The place of paranoia
... in Iran-U.S. relations
November 5, 2003
The Iranian
Introduction
The conduct of both Iranian and American foreign relations is
highly improvisational in character, often appearing as being
self-contradictory or inconsistent, irrational,
and rudderless. Certainly with respect to one and other, in the last twenty
years or so, each country's foreign non-policy toward the other
has been exactly that
way. This state of dysfunction in the Irano-American relations is the manifestation
of a generalized form of paranoia.
It should be a foregone conclusion that this dysfunction in Iranian
foreign policy is owed primarily to a deep-seated national fear
about foreign intervention,
or interference in Iranian affairs. Historically, interventions have altered
the Iranian map, changed its government, and assaulted for the most part what
for the day passed as the state-culture. This presentation explores also an
equally debilitating pathology resident in American foreign policy.
The title of this
essay "The Place of Paranoia in Iran-US Relations." The
aim of the presentation is to call attention to the role that paranoia plays
in the shaping and conduct of their foreign relations. The term "paranoia" is
generally defined as (a) a mental disorder characterized by delusions of persecution
or grandeur and (b) extreme irrational distrust of others.
The use of this concept here is intended to describe and not
necessarily diagnose the malfunction that bedevils the Irano-American
relations of the past two decades.
The term is offered and used as a morally neutral concept, but with two qualifications.
First, it should be recognized that paranoia is as much the product of a distorted
reality as a contribution to the further distortion of reality, and that a
distorted reality often leads to miscalculations and misguided
acts with fantastic consequences
for international peace and security. Second, in the present state of international
relations paranoia is not necessarily a demon since a state develops it in
order to ensure its own survival in a system increasingly given
to lawless and arbitrary
exercises of power. The likeness of being
The Iranian and American foreign relations, individually, exhibit
conduct based on delusions of grandeur and exaggerated victimhood,
even though neither would
admit to it openly. To meet the minimum requirement of this discourse, I should
point to examples which I consider paranoid behavior.
On the American side, the recent invasion of Iraq and the imposition
of a colonial administration there speak to America's delusions
of grandeur as "liberator" of
other peoples and places, such as Cuba and Europe in the last century, defender
of the free world against communism and presently against the phenomenon best
described as "terrorism without frontiers." The very forward deployment
of the American troops to the Pacific theater after the bombing of Pearl Harbor
or to Afghanistan after September 11 or recently in Iraq spring to mind as examples
of international behavior compelled by the view of this country as "America
the victim."
On the Iranian side, the pursuit of the imperial impulses of the
Pahlavi era in the Yemeni civil war and Dhoffar are not as fresh
in the mind as is the constant
reminder of Iran's present meddling in the Middle East peace process, involvement
in Afghanistan, and its international championing of the dispossessed and disenfranchised,
East and West. Yet, when the provocations of the Ayatollah Khomeini against
Saddam Hussein were followed by the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980,
Iran recoiled into
its very familiar shell of victimhood.
In terms of irrational distrust, too,
both countries' international behavior, particularly of late and certainly
vis-a-via each other, has been wrapped in
a profound and impenetrable mistrust. The issue of the American opposition
to the Iranian nuclear quest and talk of "regime change" and the independent
theoretical need for Iran to develop a credible deterrent are examples of decisions
and policies based on a general apprehensiveness of the other side's intentions.
Repulsion of the likes
That the two countries with seemingly little in common should
behave so similarly is because their core existential experiences
share a number of formative experiences
which have led them to acquire a similar temperament. I should discuss these
in no specific order.
Accidental nations. Both countries are accidental phenomenon
in the sense that neither was the creation of a peace conference,
de-colonialization process,
or exercise in political geography or state-building, and much in their respective
creative process came from happenstance and the random association of groups.
To this origin each country owes its core belief that it is the master of
its own destiny and servant of none. The unilateralism evident
for a long time
in
American foreign policy and in the Iranian emphasis on political independence
are not fads of the day, they are values, vicious or virtuous, with a birthright
marker.
From many, one. Both countries are multiethnic phenomena in that "American" or "Iranian" as
a label connoted and still do express a far greater identity than the narrow
parochial affiliation along the narrow lines of race, religion, ethnicity or
national origin of the various groups that constitute the country's overall polity.
To this both countries owe an amount of extraterritorial reach into other regional
and cultural audiences.
Government by contract. The coalescing of the inhabitants around
a singular expression of self-government in the American and Iranian
political heritage has been a
marvel of political evolution. In the case of the United States, the process
which began earlier among the newly independent colonies with the Articles
of Confederation and eventually produced the Federal Constitution,
a compact among
the several states, each of which was presumed independent, sovereign and equal
by right. The formative phenomenon responsible for the forging of the Iranian
state, too, was a contractual undertaking, which ultimately resulted in the
establishment of the shahanshahi, or imperial form of government,
an association of lesser
lords under one king-of-kings. That order began with Cyrus the Great over twenty-five
hundred years ago and ended with the advent of the centralized administration
of the Iranian state under the Safavids by the middle of the 17th century.
Trauma of republican birth. The American and Iranian republics,
so different in age and so distant in texture and content, share
a similar birth experience
as well. It must have been something to be present at the creation of the American
republic, when it felt as though we were at war with most everyone and most
everyone was at war with us, at a time and place when and where
we believed that our worst
enemy could one day be a tyranny of our own making. This must have also been
the things felt for those present at the birth of the Iranian republic in 1979.
The national phobia evident in both circumstances stemmed from the uncertainty
and mortal fear in each polity of the possible return of its monarchical institution
and its oppressive consequences. In each instance, the revolutionaries of the
day feared the role of the foreigner in reversing the tide of change or perverting
the nascent republican order.
The observation may be made in the case of the
United States that even 8 years after the British had surrendered in Yorktown
(1781) and 6 years after the Treaty
of Paris (1783), in which Britain recognized America's independence, the Founding
Fathers in Philadelphia still were not so sure of the passing of danger. The
reminders were fresh of the traps that could be set in the collusive corridors
of European diplomacy, which perhaps one day could derail the republic. In
the Iran of 1979, however, the revolutionaries had precedent to
guide them: the memory
of the events of August 1953 prompted them to ensure that the Shah, who had
been admitted to the United States for medical treatment, did not
return to his throne
a second time on the wings of the American eagle.
Messianic purpose. Whether compelled by sheer narcissism or the
fear of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the republic,
the American and Iranian constitutions
reserve for the country a certain sense of external mission, often of Messianic
proportions or purpose, which can be understood only in terms of each country's
existential history as victim, actual or imagined, and in reference to its
vulnerabilities inside a paradigm of threat perception with ever-shifting
dimensions.
In the tempest-tossed world of 1787 the Founding Fathers believed
that there should be no hiding place for the bad-actors bent on
injuring the interest of
the United States. They took away from the states the power to grant Letters
of Marque and Reprisal and vested that power in the Congress (Art. I, 8; Art.
I, 10). The Founders also understood that if America had become a nation it
was by the grace of the Law of Nations, and if it were to survive
as one it was to
be by the grace of the Law of Nations. So from the earliest days of the republic,
international law was deemed to be a part of American law and, more to the
point, the Founders vested in the Congress the power to define
and punish piracies and
felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the Law of Nations
(Constitution, Art. I, 8).
The grant of these powers to the Congress manifested essentially
a purpose far greater in scope than simply being authorized to legislate for
the sake of domestic
tranquility and general welfare. In a subtle way, arguably, the Constitution
placed in the Congress the power to define and punish offenses internationally,
providing the new republic with a role to play in the enforcement of the Law
of Nations. Two tools were necessary for the fulfillment of this role -- first,
the capability to raise and maintain armies even in peace time and, second,
the legal power to act justifiably.
The legal precept for action went beyond the recognition of the
right to reprisal and admitted of a notion that in these days is
referred to as the right of preemptive
self-defense. In dismissing the argument that the country should maintain an
army only when danger arises and continues, Hamilton [No. 25] wrote about the
necessity to be prepared by having a standing army so to "anticipate distant
danger and meet the gathering storm" and not to "expose our property
and liberty to the mercy of foreign invader and invite them by our weakness to
seize the naked and defenseless prey." As a matter of general international law, the inherent right of
self-defense is one of international law's primary or natural laws.
Pure and simple, without
it, the state-based international legal system will cease to exist, as the
very survival of the system requires the survival of the state.
The US Constitution
prohibited a state of the Union to engage in war with a foreign power, but
provided that a state may war with a foreign country if it was
actually invaded, or was
in such imminent danger as would not admit delay (Art. I, 10). This formulation
of the concept of self-defense embodied the right to react and the right to
strike preemptively. The concept of preemptive self-defense, or
anticipatory self-defense,
has been a hallmark of customary international law and arguably remains a viable
survival doctrine despite the Charter of the United Nations and its collective
security arrangements.
When it comes to foreign relations, the 1979 Iranian
Constitution is not morally ambiguous or defensive in character.
It proclaims a state of Divine Sovereignty
(Art. 56) and requires an active duty on the part of the government to export
the revolution and Islam abroad. "With due attention to the Islamic content
of the Iranian Revolution, which has been a movement aimed at the triumph of
all the mostazafyn [weak: oppressed, dispossessed, disenfranchised] over the
mostakberyn [arrogant: oppressor]," reads a part of the preamble, "the
Constitution provides the necessary basis for ensuring the continuation of
the revolution at home and abroad. In particular, in the development of international
relations, the Iranian Constitution will strive with the other Islamic and
popular
movements in order to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community
in accordance with the Quranic verse 'This your community is a single community,
and I am your Lord, so worship me' [21:92], and to assure the continuation
of the struggle for the liberation of all the deprived and oppressed peoples
in
the world." Article 3 (16) of the Iranian Constitution requires the country's
foreign policy to be in accordance with Islamic values, fraternal
commitment to all Moslems,
and unsparing support to the mostazafyn of the world. Under Article 152, the
Iranian foreign policy is based, inter alia, on the principle of defending
the rights of all Moslems. Under Article 154, the Islamic Republic "supports
the just struggles of the mostazafyn against the mostakberyn in every corner
of the globe ... while scrupulously refraining from all forms of interference
in the internal affairs of other nations." One fear, two defining responses
There was one significant qualitative difference between the manners
in which the paranoid American and Iranian republicans sought
to ensure the viability
of the republic, and to ensure its political stability and impermeability to
foreign intrigue. The Iranian response to the challenges of governance and external
influences, as set forth in the Constitution of 1979, repeated the age-old Iranian
model since the Safavid era, which was to craft a vertical system of government
and centralize power and authority in one office, at the top, which today is
vested in the office of the Supreme Leader (Articles 57, 60, 91, 107-113) and
to shut out the contemporary foreign influences by edict, censorship, and oppression
of the citizen.
With respect to foreigners, one part of the Constitution's preamble
declared
that by the Revolution the nation had cleansed itself "of the dust and impurities
that accumulated during the taghuti [idolatrous, satanic: monarchial times] past
and purged itself of foreign ideological influences." Article 43 (8) of
the Constitution called for the prevention of foreign economic domination of
the economy. Article 81 prohibited outright the grant of any permission or privilege
to foreign nationals to establish a company or organization in any of the industrial,
agricultural, mineral and services sectors. In Article 82, it imposed a prohibition
on the employment of foreign experts, except where it was necessary and approved
by the consultative assembly. Article 146 prohibited any kind of foreign military
base even if for peaceful purposes. Article 153 prohibited the entering into
any agreement which could result in the foreign domination of the country's natural
and economic resources, culture, armed forces and other aspects.
The American Constitutional framework, on the other hand, responded
to its concerns with governance and foreign influence by adopting
a model which was radically
different from America's own historical experience.
It has been a mere 216 years since the drafting of the Constitution
and so it is to be expected that most Americans are not conscious
about the level of paranoia
and xenophobia which permeated the air at the time of the Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia. A sampling of the writings of the Founders in The Federalist
Papers leaves no doubt that the Founders were preoccupied with foreign arms,
influence and intrigue.
Madison believed that the foreign gold could not buy the character
of the American countryman [Madison, No. 55], and yet he found
it necessary [in No. 62] to support
the eligibility requirement for senators because fearing that a younger or
less experienced senator might become a "channel for foreign influence." Jay
[No. 3] was petrified about foreign arms and influence subverting the young nation.
In defending the need for a federal union, Hamilton [No. 7] feared that without
it America "will be gradually entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths
of European politics and wars" and "will become a prey to the artifices
and machinations of powers." Whether an object of jealousy, hatred or fear
-- Hamilton [No. 59] wrote, "enterprises to subvert [the Union] will sometimes
originate in the intrigues of foreign powers." Again along these lines,
Madison [No. 43] queried, "But who can say what experiments may be produced
by the caprice of particular States, by the ambition of enterprising leaders,
or by the intrigues and influence of foreign powers?"T
he Constitution codified the horizontal relations that existed
among the co-equal sovereign states and ensured decentralized apportioned
and shared political power
among the various nodes or branches of government, via checks and balances.
As Hamilton [No. 85] reported, this form of government "ensure[d] diminution
of the opportunities to foreign intrigue." The eligibility requirements
for the Chief Magistrate of the Union and legislators, a bi-cameral legislature,
veto and super-majority voting (Art. I, 7), judicial review of legislation (Art.III,
2), number of legislators, two-thirds requirement on matters requiring the advice
and consent of the Senate (Art. II, 2), and bifurcation of the prerogatives of
war (Art. I, 8 and 10; Art. II, 2) altogether so diffused authority that Hamilton
and Madison feared the likelihood of domestic faction (gridlock) and failure
on the part of the government to get anything done but, all the same, this was
worthwhile and necessary in order to limit the reach of foreign corruption into
the American political process [Madison, No. 62; Hamilton, No. 22].
Nowhere was the preoccupation with the danger of foreign contamination
of the American political process better illustrated than in this
passage from Hamilton
[No. 66] supporting the advantages of the advice-and-consent provision of the
Constitution (Art. II, 2) in the making of treaties: "The security essentially
intended by the Constitution against corruption and treachery in the formation
of treaties is to be sought for in the numbers and character of those who are
to make them. The joint agency of the Chief Magistrate of the Union and of
the two thirds of the members of a body selected by the collective wisdom of
the
legislatures of the several States is designed to be the pledge for the fidelity
of the national councils in this particular." This was to foreclose the
likelihood of the "individual in the Senate who should have prostituted
[his] influence in that body as the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption."
This
-- the American republican government -- was not a model borrowed from the
pedantic writings of philosophers and theoreticians locked in their closets,
but rather it was wrought by practical and pragmatic individuals, who took
for
granted very little if anything noble about the nature or manner of men.
They assumed that man and man's institutions were by nature venal
and corruptible,
the governor and the governed would act always first in the pursuit of self-interest.
They also understood that they were creating a government not for the noble
among them but also for what a later inscription in the New York Harbor would
label
as the poor, weak, wretched refuse and tempest-tossed of the other shores.
Not even the president could be expected to be a paragon of virtue.
Hamilton [No. 75]: "[A] man raised from the station of a private citizen to the rank
of Chief Magistrate, possessed of but a moderate or slender fortune, and looking
forward to a period not very remote when he may probably be obliged to return
to the station from which he was taken, might sometimes be under temptations
to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue
to withstand.
An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of
the state to the acquisition of wealth. an ambitious man might
make his own aggrandizement,
by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents." The
force of this elemental observation also produced America's independent judiciary
in which the Federal judges hold office for life with no diminishment of their
compensation during their continuance in office (Constitution, Art. III, 1).
The Constitution's provisions on the crime of treason constitute
an excellent example of how a multifaceted issue involving human
frailties and malevolent
intentions can be regulated fairly. The Constitution defined "Treason" to
consist only in levying war against the United States, or in adhering to the
enemies of the United States, giving then aid and comfort (Art. III, 3). And
because such a charge should not repose willy-nilly for reasons of personal vendetta,
the Constitution itself required that no person was to be convicted of Treason
unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession
in open Court (Art. III, 3). In the American Constitution the requirements for holding office
were confined to age, birth and residence. In the Iranian constitutional
scheme the qualifying
officer is supposed to be imbued with divine and moral qualities. For example,
Article 91 required that six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council
be just and aware theologians; the other six to be lawyers (jurists).
Article 109
required the Supreme Leader and members of the Leadership Council "to be
learned and virtuous and have social and political savvy, to have courage and
strength and have sufficient management skills." Article 157 called for
the employment and appointment of judges who are "just and meritorious."
In the post-September 11 world of America one often reads of steps
taken to make America more secure -- Consolidating power, "streamline" the
intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracy, federal preemption,
central control and funding
of national preparedness, control the borders and movements, wage war by resolution, "fabricate
pretenses of approaching danger [Hamilton warned in No. 25]" and sacrifice
the hard-earned civil liberties for a safer America.
If not temporary in nature,
the cumulative effect of these "anti-terrorism" measures will inevitably
begin to disrupt the heretofore horizontal distribution of power which the Constitution
spread among the citizens and the states and Federal governments. The replacement
of that order will be inevitably a centralized vertical system (or pillar-ing)
of power and government, which will be the death knell of the republic as we
know it. With that demise, one must fear also the eventual demise of the horizontal
format of the international legal system as the domestic encouragement of greater
unilateralism on the part of the powerful states shall produce a hierarchical
international system. That will increase the overall global incidence of oppression. The Iranian fears
The heart of the Iranian foreign policy obsession in the post-WWI
era, which includes the Pahlavi kings (1921-1979) and the religious
kingship of the Ayatollahs
(1979-present), is shadowed by two primal phobias -- first, the fear of territorial
disintegration and, second, the fear of foreign intervention.
The first fear -- fear of territorial disintegration -- arises
out of a sacred, primal and visceral bond that an Iranian has with
the birthland, one which is
qualitatively different from the texture of other topophilia experienced by
other national groups. This is necessarily so because in the Iranian
attachment to
the birthland grows out of more than thousands of years of inhabitation by
a people in the relatively confined area of the Iranian plateau.
In the larger scale of human migrations, the inhabitants of the
Iranian plateau rarely if ever migrated beyond the confines of
the plateau, producing therefore
a concentrated or viscose form of love of the land, rarely understood and much
less appreciated by the mobile and extraterritorial cultures of Western Europe. "The
vanity of the Persians," wrote the ignorant British chargé d'affaires
in Tehran in 1820, "makes them regard their country as the most favoured
spot of the universe and the object of envy and desire to all neighbouring
states." J.B.
Kelly, Great Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880 (Oxford, 1968), pp.
169-70].
Vanity or not, the preservation of Iran's territorial
integrity therefore commands from every Iranian government a vigilance against
separatist machinations
inside
and dismemberment plots cooked up outside.
The second phobia -- the fear of foreign intervention -- arises
from the nation's disdain for failing to be the master of its own
house. There are two anxieties
at play here, governmental and national. On the governmental side, first, the
regime in power is fearful of being swept from power, which usually has dire
consequences for the life, liberty or property of the rebuked and, second,
any partial reform or importation of corrupting foreign cultural
influences may undermine
the legitimacy of the governor and hasten his departure from power. On a national
scale, few would welcome a regime change, no matter how desirable, by foreign
intervention because that would violate the precept of needing to be the master
of one's own domain.
The United States on the other hand has not experienced the enlargement
and contractions of its territorial boundaries as has Iran through
successive historical periods
(a process which is still ongoing). If any thing, since its inception, the
United States has expanded its living room from ocean to ocean
and continues to expand
its political space by conquest, alliances, and police actions to the four
corners of the world, a process which continues today in Mesopotamia
and Hindukush. While
there is great patriotism among Americans, the crippling hold that the birthland
can have on the individual's sense of belonging is not as acute in this the
most mobile of populations and societies. Bicycle of fear: The Arab-Persian paradigm
The allergic reaction of most Iranians to the term "Arabian Gulf" is
best understood in terms of the larger pathology that grips the Iranian psyche
-- the loss of identity. In that context, the struggle over the maintenance of
the name of "Persian Gulf" looms as the last stand of all things Persian
or Iranian. In the aftermath of the Islamic revolution, the fear of loss of identity
has grown even greater because the Iranian nationalist views the government's
Islamic proclivity as an extension of the conquest and acculturation of Persia
by the Arabs beginning in the seventh century.
It is peculiar that the Iranian nationalist does not have the
same antipathy, however, toward the Greeks and Mongols who conquered
Persia. Three factors explain
this difference. First, neither the Greek nor the Mongol invasion transformed
the Iranian culture and so presently one sees virtually no discernable residue
or reminder of their passage through Persia. Second, the Greek and Mongol conquests
had a beginning and an end. Third, the geographical distance clearly separated
the Persian from the centers of Greek and Mongol worlds. By contrast, the adjacency
of the Persian and Arab has kept alive the seething mutual antipathy between
the two along complex cultural, religious, ethnic, territorial, and linguistic
divides.
The pathology of fear which grips the Iranian Arab-phobe and the
Arab Irano-phobe is the flip side of the same coin. The Iranian
views the Arab as
the one intent
on finishing the job that it began in the seventh century, continually eroding
and erasing the vestiges of the Iranian world. In this struggle against the
Arab hegemony, the Iranian nationalist defends the name of the "Persian
Gulf" and
the inseparability of the Tonbs and Abu Musa Islands from Iran, and disdains
the creeping of the Palestinian causes into Iranian domestic and international
agenda.
The Arab's fear of the Iranian, too, has to do with unfinished
business, in that because the Arab has not finished off the Iranian
the Iranian will
hit back one day to avenge fully the original Arab trespass.
In this cycle of mutual
fear, the mistrust of the other is currency. Unless each side truly comes
to believe -- by self-realization or by international guarantees
of collective
security -- that the other will not annihilate it, no lasting
peace shall ever reign between
the Persian and Arab.
Unfinished business: The U.S.-Iraq paradigm
The fear of unfinished business also explains the extraordinary
lengths to which the Bush Administration went to invade and
occupy Iraq. The psychosis fueling
that adventure was so compelling that the Administration would fabricate evidence,
defy the United Nations, forge legal theories, break with traditional allies,
risk all credibility here and abroad, commit blood and treasure in unacceptable
amounts, and suffer the odium of an indignant Iraqi people.
The Desert Storm stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime,
but set the institutional framework to contain and squeeze the
Iraqi regime. Many at the
time wished the United States had finished the job. The assassination plot
against President Bush on his visit to Kuwait on April 14, 1993,
made that point all
the more relevant. Clearly, vengeance was to be Saddam Hussein's.
The psychology of the case against the leadership of Iraq in
2003 did not dwell on how imminent was the danger posed by Saddam
Hussein, but rather on the foreseeability
of the harm that he could inflict on this country. Given what one knew of Iraqi
leadership, was it foreseeable that it would become another al-Qaeda, with
a devastating agenda against America?
The decision-maker had the common knowledge that the Iraqi leadership
possessed the means to inflict untold harm on the American public.
The Iraqi know-how in
bio-chemical warfare gave the regime the ability to weaponize the know-how
and strike at the United States. The regime also had demonstrated
in the past that
it was predisposed to using chemical and biological weapons, as it did on its
enemies and civilian populations. It may have had a hand also in the first
bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
The decision-maker presumed that Iraq had the motive to harm
the United States: for twelve years the U.S. had backed and enforced
an embargo that had robbed
the country of trade, frustrated the country's scientific and development plans,
carved out the north and south into semi-autonomous regions, controlled the
sale of its oil, patrolled the skies over northern and southern
Iraq, and openly called
for, intrigued and financed the overthrow of the regime. If there was one candidate
among the world's villains who could have the motive, opportunity, and means
to hurt the United States it was the Iraqi regime.
The US Administration believed therefore that the Iraqi regime
had the requisite criminal intent to harm the United States, its
citizens, allies, and interests.
The idea, therefore, was to strike at the snake, a half-wounded snake, in its
den rather than to arrest it after it had decimated thousand of people at its
first convenient opportunity.
One cannot ignore the faint similarity of the US invasion of
Iraq with the al-Qaeda's aerial attack on the New York's World
Trade Center in September 2001. That too
itself was the conclusion of an unfinished business, from February 26, 1993. Conclusion
If paranoia is a disorder which can warp one's sense of reality
and thereby lead to miscalculations of catastrophic proportions,
then perhaps one should prescribe
a remedy for it and invite the afflicted to address the situation. The regimen
is a two-step program. First there are steps that may be taken by countries caught
in the "bicycle of fear" or rather paranoia in their bilateral relations.
Simultaneously, the organs of the international community as a whole need to
impress an equal rule of law which is consistent, and to enforce a complete ban
on activities to induce or cause regime and territorial changes from the outside.
In the bilateral phase, the first step in any self-realization program is
to accept the existence of the problem, without offering up excuses for why
one
is or behaves in a certain fashion. The next step is to apologize for the harm
done to others by one's conduct and pledge not to repeat the offense. In the
annals of Irano-American relations few offenses have drawn as much heat as
the continuing legacy of Operation Ajax, which rid the Iranian landscape
of the likelihood
of a soviet-style communist takeover in 1953. In present-day terms every time
Washington speaks of regime change in Iran or encourages the citizens there
to reform or rise up against their oppressors, the ghost of the 1953 indignity
reasserts
itself.
The American involvement was neither necessary nor sufficient
to expel Mossaddeq from power or return the Shah to the throne.
To claim so much credit for the
CIA's role is just to add to the bombast associated with America's delusion
of grandeur. For one thing, Mossaddeq was appointed by the Shah
to serve as prime
minister and under the Iranian Constitution he could be dismissed, as he was,
by the Shah: so all the talk about the CIA subverting the popularly-elected
Mossaddeq government is not exactly correct. Equally, all the talk
about the CIA restoring
the Shah to the throne is factually suspect, as the monarch had not resigned
or abdicated; he took a trip abroad at Mossaddeq's recommendation and with
the knowledge that he will be returning.
The vitriol that surrounds this episode has so polarized the
thinking of Iranians that nobody can even entertain, let alone
fathom, the likelihood that the end
game for 19-21 August 1953 was scripted by the Shah, Mossaddeq and American
Embassy, with the appropriate signals to the Soviet Union not to
meddle. In short, had
there not been Operation Ajax, there would have been "Operation Darya," a
similar coup to thwart the efforts of the Tudeh, which was shielded by an unwitting
Mossaddeq and the general chaos, to take control of the Iranian state.
If Tudeh
had triumphed, the clergy would have been the first casualties of the purges
which were sure to follow, pretty much along the lines practiced by the Soviets
in Central Asia, where the mosques were closed, clerics were rounded up,
and the Islamic institutions were dismantled. The bazaar, another
pillar of Iranian
politics, would have collapsed under the confiscation and banning of private
means of production. The sovietization of the military and bureaucracy
would have resulted in hundreds if not thousands of purges. Therefore,
the former
Secretary of State Albright's open and formal acknowledgement
during her tenure in office
of the American role in August 1953 episode in Iran and the retarding
of the country's democratic development and eventual spiral into
oppression was absurd
and unwarranted.
In general international law there is no prohibition against
a country like the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs
of another country,
like Iran.
That is just the way it is and everybody does it, as President Ford once
remarked about the U.S. overthrow of the elected Allende government in
Chile. Yet, the
U.S. is obligated by treaty to butt out of Iran's internal affairs. In
Article 1 of the General Principles of the Algiers Declaration
(19 January 1981),
which ended the Iran Hostage Crisis, the US "pledges that it is and from now on
will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly,
politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs." Period.
This Algiers Declaration has the force of law both in international
law and as a matter of the US Constitution, by which international
agreements are the law
of the land. President Bush may not be subject to the vagaries of international
law, but he should not be allowed to flout the Constitution.
Perhaps the internationalization of the Algiers Pledge should
be the starting point for breathing life into the very moribund
so-called "collective security" regime
under the United Nations Charter, or even to start anew. Ultimately, in the absence
of trust among nations there will always be fear which peace alone shall not
contain. This article is based on a presentation at The 2003 Middle East & Central
Asia Conference, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, October 18, 2003.
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
|
