LONDON, 26 September 2004 — This November will mark the 25th anniversary of the American hostage crisis in Tehran when — following the flight to the US of the Shah of Iran — Iranian students took prisoner the staff of the US Embassy, refusing to release them unless the Shah was brought back to Iran for trial. The siege lasted 444 days.
The episode was experienced in America as a national humilation of the first order. The sense of humiliation was to be hugely compounded when three of the helicopters sent by US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages were caught in a sandstorm and crashed in the desert. Eight of the servicemen who embarked on what was meant to be a heroic rescue mission burned to death. Millions of Americans remember only too vividly the photographs of Iranian leaders gloating over their charred remains.
It is an unhappy turn of events that this anniversary should coincide with the most bitterly contested US presidential election in living memory — an election fought out over rival American attitudes to the Middle East. With Iran (to the disquiet not only of the US) conceivably on the verge of developing a nuclear warhead, relations between Tehran and Washington are more inflamed than they have been in years. It is plainly high on President George W. Bush’s agenda to deal with Iran. Re-elected in November, Bush will almost certainly feel that he has received a mandate to authorize military action wherever and whenever he sees fit.
Already the president’s truculent Secretary of State for Weapons Proliferation John Bolton is wasting no opportunity to voice Washington’s impatience with Iran’s failure to divulge every last detail about its nuclear program. Given how bogged down American troops are in Iraq, an invasion of Iran by US ground forces, even if feasible, might be hard to sell to the American public. Who, though, would want to rule out the possibility that Bush will order air strikes against Iran’s nuclear installations?
Saber rattling hawks like Bolton may well be itching to settle old scores. But the obsessive demonizing of Iran also reflects the increasing deference paid by Washington to the interests of Israel — as conceived both by Israelis themselves and by neoconservative Zionists in the Bush administration. Bush’s branding of Iran as a key constituent of the “Axis of Evil” had more than a little do with the military threat Iran is deemed to pose to America’s Middle East protege, and after all Iran has never made any secret of its hostility to the “Zionist entity”. Among critics of the Bush administration, it is now commonplace to speak of the “Likudization” of American foreign policy, the espousal by Washington of the commitment to brute force which has been the hallmark of the government of Ariel Sharron.
Not that the thuggish posture of the Bush administration is exactly a novel development in American history. In his timely book, “Iran in Crisis?”, the British writer Roger Howard stresses the desirability of hard-headed dialogue with Iran while also emphasizing how rooted in the American past is the US contempt for negotiation. The menacing language of Bush and his warmongering colleagues harks back to America’s bloody evolution as a country built on aggressive settlement and expansionism. In championing “regime change”, the forcible conversion of “rogue states” to American values, the neoconservatives could be said to be reformulating the primordial American belief in the efficacy of sheer firepower. What other leading nation could have spawned a politician like Donald Rumsfeld with his serene confidence that you are likely to accomplish more with a “gun and a kind word” than with a mere kind word?
If the kind of constructive engagement with Iran currently being attempted by leading European countries has seldom been the American way, it is for manifest historical reasons.
The fact that the West was won by ruthless ethnic cleansing of the native Indians gave rise to an American foundational myth that might is right. It is of a piece with the age-old American cult of force that US politicians — in contrast to their European counterparts — have long been apt to think in terms of blueprints for action rather than practical diplomacy; at the same time, the early history of the US encouraged the belief that ultimately America’s will is bound to prevail. Underwriting this overblown sense of national destiny is a faith in the unique virtue of the American Constitution, with its exaltation of the pursuit of “life, liberty and happiness”; what also sustains it is the conviction, derived from Protestantism by way of Judaism, that Americans constitute the “chosen people”. Bush’s conception of his foreign policy as the expression of a divine master plan echoes the puritan zealotry of America’s original European settlers.
Yet at a time when America’s most regressive tendencies are in the ascendant, it is easy to forget that not all Americans embrace Bush’s belligerent unilateralism. More than a few remain mindful of the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson: That Americans do well to show a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind”. The irony of the present antagonism between the two countries is that, in purely economic terms, the US and an oil-rich Iran have much to gain from cultivating cooperation and mutual understanding. The trouble is that, far from acting on Jefferson’s advice, the American media actively promotes mass ignorance of other cultures. It is a measure of the failure of the US to take even basic steps toward understanding the Middle East that many Americans assume Iranians are Arabs.
At a book launch in London the other day, the British journalist Christopher de Bellaigue discussed his memoir of Iran, “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs”, making much of the courtesy with which, despite the tense international atmosphere, he has been treated by Iranian people. It is safe to say that courtesy toward foreigners is the last thing great numbers of Americans — and for that matter great numbers of Britons — associate with Iran. In the days when the US fought shy of what George Washington called “foreign entanglements”, the mental isolation of the US from the rest of the world hardly mattered. Now it is one of the human race’s most alarming problems.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist living in London. He is working on a book about British Arabists and British Zionists.
