Posts
In the Spring last year I gave a talk in Coral Gables on Iran, along with several other Middle East hands, that emphasized the Achmaemenian streak that lies deep in the Persian psyche. This communal memory harks back to the truely unique achievement that Cyrus and Darius initiated when they instituted a multi-national empire stretching from the Hindu Kush to Greece in the early 500s before Christ. For example, the US Postal Service adopted the famous motto of the Persian messengers that "through rain, sleet and snow, nothing keeps us from our appointed rounds" and every young Persian noble was taught "to ride a horse, to shoot the bow, and to speak the truth." Even after Alexander the Great's conquests, the Persians retained their national ethos, and against the Romans were the redoubtable Parthians, a race of warriors equal to the Roman phalanxes.
My talk in Coral Gables stressed that these earlier incarnations of the Persian achievement still live in the current Islamic Republic, which is more Persian than orthodox Muslim in many respects. One of the hallmarks of the current Mullah-led regime is a sort of paranoid grandiosity, which compelled a senior Ayatollah to remark, after Iran produced its first motor vehicle for consumer use, that Iran would soon surpass American car production. Now US production is being surpassed in some respects by Japanese quality and price, but Iran will never be a major competitor.
Other Iranian pronouncements have a similar ring. Long ago, I worked on a piece for the Middle East Journal with Shireen Hunter on Iran. We came to a conclusion that Iran suffers from a sort of schizophrenia---a bifurcated world view based on Iranian superiority on the one hand, and a worldly-wise diplomatic sagacity on the other. Strangely, the two worked along parallel tracks in a strange sort of syncopated fashion, a kind of two steps forward, then sideways, then a step back, then sideways again.
And remember the traditional lore that the Iranians invented the game of chess, with "Shah maat"---the king is dead---reverting to "checkmate" in English. There is a sort of feral cunning in their national mindset that knows when to move forward, or when to lie back in wait.
But the Shi'ite gene in the national religious psyche does bear intense watching, as the Daily Mail article indicates:
The UN gave him until August 31 to reply to its package of proposals designed to stop his nuclear programme. Significantly he chose yesterday to, in effect, reject the UN ultimatum because yesterday was a sacred day in the Islamic calendar.
It is the day on which the Prophet Mohammed made his miraculous night flight from Jerusalem to heaven and back on Buraq, the winged horse.
As one Iranian exile told me yesterday: 'The trouble with you secular people is that you don't realise how firmly Ahmadinejad believes - literally - in things like the winged horse. By choosing this date for his decision, he is telling his followers that he is going to obey his religious duty.
'And he believes that his religious duty is to create chaos and bloodshed in the "infidel" world, in order to hasten the return of the Mahdi - the Hidden Imam. So don't expect him to behave, in your eyes, "reasonably".'
So who is this Hidden Imam? He was a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed who, at the age of five, disappeared down a well around AD940. He will only return after a period of utter chaos and bloodshed, whereupon peace, justice and Islam will reign worldwide.
When I was in Tehran, Ahmadinejad was its mayor, and an Iranian friend with links to the city council told me: 'He's instructed the council to build a grand avenue to prepare for the Mahdi's return.
'I wouldn't mind that, because our roads are rotten - it's just that the motivation for this expensive avenue strikes me as completely crazy.'
On coming to power, in order to hasten the return of the Hidden Imam, the Iranian President allocated the equivalent of £10m for the building of a blue-tiled mosque at Jamkaran, south of the capital, where the five-year-old Hidden Imam was said to have disappeared down the well.
When the President drew up a list of his cabinet ministers, he's rumoured to have dropped their names down the well in order to benefit from its alleged divine connection.
Previous Iranian negotiators from the mullah-mafia elite were corrupt, sinuous and deceitful - but, when necessary, could be pragmatic. You could, to a certain extent, do business with them.
Many of these mullahs would not - despite their rhetoric - welcome the bloody destruction of the Western world, not least because they have stuffed their wealth into secret 'infidel' bank accounts overseas.
The Western-educated nephew of one such wealthy mullah said to me: 'Ahmadinejad's fruitcake theology scares us as much as it should scare you!'
Ahmedinejad may be more Catholic than the Pope, a sort of Mel Gibson in Islamic garb.
If he is a true believer, as Osama bin Laden on a certain level certainly is, the mullahocracy may be unable to restrain him---or rather the true believers among the mullahs may use him to reach the apocalyptic end-times the return of the Hidden Imam requires.
No need to point out to those not swamped by a River in Egypt what perils true believers can deliver.
The rest of the Daily Mail article should be read to show just what a quandry the Iranian nuclear program might impose on western powers.
Ever the supercilious nanny, The New York Times tut-tuts with quotes that intelligence analysts might become too "Manichaen" in their judgments on Iran. But Newt Gingrich in the article notes that Iran might actually buy a nuclear device from cash-strapped Kim Jung-Il and secrete it into proximity with Israel.
Israel for one is taking Ahmedinejad's frequent hostile statements seriously enough to acquire two new nuke-armed missie subs to ensure that any nuke attack by Iran will be paid back in full and then some.
I can remember the good old days when armchair strategists used to say that nuclear proliferation was going to be the most vexing foreign policy problem of the future.
The future is now!
No comments :
Post a Comment