Signs of life
Recollections from an autumn on the road
December 2, 2003
The Iranian
By the looks of the brownish hillocks and buttes and the
parched jagged mountains that flanked it, one hardly could believe that this
place was only a few years earlier the site of the Winter Olympics. All the
whiteness that was covering it now, in mid-October, was salt. I
had come to Salt Lake City,
Utah, for a conference dedicated to the examination of the issues confronting
Central Asia and the Middle East, but my secret purpose for attending this
assembly was to connect with the human geography of an area about
which I had read some
and understood little. After this academic pilgrimage, I continue to be ignorant
still, but at least I now know why.
One cannot go to Salt Lake and not experience organized religion
at some level -- whether it is in the form of the Star of David
set in glass in the upper
portion of the window of side-entrance to the Mormon Assembly
Hall, or the replica of
Jerusalem in the North Visitor Center, or the relief of the martyred Smith
Brothers, each no less holy to their faithful than are two other
brothers beloved to the
Shiites.
The parallel in the institution of polygamy among the Mormons
and Moslems was all too obvious, but what emerged for me from a
tat
more thought was the
way in which each practice influenced the architecture and structure of the
family habitat. The segregated quarters of the different wives
along a narrow corridor,
and the large kitchen and dining area, usually in the basement, of what is
now quaintly referred to as the polygamist houses, provided the
Mormon household
with the requisite amount of distance and proximity necessary for communal
living. The notion of the inner sanctum and outer perimeter in
the traditional Iranian
households offered an interesting comparison across this cultural divide.
In Salt Lake one can have also mystical experiences of an unorganized
sort,
which comes from being at the mercy of the mountains and the inviting steep
climb that
connects them to the pedestrian life below. One afternoon, I took to the
hills at the recommendation of a friend who, as if to give meaning to her
Persian
name which translated into "Libertine," had freed up from a career
in engineering in the cacophonous Los Angeles in order to pursue a degree
in the field of communications
in the quiet of Utah.
For some time I had been desperately stuck on the image of a
desperately-stuck zipper of a parka in order to visualize or communicate
my impression of the
state of US-Iran relations -- a zipper, which neither went down, nor came
up and yet
was holding together ever so briefly but stubbornly the two sides of the
jacket, where some narrow common interest interlocked by happenstance.
There was a way
to fix this, I would say: either one could align and jam the uncooperative
teeth of the zipper into each other, or one could tuck and pull the tab
with great
labor and force in one direction or another, or simply one could disconnect
the mechanism and cock it anew -- Begin from the start, as it where.
In
the age of
the elaborate buttoned-down cloak of the clerics in Tehran and the snappy
Velcro mentality of the American policy-makers in Washington, no wonder
why nobody seems
to remember how a zipper operates anymore. The tying of shoe laces has
slowly become an ancient art form.
From the heights, the valley below looked covered in a haze,
an inversion that hurried to mind the images of a polluted Tehran
and Los Angeles. In
Salt Lake,
as I learned, the coal-burning power company often added little something
extra to the suffocation. In the off-hours, when the population was asleep,
I was told
by my cabby, it burned the cheap, smelly coal in order to save money.
Zipping along the horizon, my eyes caught the sight of two tall
robust-looking hills, facing off, apart by a few miles, separated
by a distance which
seemed incapable of being bridged. I called one "US" and the other "Iran" and
what followed was obvious -- an ideal analogy to replace the tired zipper.
These admittedly proud and distanced structures, whose summits stood
so far apart,
were nonetheless joined in the valley which they shared -- in the area
of their lowest common and only denominator, I thought, here was where
the work of bridging
US and Iran can go on.
The biology resident in the adverse climates and inhospitable
topography is a marvel of existential experience and Salt Lake
offered plenty of
it. I heard
about a man -- an Iranian -- who arrived there decades ago in the futile
search of a missionary who had taught him English when in Iran. He
stayed on, however,
took a janitorial job at a university, studied, became an engineer,
saved his money and bought year after year a little piece by a
little piece
of the desert,
to a point where he became the most successful captain of industry
in the field of nuclear waste disposal in the most scientifically
advanced
society
in the
world. To his detractors, he had not gone far -- once a garbage collector,
always a garbage collector. I, for one, celebrate not the heights scaled
by him but
the rise itself.
Saltair is a meaningful toponym -- a few minutes of wandering
along the barren and homeless shores of Salt Lake will leave one's
lips with
a
strong measure
of its significance. In this element, where only sailboats dare to
ply -- because the salty air damages any outdoor motor if left exposed
for
too long
-- I was
told by a local, nothing lives but the brine shrimp, a tiny crustacean
not fit for human consumption but excellent as chicken feed and food
filler. Even in
the most unlikely of places life thrives in its own way.
The hour was getting late and the breeze brought forth the echo
of the message from my most hospitable and efficient host to report
back to
the conference
center on the earlier side. I started down. If the climb up had
been
hard on the lungs,
the descent was equally tasking of the thighs. The pain left the
memory as my thoughts once again began swirling about in the cavity
squeezed
between my sweat-drenched
throbbing temples.
Ahead of me lay an expanse of some dozen square yards of absolutely
barren-looking slope covered with gravel and no sign of life, except
for a large juicy
spider negotiating the stones like in the pictures of the rover
that flowed over
the Martian landscape a few years ago. In a split of a second I
caught glimpse of a two-to-three inch twig sticking out of the
ground, sinuous
and contorted,
looking
dry as a bone, with two or three tiny brownish-green springs passing
for foliage.
Like checking the identity of a lost puppy in the wilderness, I
bent down and scrutinized the handwriting on the small tag dangling
freely
from this
marvel: "native," it
read and who was I, an immigrant, to quarrel with that claim to
priority and lineage.
I had finished marveling at the life that groped to survive when
I heard a faint cooing sound as if it said there was no more here
in
the nothingness
of the moment
to impress. To the contrary, a white pigeon came out of the brush,
bouncing about, rocking foot-to-foot, with its neck bobbing. It
drew closer: my
awe of it and
its fear of me melded in the uniqueness of this hillside encounter,
more for
me than for it, though. Out of place, perhaps, but not inexplicable,
I thought. It was probably a survivor or progeny of the hundreds
of birds which were
let out as a part of the Olympics ceremonies. It was not "native"
but equally at home. I could relate.
With the picture of the pigeon still fresh
in my mind, I reached the paved road and hurried to my lodging,
where I received word about a post-conference get-along at a Turkish
professor's
home and a song-and-dance nightcap later at a Bosnian disco.
I washed away the clay dirt, suited up and met up with my newly-acquainted
colleague -- a gentleman-journalist of Tatar origin, who worked
for a big broadcasting
company. We walked across the Unity Bridge that connected the two
sides of the university grounds, heading to our respective late-afternoon
sessions. A staunch
follower of the Ahmadiyyah branch of Islam, he spoke of the disservice
that
the closing of the gates of reasoning had inflicted on the progressive
development of Islamic thought. One day, we fancied, we shall sail
down the Volga River
from
Kazan back to Kazan in a tour of the Caspian Sea -- where, too,
much is dead or dying, but some life still persists.
The next day, I went back into the hills. In the morning, I went
to the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine at Magna, the site of the deepest
and
widest
man-made
excavation. It is owned and operated by Kennecott, an American
company, but all the cupreous
trinkets in its small gift shop were made in China! That irony
alone was worth all the gold and silver contained at the site,
yet it also
drove
home the realization
that globalization, which is being vilified by the rabid left in
the industrial countries, could not be what it is without the participation
of the cheap-labor
exporting countries like China and others which by virtue of their "developing
country" status get an ideological free-pass from sharing the blame for
this rampant exploitation.
In the afternoon, I went back into the hills to
take in the delicious offerings of a first rate botanical garden
at Red Butte. There,
in the meandering walkways of this little paradise, I took up where
I had left off the day before with the resetting of the course
of relations between my
adopted land and birthland, to begin the bridging of the gap in
the low valley -- where
the basic meet.
In the barren landscape of US-Iran relations, where mutual mistrust
and disdain rule, it is utter folly to speak of peace models that
are based
on incremental
and basic confidence building measures. In the fields of mistrust,
one should be planting seeds that thrive on mistrust, where mistrust
is not
the bane
but the fertilizer -- much like the sprig in the Utahic saltland
or the shrimp in
the brine of the Salt Lake.
No aspect of human endeavor is as basic as maximizing one's self-interest
and no interactive human venue offers the greatest possibility
for that than the
market place where buyers and sellers of goods and services strike
mutually advantageous deals. The contract that memorializes the
transaction is
a sociological phenomenon
in which people talk to one another from across the divides of
mistrust and cunning, they negotiate, they agree and disagree and
learn how
to resolve their disputes
by need; they learn to overcome doubt all in order to make a profit.
What if the United States lifted all its trade and investment
restrictions with Iran, unilaterally without precondition, I thought.
At first,
the Iranian government
will issue a series of gas-bag vituperative proclamations about
self-reliance and having no need for the arrogant one's wares.
But the tradesmen
and financially savvy among the population will begin to stir when
prospects
of making a
profit becomes clear.
The human contact being necessary to contract,
the process will
inevitably serve as a conduit for one-thousand-and-one other
conversations which will spring. It had been like conversations
in the 1950s
and '60s which paved
the way for the political changes in Iran in the 1970s. Naturally,
nothing will be more conducive to the perpetuation of the current
political situation
in Iran
than the American reluctance to lift its conversation-stopping
self-imposed limitation on Iranian trade and investment.
The recent Iranian cooperation with the United Nations atomic
agency demonstrated one undeniable fact about the moderating influence
that trade and finance
has on the Iranian decision-making process. The leverage which
the EU-3 foreign ministers exercised in Tehran recently was due
to the
EU's trade
and investment
posture
with respect to Iran: Iran purchases near-billions in goods and
services from
the EU-3 and other EU countries; neither they nor Iran can afford
to see that stopped by some United Nations sanctions regime, which
was
threatened over
Iran's nuclear disclosures.
The sanctions would have frozen also
the near-billions
which
the Iranian officials and their dependents have on deposit or invested
in real estate property and instruments around the world. Because
the United States
has no trade and investment leverage with Iran, Washington's only
currency with Tehran
remains force -- and the use of force has been losing value fast
in recent months both with the international community and many
Americans as well.
It is a folly
and self-deluding to think that the Iranians buckled over the nuclear
issue because of America's forceful stand.
In early November I found myself in Paris, the self-styled European
capital of rampant anti-Americanism, where the Frank, who deplore
Mr. Bush and
his unilateral
and illegal ways, find themselves in perfect agreement with the
Arabs and Moslems amongst them, who blame the United States, rightfully,
for pursuing
an unbridled
pro-Israeli foreign policy which has resulted in greater anti-Semitism
worldwide and global terrorism. I, for one, believe peace will
not
be restored between
the Moslems and Jews in the Middle East -- and elsewhere -- until Israel
in made to withdraw to its pre-June 6, 1967, borders, the occupied territories
are turned over to the Arab countries from which they were taken, and the question
of the Palestinian statehood becomes an intra-Arab project.
When in Paris, I visit Jardin du Luxembourg because there is always
something extraordinary that goes on there [See: Give
this republic a chance]. On this
particular afternoon, I emerged from the metro to be greeted by
the scent of roasted
chestnuts purveyed by a gypsy at the entrance to the park. Peeling
and savoring the nuts,
I walked halfway the outer circle of the park before turning right
onto a long path to the Liberty tree. I have come to gauge the
state of Franco-American
relations
on the basis of botany -- and from what I perceived, the young
oak, which was planted there in the name of the people of France
in January
2002
in the memory
of the ones perished in 9/11, the state of Franco-American relations
continues to be robust and just fine. The tree, now devoid of its
green cover, nonetheless,
stood three feet taller and a full inch, if not more, thicker and
healthier than the last time I visited it. As I dispersed the fallen
leaves under
my
feet, I
began to murmur to myself,
one day young,
soon to grow old;
one day green,
another time, gold;
clothed and next nude,
cold and needing food;
unbowing to the mighty wind,
yet swaying to the breeze;
hard to bend, mostly immovable,
then so easy to please;
but never without shade,
how can such friendship ever fade?
I regained the peripheral walkway where I had digressed and continued
to enjoy the sight and sounds of the park. The massive statue that
obstructed my path
had not been there in my prior visits to the park. By the time
I had finished
admiring the effort that had gone into carving this huge block
of wood, a tree, really, into an eye-pleasing sculpture I was assaulted
by one
sculpture after
another in rapid succession -- surrounded, I surrendered to the
sensational
artistry of the exhibition which validated the work of Coskun,
a Turkish-born French sculptor.
Later that evening I took to the podium at the American University
of Paris in order to share my views on "The US Foreign Policy
in the Middle East" with
the faculty, students and staff. It proved to be a wonderful evening
of give-and-take, argument and discourse. Controversial, to be
sure. I spoke about the sounds
and sights of America's war in Iraq and the struggle against al-Qaedaism
in terms
of the echoes and reflections from this country's own past and
long-forgotten episodes -- and I gave the hope that we shall overcome
all this too and everything
will be fine once again.
I set aside as overworked and useless
the comparison of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the attacks on
Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the
sacking of District of Columbia during the War of 1812. To me,
I explained to the audience,
the sights and sounds of 9/11 were reminiscent of the explosion
that rocked Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886, by which
was ushered onto the American
life
the violence of the international Anarchist Movement, at its
time a movement -- not necessarily just an organization -- as
unapologetic and militant as
the al-Qaedaism of today. I also dismissed as disingenuous the comparison of America's
war against Iraq with America's military participation in World
War
II against
Germany and Japan,
or in Vietnam. The war against Iraq was about as useless and
unnecessary as the one that America had talked itself into in 1898
-- the
war against Spain. That
war left the United States in charge of the Philippines, where
the U.S. then lost 1,000 American lives before it could bring
it to terms,
pacify
it, as
it were. If there was any historical American lesson to be applied
to Iraq it should
be from the U.S. administration of the Philippines. Chief among
them was to signal unambiguously its intention to remain in possession
of the country
as a colonial
power and govern it as a colony until conditions for independence
are met gradually, no kowtowing to the politically-correct notion
of native
wishes.
The way in which the industrialized West eventually stamped out
violent Anarchism offered an apt model for the present-day struggle
against
al-Qaedaism. The
governments which fought against Anarchism -- from Russia to Latin
America -- viewed it as
an international movement. While oppressive police measures at
home succeeded in dismantling the organizational aspects of national
anarchist
cells,
the war against Anarchism was won on the ideological or doctrinaire
front. Many
of the
Anarchist slogans were espoused also by the Communists, Socialist
and Labor Unionists, which showed that one could be anti-imperialist
and
anti-capitalist
without resorting
to mass killings and gratuitous violence. In the same manner, locally,
later the Socialists and Liberal Democrats de-fanged the Communists
in every country
where Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism dared to appear.
When it came to fighting al-Qaedaism, the United States has made
the amateurish blunder of thinking that it is fighting an organization
and the dismantling
of it would suffice. In as recently as during his visit to London
in
November, President
Bush wowed the international press corps with his grasp of American
corporate structures when he likened the al-Qaeda to an entity
and its leadership
to a board of directors and officers, but he demonstrated profound
ignorance about the morphology of international political movements.
As I queried
my
audience
in Paris, where is the American administration's understanding
of al-Qaeda as a movement and who is preparing the ideological
antidote necessary to counter
it? In his division of the world into an "us" versus "them" camps
President Bush has deprived the American side of the natural alliance with the "near
us" and the empathy of the "near them." Whether
he intended it or not, this is now a war between America and Islam,
with militant Islam
calling
the shots for now.
There was a time when robust nationalist state ideologies --
with a tolerable level of anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism
and
anti-capitalism --
stood in the face of Communism. To combat al-Qaedaism, the United
States
should
be seeking
the alliance of the moral equals of yesteryear's national bourgeoisies
in the Islamic world in the likes of the Shiite nationalists
of Iran the Sunni
nationalists
of Malaysia and elsewhere. To be sure -- these countries, regardless
of their religion, by virtue of their nationalism alone are anti-American,
anti-Zionist
and anti-imperialist, but unlike al-Qaedaism which is bent on
armed struggle,
they are most capable of rational
discourse. It is ultimately an American choice if it rather lose
recruits to al-Qaedaism.
The author wishes to dedicate this essay to the memory of Kristopher
Kolumbus, for whom a periplus was more than a narrative and a
voyage greater than
the distance traveled.
Author
Guive Mirfendereski practices law in Massachusetts (JD, Boston
College Law School, 1988). His latest book is A
Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea: Treaties, Diaries, and Other
Stories (New York and London: Palgrave 2001)
* Send
this page to your friends
|
