THE latest Oscar-winning film, Argo, portrays the story of six American Embassy officials who sought refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran during the early days of the Iranian revolution. The film has kicked up a flurry of emotions.
The film is a brief chapter in the tense relations between the US and Iran. The relation has worsened further in recent years. Nobody ever imagined that the standoff would continue this long, even 33 years after the embassy occupation without any end in sight for the disputes, sanctions and proxy wars.
In the three decades after the revolution, the world has changed. The global situation and leadership are no longer the same. Governments have fallen and alliances have been changed. Still, Tehran has remained nearly the same. On the other hand, the country has only sharpened its viciousness and violence displaying a hunger for greater influence in the region.
The Soviet Union has vanished and China has undergone considerable change, and even Vietnam and Cuba have opened their doors to the US. The regimes of Saddam and Qaddafi have passed into oblivion. Concepts concerning international relations, such as globalization and telecommunications, have undergone radical changes. Even the concept of influence and sovereignty in their meaning and content has changed.
Yet Iran still clings to its Khomeinist ideology, whose mantra carries deep hatred to what they call "the Great Satan" (a derogatory Iranian epithet for the US) as a result of their ideologies and policies.
At present the "Great Satan" is hated because it does not permit Iran to achieve its two dreams: Acquisition of nuclear bombs and establishing supremacy in the region.
It is clear that the superpowers would never allow the rogue state to have nuclear arsenal that would enable it to destroy sources of oil and destabilize the whole world by arming terrorist organizations, and so it is likely that the superpowers would resist Iran’s untiring efforts to achieve regional supremacy.
The taking of US Embassy officials as hostages was an expression of pent-up anti-US emotion and the US Embassy may well have been one of their first targets. Indeed, the passing of time has not altered the attitude of Iran.
The effort of some of its leaders to change the status quo over the past three decades and bring the country to the ranks of respected countries has failed. The first such leader was its first president Abu Al-Hasan Bani Sadr. His story is a real drama, even more sensational than Argo. He fought against the Shah of Iran along with Khomeini for over 20 years and won the first presidential election of the republic against seven other candidates but was sacked by Khomeini after one year, the latter having accused him of not being successful in countering Iraqi forces. He had to flee Tehran to the Turkish borders disguising as a soldier. Another rare Iranian politician was Mohammad Khatami, the fifth president of the republic who won with a landslide 70 percent of the votes. Hundreds of politicians, religious scholars and thinkers who were the sons of the revolution were persecuted despite their staunch support for the Khomeini regime. They all failed to make any change in the mindset of the political system of Qum.
We are now seeing the worst era of the Iranian governance with the ascendance of the star of the Revolutionary Guards, which has tightened his grip on the government, intelligence and economy. Now Iran is seen behind the trouble in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.
The film deals with the early years of the revolution when we were also optimistic about the outcome because it followed the regime of Shah who had become a megalomaniac who dreamed of establishing a Persian empire. Indeed, the last decade of his governance was spent with confrontations with the Gulf countries following the withdrawal of Britain from the region. Yet Khomeini also came to power showing symptoms of the same disease and declared his plan to extend the Iranian sway in the entire Arab world but this time in the name of Islam. He began implementing his scheme by stoking sectarian disputes to an unprecedented degree unknown in the history of Muslims since the fall of the Ummayyad dynasty 13 centuries ago. Iran still suffers from this Khomeinist policy. Indeed, Iran is a military power but remains a poor country that has failed in civilian matters.
