Why so many Iranians fear of their INDEPENDENCE to be taken away by the US or other foreign countries, INFIDEL, or maybe more of a fidel nature? This fear is a very old one and we can mostly guess about its causes and origins. Of course this is nothing particular to Iranians, and I have seen citizens from Lybia or Iraq to Uganda, Congo or Venezuela and so forth to have similar fears. Why are these people afraid of the West (what is perceived as the most modern and powerful countries in the world) threatening their INDEPENDENCE, or maybe pride, or maybe…
NATURAL RESOURCES??!! Oh yes, I think this is mostly the point, natural resources, oil, gas, all sorts of minerals, or other types of God-given (not created or assembled by human labour) riches. These countries, being aware of their inability to do much about their natural resources on their won, and knowing that the only truly valuable asset they own in front of the rest of the world is nothing but their natural resources, sort of RIGHTLY (or understandably) fear the smart guys (the West, the modernised nations) STEALING their riches.
So, there is some sort of an understandable fear, that the only resources that can make the modern world be interested in our relatively intellectually and socially deprived lands (it is called third world countries in nicer words) may be at risk of being taken away without sufficient compensation. And that makes us, peoples of the third world, be a bit (a bit too much) paranoid.
What is the solution then? What should the third world do in order to protect itself and at the same time modernise and develop in order to reach the standards of the developed world at some point in the future? What should Iran for instance do in order to benefit its citizens while keeping its “independence” (a word that has always been used in Iran with the only connotation of referring to the West as the evil one)? Or maybe the problem is NOT the West, but something else!
First we need to see where we stand. We need to accept the realities, our possibilities, and then see how rationally we can reach our goals. The realities for countries like Iran are pretty somber. Industry is very bad, economy is a dysfunctional one relying mostly on foreign money from crude oil (the horrifying consequence of this reality is too often over-looked), social conditions are catastrophic, corruption has been on the rise, and the list can go on and on.
I remember that some 20 years ago, even during the chaotic times of the post-revolution Iran, it was very difficult to bribe officials for any purpose. Nowadays even the unimaginable of those times happens every day. Like Russia and many other post-Communist countries Iranian officials from ordinary police officers on the streets to almost any other types of officials within the public domain can be bribed. Money rules and almost everything is on sale!
So, the situation is bad and it has got worse on many respects. An “independent” Iran has sold lots of its “independently” extracted (they have actually asked for foreign help here and there) unrefined oil relatively cheaply while performing worse than most countries that have no precious sought-after natural resources to fear being taken away! Although Iran’s natural resources are indeed extremely precious and they can take the Iranian people to some riches that probably even the citizens of the UAE would be envious (hypothetically speaking), an independent Iran has miserably failed to take advantage of its natural resources!
The whole meaning of being independent in today’s world of free capital flow is more like a rhetoric rather than any substantive argument. Has Turkey been an independent country? Or not? There is no proof to say that Turkey has not been independent, or definitely not less independent than Iran. Turks have always known that the West has little natural resources to pray on in their country, but Turkey relying on its work-force and entrepreneurship, using all its possibilities, from tourist attractions to whatever agriculture the arid lands of Anatolia have to offer, has managed to build a more prosperous country than its resource-rich neighbour to the east, Iran.
Iran seems to have had nothing but the curse of fearing its independence; to protect its natural resources from a perceived Western plunder, and in doing so has done worst than it could have otherwise done WITHOUT having relied on its natural resources. An Iran without its abundant and precious natural resources may have actually become something like Turkey, more democratic and probably even more prosperous. Iran’s natural resources have given rise to what can be called a people-independent sort of governorship, in which the government does not truly need the people.
The government can sell the natural resources of the country, buy weapons from other countries, pay soldiers and other forms of militaristic organisations, and use a tiny minority of the population to keep the rest on check, and hold the whole country hostage to the desires of the ruling clique while crying foul that it pursues national independence, being forced to confront more powerful regimes. Confront them for what? Nothing for real!
What all this national independence is actually all about when the country is completely dependent on crude oil exports to keep going? This NATURAL-RESOURCE CURSE has been the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the past 50 years or so, giving rise to governments or organisations (also Al Qaeda is paid by oil money from Arab and some other Muslim sponsors) that have not needed their populace to survive; they neither need taxes from their populace nor much of any form of approval, as they hold the financial means to suppress any large-scale opposition using the money collected from selling the natural resources of their respective lands to foreigners, the same foreigners they claim to be INDEPENDENT of, while in reality, it is actually, and logically, completely the opposite.
This is not only the case for oil-rich countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia, but also for many far-worse-off countries in sub-Saharan Africa where the fights over precious resources have led to the misery and death of millions and millions of innocent people. The same sub-Saharan Africa where Charles Taylor (a dangerous but comical ruler of genocidal behaviour) used to employ child soldiers to kill their own kind, adult or children, while he and others were busy selling diamonds to the same West (nor governments but companies and people… as far as I know) he was portraying to seek INDEPENDENCE from!
It is time for us, the peoples of these third world countries with lots of natural resources, to realise that it is NOT the West, or any other hypothetical foreign exploiting infidel power, doing us any harm or even intending to do much either, but it is our own unrepresentative blackmailing thuggish ruling cliques who are doing nothing but to sell our natural resources and use the money in order to keep their own illegitimate and irresponsible policies and actions going.
Yes, I do indeed believe that we as Iranians would have been much better off without our precious and abundant natural resources, but this is life, and something that could have turned into our best chance ever toward prosperity has indeed turned into our direct ticket toward social and economic stagnation and public hangings!
