Iran and the Outside World

CounterPunch, June 7, 2013

2013 Candidates

The presidential election in Iran, due to take place on June 14, has ignited a fresh round of debate in the West on the country’s internal politics when Syria and Iran’s nuclear program dominate the Middle East agenda. They are all part of the same big picture and motives of competing powers in the region. The Guardian Council’s ruling to exclude the 78-year-old former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, apparently because of his age, has led to questions being raised about the future direction of Iran, once Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s successor is elected.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, Peter Oborne and David Morrison opined that Rafsanjani’s absence from the presidential race was taken as a sign that Iran was “about to turn its back on nuclear negotiations.” The verdict already is that it is too gloomy. Eight presidential candidates have been debating the issues on television as the campaign proceeds. In the run up to the June 14 vote and thereafter, more will be said in Western capitals, not much positive, about Iran and its politics in isolation. In a sense, it is a continuation of familiar history of what many Iranians see as interference and humiliation–history that strengthens those in power and weakens genuine dissent.

Iran has been an object of desire in the strategic rivalry called the Great Game between the British and Russian imperial powers in Central Asia from the early nineteenth century. The twentieth century had been a traumatic journey for the Iranian people, who endured foreign intervention, manipulation, and revolutions. These transformational events were, to a large degree, imposed on the country. Mules and camels were the normal means of transport at the beginning of the twentieth century. A hundred years on, Iran is officially a theocracy; Tehran city has heavy motor traffic; Iranian scientists are engaged in stem cell research with a vast potential in the treatment of serious illnesses—the kind of research which America’s right-wing lobbies oppose; and Iran has a nuclear research program, a major cause of brinkmanship with Washington.

In a hundred years Iran has transitioned from a country without an effective bureaucracy, communication network, or standing army to a major power in Central and West Asia—a country of vast energy resources. At the beginning of the twentieth century, local tribal leaders, notables, clergy, and powerful merchants ran the country in the name of the shah of the reigning Qajar family in Tehran. Internal conflict in a weak state brought insolvency and foreign intervention by the Russian and British imperial powers and the United States. Each intervention was followed by further upheaval that shaped Iran into an Islamic republic vehemently opposed to the West by the end of the century.

Like many ruling dynasties of the time, the Qajar family suffered decline in the early part of the twentieth century. Qajar rulers had been on the throne for more than a hundred years, not so much because of bureaucratic institutions and coercion, but thanks to systematic manipulation of social divisions. The jurisdiction of the Qajar state was really limited to Tehran and surrounding areas. But wearing grand titles, including that of Supreme Arbiter, the shah was content with clan and tribal chiefs and powerful notables exercising real authority in the outer reaches of his kingdom. Some of them married into the royal family to cement their relationship with the ruling family.

Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar

Facing an economic crisis brought by bankruptcy and high inflation in 1904–5, the Qajar ruler, Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, threatened a steep rise in land taxes and turned to Britain and Russia for loans on top of the £4 million Iran had already borrowed. The imperial powers forced him to hand over control of Iranian customs to Belgian administrators, who promised that repaying the outstanding loans to Britain and Russia would be a priority.

The crisis triggered what became Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. Speakers at sermons in the capital mourned the loss of their nation’s sovereignty. One protested that the country had been “reduced to such a condition that our neighbors of the north and south already believe us to be their property and divide our country between themselves.” Widespread protests shook the monarchy, and attempts to suppress them were unsuccessful. On August 5, 1906, Muzaffar al-Din Shah finally signed a royal proclamation to hold national elections for a constituent assembly.

In October an elected assembly convened and drew up a constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power; an elected parliament, or Majlis, with wide powers to represent the people; and a government with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis. The shah signed the constitution on December 30, 1906. He died five days later. The Supplementary Fundamental Laws approved in 1907 provided limited freedom of press, speech, and association and security of life and property.

The attempt to replace Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s despotic rule with a written code of laws debated and approved by an elected assembly was short-lived. The 1907 Anglo-Russian pact signed by the two imperial powers, who were fearful of Germany, divided up much of Iran. Isfahan in the north went to Russia, and areas in the southwest, including Baluchistan, Kerman, and Sistan, went to Britain.

Furthermore, the empires in the north and the south agreed to keep the Belgian customs officials to collect taxes and use the revenues to recover the loans. The rest of Iran was declared a “neutral zone,” leaving the constitutionalists to deal with the shah. As a keen observer was to write later, the pact “taught Iranians a hard lesson in realpolitik—that however predatory the two neighbors were, they were even more dangerous when they put aside their rivalries.” Conflict broke out between the shah and the constitutionalists, spreading far afield, and instability continued until the middle of the century.

Fifteen years of internal conflict and intervention by Britain and Russia, soon to become the Soviet Union after the fall of the czarist regime in 1917, left Iran in a fragmented state in 1920. The Qajar shah had been forced to grant Britain access to Iranian oil fields, including in the north, which was under Russian influence. In return, Britain would offer weapons, ammunition, and military advisers to the Iranian ruler. The Anglo-Iranian agreement, issued by the British foreign secretary Earl Curzon, turned Iran into a virtual British protectorate and was widely condemned, most notably by France and the United States.

General Reza Khan

Soon the Red Army threatened to march on Tehran. Amid all the turmoil, General Reza Khan, commander of a Russian-trained Cossack brigade in Qazvin to the west, marched into Tehran. Reza Khan declared martial law, took control of the capital, and told the Qajar ruler, Ahmad Shah Qajar, that he had come to save him from the Bolsheviks. In reality, though, the Qajar dynasty was coming to an end. Reza Khan was the new shah of Iran by 1925, and he declared his own Pahlavi dynasty a year later. In the end, the Qajar dynasty fell with a whimper.

The Iranian state’s systematic humiliation and consequent weakness had made it progressively susceptible to external forces. A lack of infrastructure and instruments of enforcement at the state’s disposal were responsible for two distinct phenomena in the country. The Qajar dynasty collapsed because it had little to give its subjects and few means of control in Iranian territory. A state without means is a state without authority. Its fate is in the hands of those who move in to fill the void created by the state’s inability. The Qajar dynasty lasted more than a century (1794–1925), but in the end it was a puppet of whichever external power was ascendant.

Social upheaval of such order frequently leads to radicalization. The 1906 Constitutional Revolution had raised hopes that the Iranian parliament would assert itself and be a counter to manipulations of the Qajar regime and imperial powers. In the end, the Qajar dynasty and the constitutionalists both failed, and a new order emerged under the leadership of Reza Shah, who in February 1921 staged a coup that made him Iran’s effective ruler. Four years later he proclaimed the Pahlavi dynasty. The last king, Ahmad Shah Qajar, went into exile in Europe.

His successor, an autocrat, was clear about what was wrong with the country. He abrogated the Anglo-Iranian agreement and signed a pact with the Soviet Union. The British retreated. The Soviets were persuaded to withdraw to Gilan Province in northwestern Iran and cancel most of the czarist debt and claims. However, the new Communist rulers in the Kremlin gave Iran a guarantee that they would intervene if a third power ever invaded the country and posed a threat to the Soviet Union.

Reza Shah consolidated his rule through state building in two areas: the bureaucracy and the armed forces. By bolstering the bureaucracy he meant to create a hierarchy of authority from the center down to the local level. Government officials would implement laws, gather information, and perform the vital function of tax collection. Reza Shah’s attention to the armed forces reinforced the nation’s primitive defenses. It was the beginning of a trend that would turn Iran into a major power in the Persian Gulf in the next half century.

At this stage, Reza Shah appointed an American, Arthur Millspaugh, to the post of treasurer-general.  Educated at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins, where he also lectured, Millspaugh had worked at the drafting office at the State Department and then as a trade adviser. Reza Shah’s decision to hand over the responsibility of reorganizing the economy to an American technocrat looked like a master stroke. It reduced British and Soviet interference in Iran’s affairs. Moreover, Millspaugh and Reza Shah worked well together for some time, and the economy improved dramatically.

Using the shah’s personal authority and the coercive power of Iran’s expanding military, Millspaugh started collecting taxes from those who had been avoiding paying. He made the Majlis raise the tax rates every time more revenues were needed for expansion of the military or bureaucracy. He appointed full-time civil servants to run departments. All this strengthened the authority of the central government under Reza Shah—a remarkable turnaround in a country squeezed between two major imperial powers of the day. Millspaugh stayed in Iran for five years, until 1927. Many Iranians saw him as the man who could liberate them from British and Russian domination and the United States as a friend of their country.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

The advent of the United States as the third significant power in the region did not prevent Britain and the Soviet Union intervening again in Iran, most notably in the early 1940s and a decade thereafter. In 1941 Reza Shah Pahlavi was seen as sympathetic to Germany’s Nazi regime in World War II. The British and the Soviets forced him to abdicate and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, became shah. The Allied forces promptly occupied Iran and transported armaments to the USSR to repel the Nazi advances.

Mohammad Mosaddeq

More than ten years later, the American CIA and the British MI6 staged the 1953 coup in which the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, was overthrown. General Fazlollah Zahedi, who had collaborated with the Western intelligence services, became prime minster. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had fled into exile, was reinstated on the throne. The 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected nationalist government in an American-inspired coup plot sank deep in the Iranian psyche. Those events determined the nation’s state of mind, finally led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and explain the Iranians’ attitude to the outside world.

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The Roots of the Middle East Conflict

Foreign Policy Journal

During the research for my latest book, Imperial Designs: War, Humiliation and the Making of History (Potomac Books – the University of Nebraska Press, 2013), I came across something the Czech writer Milan Kundera said in his novel Immortality about shame. He was twice expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave his homeland to go to live in France seven years after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, then stripped of his Czech citizenship. “The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours,” he said, “but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

Another work which influenced my writing was the 1978 literary masterpiece Orientalism of the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said. In his book, Said examined the set of beliefs behind the Western ideology known as Orientalism, that is, the tendency of colonial administrators, philosophers, and writers to treat the East as alien, exotic, and inferior. For several centuries, this ideology emphasized the difference between the European and Asiatic parts of the world, as if each were a distinct and single entity. Said described Orientalism as “fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient.”

Imperial Designs is the last volume of my trilogy. The book follows Breeding Ground, a study of Afghanistan from the 1978 Communist coup to 2011; and Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan that evaluates George W. Bush’s presidency in terms of the “war on terror,” focusing on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and their aftermath.

I had suggested in the two previous books that among the factors contributing to the events of September 11, 2001, was a sense of humiliation felt in the Muslim world, especially in the Middle East. It made me think further about war and humiliation in international politics, and how war, humiliation and manipulation have historically affected the behavior of the humiliated and the humiliator. My focus in Imperial Designs was the Greater Middle East. For oil, geopolitics and imperial rivalries between Britain, Russia and the United States had been among my interests. The history of Arabs and Persians is rich and interesting. They have both fought numerous wars over the centuries. The history of external actors’ meddling in the region, by the Ottomans, then the British, the Russians and the Americans is intriguing. The consequences have been profound and far-reaching.

In Imperial Designs, I examine the Ottoman Empire’s collapse around the First World War in the early twentieth century; the discovery of oil in the region and the division of lands between Britain and France; the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War and its meaning for Palestinians and Arabs; and further conflicts. In Iran, the early democracy movement; the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in an Anglo-American intelligence plot; and subsequent events over a quarter century until the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1979 revolution. Examination of events such as these is relevant in any study of the role of humiliation and the shaping of the contemporary Middle East.

I demonstrate that the continuing upheaval in the region has its origins in the events around the First World War a century ago, when Ottoman rule was replaced by British and French colonial rule using the instrument of “Mandate.” I also discuss how conflict between tribes and wars with external invaders have determined the thinking and behavior of local peoples through history. Vast sandy deserts, a free spirit and a warrior instinct are fundamental elements of Middle Eastern cultures. Repeatedly, wars put those instincts on display and reinforced them.

Through history, where desert communities were sparsely located, interaction was less between them, but more within members of each community or tribe. The emphasis was on cohesion within each tribe. Personal possessions within the general populous were fewer, and lifestyle was frugal for most members. Wealth tended to accumulate with chiefs. Honor, its dispossession causing humiliation, and promises betrayed became strong drivers of human behavior. Defending the honor of a person, a clan, tribe or nation–and regaining it after humiliation–became of utmost importance. Past injustices and unsettled disputes persisted, and more added to the long list as time went by.

Power and humiliation are the cause and effect of human behavior. In Imperial Designs, I also discuss interventions by Russia, Britain, and the United States in Iran and the consequent radicalization of the Iranian population. My observation is that, throughout the region, the greater the scale of mobilization by opposing sides locked in conflict, the deeper, more long-term reaction it generates. The greater the defeat, the more intense and long-lasting the determination in the vanquished to extract the price for humiliation. It is this pattern of events through history that explains the making of the Middle East.

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The Syrian Riddle

CounterPunch, FPJ, Palestine Chronicle

Recent remarks by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss investigator of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, have changed the nature of debate on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. Momentum had been building up for months against Bashar al-Assad’s government, first on the basis of accusations that such weapons were in use, followed by heavy hints by anti-Assad groups and Western politicians that the Damascus regime was guilty of chemical warfare against its opponents and civilians. There is no doubt about the unspeakable brutality committed by both sides in the conflict, but chemical warfare, if proven, would mean escalation to another level involving serious war crimes.

Carla Del Ponte, Switzerland’s former attorney general and prosecutor of the UN tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, is no pushover. She is now a member of the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, appointed under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Contrary to subsequent insinuations that she did not know what she was talking about, Del Ponte had chosen her words carefully. She had said that witness testimony made it appear that “some chemical weapons were used, in particular nerve gas.” And it appeared to have been used by the “opponents, by the rebels.” There is “no indication at all that the Syria government … used chemical weapons.” She said she was a “little bit stupefied” that the first indications were of the use of nerve gas by the opponents.

Del Ponte’s remarks, made amid reports of gains by Syrian government forces, seemed to undermine the position of rightwing hawks in Washington like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and in London Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague. These are some of the powerful figures who craft Western policy, but hardly objective and credible voices on Syria and the wider Middle East.

Within hours, enthusiastic interventionists in Washington and a somewhat reluctant Obama administration were scrambling to adjust. The White House said the United States believed that chemical weapons were used by the Assad regime. In a stark reminder of Iraq in 2003, the British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted in Parliament: “I can tell the House that there is a growing body of limited but persuasive information that the [Syrian] regime has used and continues to use chemical weapons.” The Foreign Secretary William Hague agreed. Mainstream television channels and newspapers remained broadly uncritical, unquestioning, even generous in giving the benefit of the doubt to Hague, despite lessons of Iraq.

Persuading those who are ideologically drunk and politically myopic is often a hopeless undertaking. Hunger for war and lust for power or for distant resources always impair both reason and morality. The developing situation on the ground has made the war hawks struggle for credibility. For them, the last resort is to assert with dead certainty their “belief” that it is Bashar al-Assad’s forces who have employed chemical weapons and committed war crimes. How could “freedom fighters” do this?

The changing reality of Syria’s long and brutal war, in which government forces show much greater resilience than their opponents’ predictions, has generated some desperation among the rebels and worry in the American and European capitals about Islamist factions gaining control of the anti-Assad campaign. The capture by rebels of UN peacekeeping troops in Syria, freed after a week of behind-the-scenes activity, tells the story, bringing a little more balance in the scenario usually painted before us.

It was the second time in two months that UN peacekeepers had been held by a rebel faction. The United States and its allies are trapped between delusions of total victory in the Middle East and its true consequences – emergence of anti-Western forces such as Al-Nusra Front that are even more aggressive and erratic.

The outcome of the recent Moscow visit of President Obama’s new secretary of state John Kerry is instructive. America’s agreement with Russia that they co-sponsor an international conference to find a negotiated settlement raised some eyebrows in Washington and among U.S. allies in Europe and the Arab world. President Vladimir Putin seemed to have prevailed in his insistence that Assad’s exit cannot be a precondition. But this precondition is the starting point for the Syrian rebels and many of their foreign supporters who have a wider Middle East agenda. A commentary in Italy’s rightwing publication Il Geornale said in its headline, “Obama’s Defeat: To Pacify Syria He Is In Cahoots With Putin.”

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, struggling to maintain his authority within his Conservative Party and coalition with the Liberal Democrats, immediately flew off to Moscow for talks with Putin in an attempt to see that any international conference on Syria is held in London; Cameron’s trip to Washington would be next; Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel planned a visit of his own to Moscow after ordering two secret air attacks against Syrian military facilities in a week; and Israeli and Western newspapers issued warnings that Russia was about to supply S-300 missiles to Assad.

As for Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov maintains that Moscow is “not planning to supply Syria with any weapons beyond the current contracts,” which, he says, are “for defensive purposes.” Russia’s message to Washington, delivered a year ago, continues to be “hands off Syria and Iran.” Obama continues his rhetorical maneuvers. And the war goes on.

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