would desert them. Anti-war US politicians and activists would be empowered and enhanced.

In contrast, a US military attack on Iran would strengthen the position of the hardliners in Tehran; allowing President Ahmadinejad to play the nationalist card and portray himself as a heroic war leader. It would also give him an excuse to further crack down on dissent, using the pretext of safeguarding national security and defending the country against US imperialism. This would set back the Iranian struggle for democracy and human rights.

Moreover, a US attack on Muslim Iran would increase the sense of grievance felt by Muslims worldwide; radicalising Muslim youth, fanning the flames of fundamentalism, increasing support for Islamist parties and resulting in thousands of new recruits to the ranks of Jihadis and suicide bombers.

Tragically, the leadership of the UK and US anti-war movements have been sleep-walking into making the same mistakes over Iran as they made over Iraq. They are silent about the regime’s despotism and oppression. Mirroring the neo con indifference to human rights abuses in Iran, they refuse to show solidarity with the Iranian peoples’ struggle for secularism, democracy, social justice, human rights and self-determination for national minorities. There is nothing remotely left-wing about this is sad and cruel betrayal. Put bluntly: it is collusion with tyranny.

More information about Peter Tatchell’s campaigns and to make a donation: www.petertatchell.net

‘This programme is an insult to the 100,000 Iranian people who have
been murdered since the Islamic fundamentalists seized power in 1979,’
he said.

Mr Tatchell was commenting on the decision by Channel Four Television
to broadcast the Iranian President delivering The Alternative Christmas Message today, Christmas Day. It will be transmitted after the Queen delivers her traditional Christmas Message to the nation.

Mr Tatchell is calling on Channel Four to:

‘Pull the plug on this criminal despot, who ranks with Robert Mugabe,
Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and the Burmese military junta as one of the
world’s most bloody despots.

Channel Four executives would not give Ahmadinejad this propaganda
coup if it was their partners or children who were being tortured in
Evin prison, Tehran.

This Christmas, thousands of Iranian families are grief-stricken.
Their loved ones have been jailed, tortured and executed. Instead of
inviting one of them deliver The Alternative Christmas Message,
Channel Four is giving airtime to the man responsible for their loved
ones’ suffering,’ he said.

According to Channel Four’s advance text of President Ahmadinejad’s
broadcast, his speech includes the following statement:

‘Jesus, the Son of Mary, is the standard bearer of justice, of love
for our fellow human beings, of the fight against tyranny,
discrimination and injustice …’

‘I pray for the New Year to be a year of happiness, prosperity, peace
and brotherhood for humanity.’

‘Ahmadinejad’s apparently reasonable words are pure propaganda. His
actions are devoid of love, justice, humanity and brotherhood. They
involve the brutal repression of his own people,’ commented Mr
Tatchell.

Trade union, student and women’s rights activists are imprisoned and
tortured. His government is pursuing a racist, ethnic cleansing policy
against Iran’s minority nationalities, such as the Arabs, Kurds and
Baluchs.

According to Human Rights Watch, in March this year an Iranian
parliament member, Hossein Ali Shahryari, confirmed that 700 people
were awaiting execution in Sistan and Baluchistan province, which is
only one of Iran’s many provinces. Many of those on death row are
Baluch political prisoners. This staggering number of death sentences
is evidence of the intense, savage repression that is taking place
under the leadership of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In 2004, in the city of Neka, a 16 year old girl, [Atefah Rajabi
Sahaaleh,->http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5217424.stm] who had been raped and sexually abused by men for many
years, was convicted of ‘crimes against chastity.’ She was hanged by
the method of slow, painful strangulation, hoisted by a crane in a
public square.

‘Ahmadinejad’s regime exports terrorism. Many of the death squads in
Iraq are trained, armed and funded by Tehran. They murder political
and religious dissidents,’ said Mr Tatchell.

Peter Tatchell is the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford East
www.greenoxford.com/peter and www.petertatchell.net

Signs that covert action is under way are shown in reports that Ahwaz Arab, a US funded group, recently shot down an Iranian fighter plane (although the Iranians claim that there was a technical problem with the aircraft), and according to Iranian television, one man from the US-supported Party for Free Life in Kurdistan was killed and one captured by Iranian forces in eastern Azerbaijan province.

So far Iran has responded in a rather sophisticated and mature manner, but how long that will last depends on US intentions. The danger is another Tonkin Gulf episode – when in 1964 the US crafted an incident claiming that Vietnamese ships had fired on a US gunboat as a pretext for escalation. There is every indication that the US would like to do that again to justify an attack on Iran.

Crucially we have also seen Israel carrying out military exercises in readiness for action. Iran’s July missile tests were a response to the Israeli war games that took place the previous month. Israel would need advanced clearance for an attack on Iran, because it would require permission to work in Iraqi airspace. The Israeli air force can hit Iran, but not directly from Israel. Their flying fuel tankers would need to use Iraqi airspace, as would their search and rescue helicopters.

Key figures

As to why the US has gone down this path, it is important to recognise that the Bush regime is not crazy or stupid, but key figures within it are driven by ideology rather than real political assessments of conditions on the ground. And there is a very serious divide within the regime, most explicitly between military brass and civilian ideologues. Even at the Pentagon there has been a shift: you no longer have former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a very compliant set of generals. The current defence secretary Robert Gates is a far more cautious mainstream conservative – not personally a neo-con. And while the opposition within the military has been weakened, among other things by the forced resignation of Admiral Fallon, the highest-ranking military opponent to a strike on Iran, it is still known to exist. The recent statement made by Admiral Mullen, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, was the strongest explicit repudiation of military force from anyone in the Bush administration, and he said it in the context that Israel does not have a green light to strike. This suggests there is a good chance that an attack can be prevented.

A lot of the high-ranking neo-cons are now gone. Paul Wolfowitz [former deputy defence secretary and a major architect of Bush's Iraq policy] went off to the World Bank. Douglas Feith [who resigned as defence undersecretary in August 2005] is at Georgetown. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby [a former assistant to Bush and chief of staff to US vice president Dick Cheney] is a convicted felon. They are no longer in a position to make this happen. The realists like Condoleeza Rice and the current defence secretary Robert Gates seem to have more influence than they did last time around. Unfortunately there is still no one who can even approach Cheney’s rank.

There is some wider Republican opposition to an attack on Iran. The effect on oil prices could hurt Republicans at the election. But neither Bush nor Cheney is running for office again, so they are not accountable to the Republican Party.

Strategically Iran and Iraq have always been the two most important countries in the region for the US because they have the power to be independent regional powers. They have oil; a sufficient size in terms of population and land; and they have water. There is no question that US has always wanted to control both of them. Now that they control one, Iran has remained the primary target, and that’s what we’re seeing playing out.

The international negotiations on the nuclear issue lend the US the credibility of bringing the world along with them. Even those who are pushing for some kind of military strike are very reluctant to move overtly alone. They need to be able to claim that they are operating in the context of the group of six [the six countries trying to coax Iran into negotiation: Britain, France, Germany, America, Russia and China]. How much that is actually a determinant of whether the US would go to war is a different question. But they need to go through the motions to make it appear as though they have given every shot at keeping the coalition intact before making that decision.

Iran in Iraq

At the same time, the current focus has shifted to Iran’s activities within Iraq. This began about a year-and-a-half ago as the legitimacy of the claims about Iran’s nuclear facilities began to fail – as more people began to understand that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons programme, the claim began to lose its ability to win supporters for an anti-Iran crusade. So the US changed its focus towards this claim that Iran was responsible for killing American troops in Iraq.

In fact it is very clear that Iran has every reason to be committed to creating stability in Iraq. The last thing it wants is for instability to spill over into its own borders. This was shown by the fighting in February in Basra, where the Iraqi military launched a major offensive backed up by US troops, and then Iran moved in to orchestrate the ceasefire between Muqtadar al-Sadr’s forces and the Iraqi government.

Over and over again Iran is able to play this mediator role. There is no question that Iran has major interests in Iraq. They share a border for hundreds of miles; they do $2 billion a year in trade; and there is a long history of ties with the Shia political forces and some of the Sunnis in Iraq. Iran may be providing military support for various militias, perhaps even including the Iraqi military, which is functioning as one more militia controlled by the prime minister of Iraq.

Consequences

So a strike on Iran would have very serious consequences. Some members of the US Congress have expressed relief that no one is talking about an invasion, ‘just’ a surgical strike. But while it is true that the US military is too stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan to mount a full invasion, there is no reason to think that Iran would not view a surgical strike on its nuclear facilities or on the Republican Guard (which is being viewed as ‘terrorist’) as an act of war. It would give Iran the legal right to self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter.

Iran has threatened that if it were attacked it would strike Israel and close the Straits of Hormuz (the main shipping route for oil from the Persian Gulf). It has the capacity for a wide range of attacks, and the US is very vulnerable in that region. There are 150,000 American troops and 100,000 or so mercenaries in Iraq. Iran could essentially invade and take over southern Iraq; it could attack the Green Zone (in Baghdad) with missiles; it could attack US troop concentrations in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the 5th fleet in Bahrain. Iran could do all that before breakfast, so the options are wide open.

Of course, it may not respond that way – it could go to the International Court of Justice, much like the Nicaraguans did in the 1980s when the US mined the harbours of Nicaragua.

The US could act differently too. If elected, Obama probably wouldn’t strike Iran in the absence of an actual Iranian military attack on US forces or Israel; McCain probably would. But that doesn’t mean that if Bush launched an attack Obama wouldn’t continue it. Obama has moved faster than anyone thought he would to the centre. In his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (the pro-Israel lobby) he went shockingly far in his warnings to Iran and promises to Israel. There will be concern within Obama’s campaign that he must not antagonise his core supporters over Iran, where he has distinguished himself powerfully from Bush and McCain by saying he would talk first.

And while Barack Obama has not said that he would take the military option off the table, his response to the Iranian missile testing was to reiterate the need for immediate unconditional negotiations.

Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC, and the Transnational Institute. Her forthcoming books include Ending the Iraq War: a primer (Arris, £4.99) and Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: a primer (Arris, £4.99). Transcript: Oscar Reyes, Alex Nunns

Iran’s oil was swiftly recognised as the energy source of a new political and industrial era for Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Winston Churchill is quoted as having said that British battleships floated with Iranian oil to victory in the first world war. In 1944, three years after the British army invaded Iran and exiled the shah to Africa, he insisted that the British government ought to secure a ‘golden share’, or a right of veto, in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), to make sure that the Iranians understood that the AIOC was an extension of the British government operating in Iran.

The nationalisation of the oil in 1951 by Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, was met with more than just hostility by both British and Americans.While the British boycotted Iranian oil temporarily, the CIA engineered an overnight coup d’etat on 19 August 1953, ousting Prime Minister Mosaddeq in favour of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It was not only Iran’s oil that they wanted – they also wanted Iran in order to secure an assured strategic military base and presence in the region for their new imperial ambitions. This strategic importance is made clear in the current distribution of US bases in the region, at a time when the US is not permitted to colonise Iran.

The 1979 Islamic revolution shattered US domination.The occupation of its embassy in Tehran by a group of militant students who took 53 political staff hostage left the Americans profoundly irritated and led to a campaign of demonisation of Iran and all things Iranian. Within a short period Saddam Hussein was appointed the US’s undisputed agent and bully-in-chief in the region. He was armed and encouraged to impose a devastating eight-year war on Iran from 1980 to 1988.

Every Iranian will tell you how the US and British governments silently and shamelessly watched this catastrophic aggression unravel, pointing the finger at Saddam’s 5,000 British and US-made tanks, 4,000 armoured vehicles, 7,000 artillery and 500-plus aircraft, which sent more than one million Iranians to their graves and displaced, economically damaged, and chemically contaminated millions more.The memories of this war are fresh in the hearts, minds and daily lives of Iranians.

Economic and psychological captives

The US imposed broad economic sanctions against trade with Iran in 1979, further freezing over $8 billion of Iranian assets. Since the early 1980s, Washington has sought to isolate Tehran, and has in recent years accused the Iranian government of developing nuclear weapons and sponsoring terrorism.

Iran, however, asserts that it has voluntarily revealed its uranium enrichment programme at Natanz since February 2003 and has invited the UN’s nuclear monitoring body, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) specifically, to carry out inspections. Further assertions have been made by Iran repeatedly that it has not breached its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that its intentions are peaceful, producing low level enriched uranium for the nuclear fuel industry.

Since then the Bush government has made military threats and imposed bilateral and unilateral sanctions against Iran, all justified with a demonising and damning rhetoric. While US-based oil companies and their sub-contractors have been blocked from doing business with Iran, wider sanctions under UN resolution 1747 were passed on 24 March, targeting the transactions of Iran’s state-owned bank, its arms exports and the activities of its Revolutionary Guards.

Like any modern country, Iran needs new resources to sustain development and reconstruction in the post Iraq-Iran war era. Maintaining economic stability and confidence is crucial.The sanctions add up to economic and psychological warfare against the Iranian nation.

Sanctions will create more inflation in the foreign currency market, ultimately damaging the infrastructure of the trade.

They undermine business confidence, damaging the economy and harming the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Sanctions addressed at the Iranian government will destroy the lives and livelihoods of the Iranian people, school children, students and families. The Iranian government is being bullied by the west for acquiring the nuclear knowledge that has been made readily available to several of Iran’s neighbours. The Iranian people are being punished by widening sanctions, and by an unprecedented presence of the US and British war machines in the Persian Gulf pointing their guns at the Iranian nation and, in the process, at any socio-political movement from within Iran towards a more comprehensive form of democracy and civil society.

The future is female

Ask Iranians about the prospects of democracy and civil society in Iran, and they will tell you about the daily struggle they endure to build it. They will also tell you that the seeds of a democratic civil society must be planted by Iranians themselves, free from the prescriptive forms imported by US and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A new, critical and reflective generation of Iranians has emerged since 1979. It must be nurtured and be given space to grow. Despite the tough socio-economic conditions, the ongoing singular and local interpretations of Islam, and the routine shifts of power and manoeuvring between the Supreme Leader and his appointed Council, the hardliners, the reformists and even oppositionist factions within the regime, this new generation is very much alive and kicking.

It is as visible as it is expressive in its social behaviour. It possesses a particular voice, a particular and profound desire for social justice, and a particular sense of struggle for political reform. It is engaged in a quest for a more progressive civil society, projecting diverse views and behaviours, in which individuals might be full and active participants regardless of their gender, form of religious beliefs and cultural heritage.

According to the 2004-2005 national statistics published by the education ministry, there are over 15 million Iranians in primary and secondary schools.There are three million students in universities, many entering the urban space from remote towns and villages for the first time and creating intra-national cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism.

Significantly, 65 per cent of this student body are female. Apart from seeking to educate themselves, these young women subtly and persistently signify ideological difference through altering dress codes, and examine traditional and familial expectations by pursuing all kinds of interaction with their male counterparts in the cities and towns. Like the older generation of women in urban Iran, they seek to become economic partners and hold and develop careers in the civil service, higher education, medicine and health care, law, journalism, and politics, with all the limitations that the latter offers.

If desire, curiosity and a sense of struggle are among the markers of a youth movement, then young women in Iran specifically embody that movement. This is particularly significant in discussions about the development of a civil society. Can the west really afford to continue sanctions against Iran and take up military action against a people who are alert and have ideas and require stability and peace to take those ideas forward from within?

Is it really prepared to squeeze and isolate Iran further, and in doing so destroy its people’s aspirations and development, simply because it needs the oil?

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