-submitted by an NYU student in World Can’t Wait
A country defined by religious fanatic ideology,
progressively becoming a fascist state, when given access to nuclear power is a
threat to international security. Sure.
The question that should be asked is whether the country referred to is Iran, or the United States.
While tension mounted this week over Iran’s growth
in nuclear capacity, one term that entered into the discourse was
‘islamo-fascist.’ This is likely an
accurate description of Iran’s elected president, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, however
the word’s usage to describe a man whose rhetoric largely parallels that of the
current US president, a man who also was able to come to power in a political
climate defined by religious fundamentalism, is dangerously short-sighted and
hypocritical.
Two points are overlooked in the present debate. The first is that the rhetoric of the leaders
of the US and Iran are equally
threatening to global security: both are
rooted in power-mongering and careless religious zealotry, and while Iran has entered the initial stages of nuclear
proliferation, the US
already has thousands of active warheads.
Ahmedinijad is undoubtedly a threat to international security. His rejections of power agreements with Russia make it clear that Iran’s
development of nuclear power is not intended for civilian purposes. But in every article that stresses the danger
posed by Ahmedinejad, it is essential to also note that the world’s most
influential nuclear power, by far, is the United States itself. In 2001, a country that has recently begun
conducting foreign policy based on biblical rhetoric of ‘good and evil’, a
country that has demonstrated flagrant disregard for international law and a
willingness to engage repeatedly in pre-emptive war time and again, possessed
8000 active nuclear warheads. That was
in 2001.
The second overlooked fact is that the current political
situation in Iran in part a result of more than 50 years of US meddling in that
country’s politics and economy, which has progressively strained international relations
between the US and Iran, and has culminated in the Bush administration’s recent
relegation of Iran to the ‘axis of evil,’ which, along with subsequent
inflammatory Bush administration rhetoric, makes any compromise between the two
countries politically untenable.
Amidst all of the recent talk of containing Iran, and the
more recent Bush administration war drumming, the point is rarely made that
Ahmedinijad would likely not have won the 2005 Iranian elections on an extreme
religious anti-US platform were it not for the Bush administration’s offensive
rhetoric and genocidal foreign policy decisions that defined the international
political climate of the preceding years.
The potentially catastrophic impact of the Bush
administration’s war rhetoric is impounded by a long chain of US foreign policy
decisions that had collectively crushed much of the potential for moderation in
Iranian politics long before 2005.
In 1953, the US
effectively ousted Iran’s
elected reformist president Mossadeq because he planned to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, which would have allowed
the money from Iran’s
oil to stay within the country. In his
place, the US
backed the Shah against the will of the Iranian public. The Shah, Pahlevi, proceeded to establish a
repressive dictatorship that clamped down harshly on civil liberties. The US supported the Shah until his
eventual overthrow during the 1979 Islamic revolution.
In the war between
Iran and Iraq during the 1980’s, the US backed Iraq against Iran, at which point
the Reagan administration supported the Hussein dictatorship in Iraq in
obtaining the weapons of mass destruction which not only killed thousands of
Iraqi and Iranian civilians while we bolstered Saddam Hussein during the
1980’s, but also killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis indirectly as an effect
of the subsequent 10 years of US/UN sanctions and of the current genocidal
war.
During the 1990’s, reformist and fundamentalist forces
competed for political power, however the Bush administration’s offensive (in
both meanings of the word) rhetoric in the past 4 years has paved the way for
the religious extremist forces to win out, leading to Ahmedinijad’s victory in
the 2005 elections.
The rising tensions this week between Iran and the US (with EU support) is a competition between
two opposing brands of religious extremism, played out on a menacing backdrop
of the potential for global nuclear holocaust.
Ahmedinijad’s attempts to gain nuclear weapons are a threat, sure, but
the fact that a country that has in the past 50 years, motivated by imperialism
and ideology, killed millions if not tens of millions of civilians worldwide
has nuclear weapons now, and has, in
recent history, demonstrated a capability and willingness to use them with
blatant lack of respect for international law and intercultural humanity seems
equally, if not more threatening.
‘Your Government, on
the basis of outrageous lies, is waging an illegitimate and murderous war in Iraq, with
other countries in their sights. The
future is unwritten, which one we get is up to us.’ -from the Call for The World Can’t Wait (
Drive Out the Bush Regime