5. A Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Middle East.
In Part II of this article, we'll discuss in more detail these goals and their potential effects on the Middle East.
A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY IN IRAN. In pursuance of the third goal listed above, educating ourselves, let's discuss Iran, the resource-rich Middle Eastern country I know best. Numerous Iranian friends have recited for me the history of how various kings made shameful deals with foreigners, including giving up pieces of territory, and, of course, lucrative economic concessions (tobacco, minerals, oil). Opposition to these deals, going far back into history, is also remembered and honored. That opposition, because it favored Iranian people over exploiters and oppressors, belongs in the history of democratic thought in Iran.
August 2006 was the centennial of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. Why don't Americans know that 100 years ago Iran had a constitution that limited the powers of its monarch, setting up a system similar to European constitutional monarchies in which the king "reigned" rather than "ruled"? One of the main issues for the constitutionalists, who were also nationalists, was that the king gave too many favors to foreign (czarist Russian and imperial British) economic interests. However, the king and his foreign allies struck back, and after years of warfare the pro-constitution forces eventually lost. Among the martyrs of the Constitutional Revolution still honored in Iran were Armenian leader Yeprem Khan, bandit-turned-revolutionary Sattar Khan, and American schoolteacher Howard Baskerville. A teacher at a Presbyterian mission school in Tabriz, Iran, young Baskerville had no trouble recognizing the democratic side; he led a band of nationalists to break the royal blockade starving the city and was shot at age 24 on April 19, 1909.
In 1953, Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA arranged a coup d'etat that toppled the elected government of popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whose "crime" in the eyes of American oil companies had been nationalizing Iran's oil. The reinstalled "Shah" (king) ruled with an iron fist and the full support of the American government. The American government's cover story was that the Shah was our ally in the cold war against communist Russia. During the Shah's dictatorship, Iran's wealth flowed to U.S. interests as Iran purchased weaponry, manufactured products, education, technical expertise, even the beginnings of a nuclear power industry. Thousands of democracy seekers, some of them my friends and relatives, were jailed during the Shah's regime.
In 1979, in a popular uprising, Iranians finally overthrew the dictatorship and set up a republic (flawed though it came to be). Did the heirs of the American Revolution congratulate them and offer support? Guess again. The U.S. administration scurried to find a way to reverse the revolution. Assets were seized, boycotts and sanctions were imposed, visas were restricted, and Iran was labeled an outlaw, terrorist nation.
The hostage crisis served and still serves as a convenient excuse for U.S. "punishment" of post-revolution Iran. Few acknowledged the connection, however, between the 1953 coup and the "preemptive" seizure of the American embassy in Tehran (dubbed locally the "den of spies") by revolutionary students. The students believed that some folks working out of the embassy were spies plotting to bring back the same dictator in a rerun of the 1953 coup. Not that I'm justifying the taking of hostages; it's just that it's important to look for the reasons things happen.
After it was clear that the Iranian revolution could not be reversed, the U.S. administration encouraged Iran's neighbor, Iraq, to launch an all-out assault on Iran. Although the "world community" barely remembers Iraq's chemical weapons attacks on the Iranian town of Sardasht and on Iranian troops, thousands of women and men who survived the attacks suffer progressively more each year from their injuries, and children of survivors are still being born with disabilities. The execution of Saddam Hussein before he could be tried for those crimes left these unseen victims without closure.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND IRAN. What about today? We all know that the U.S. administration's policy is regime change in Iran. We are urged to hate and fear Iran's president and not to ask what the U.S. administration has in mind for Iran after the regime change. Bush is openly threatening Iran with aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and with a contingency plan to attack Natanz and other "targets" with bunker-busting "tactical" nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has arranged for the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran even though what Iran is doing, enriching uranium for a nuclear power industry, is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Someone I know, who worked in Iran's American-sponsored nuclear power industry during the time of the Shah, believes that powerful U.S. interests still want the U.S. to be the only country to sell nuclear power plants to Iran. Clearly, the U.S. government has blocked German and now Russian contractors from completing that project since the Americans left at the time of the revolution. The boycotts and interference with Iran's completion of their nuclear power plant started even before the current propaganda campaign (e.g., that Iran supposedly wants to build nuclear bombs to wipe out Israel). The economic motivation is just one person's theory, but it fits with the U.S. sale of nuclear technology to Libya, the increased U.S. competition with Russia, and with the plan for U.S.-MEFTA, doesn't it?
During the fall 2006 municipal elections in Iran, the Voice of America urged Iranians not to vote. So much for democracy. Recently there was a mysterious car-bombing in a southern province, accompanied by crocodile tears in the U.S. media about the "threat" of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia in Iran, as if "divide and conquer" hasn't been U.S. (and Israeli) policy in the region all along. None of this, of course, encourages the besieged Iranian government to ease restrictions on citizens' political freedoms.
MINDING OUR OWN BUSINESS: PEACE AND DEMOCRACY. In the Middle East, you can't tell the players without a scorecard. The good news is that we Americans don't really need that scorecard because it's not our place to make decisions about who's who in the Middle East. If we citizens just tend to the business of our own democracy here in the U.S.A, and work for peace and disarmament, we will be helping like-minded people in the Middle East region to also achieve their democratic goals.
NEXT TIME, in Part II: How five specific goals of the American democracy movement can help the democracy movement in the Middle East.
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