July 27, 2009 "Creative-i" -- I have been reading, with much despair and a deal of consternation, the torrent of ‘analysis’ coming out of ‘left’ field about which, if any, side to support in the ongoing struggles in Iran and, at the end of the day, a good deal more is revealed about the ‘left’ in the West than the situation in Iran.

Typically, the ‘left’ has much ‘advice’ to offer Iran, yet the real issue for us, here in the ‘developed’ world is what are we going to do about our governments. Yet such arrogance is not new, it has its roots in the ideology of racism which unfortunately permeates all of us here in the so-called developed world. We look outward instead of inward, where the issues we really need to confront, reside. Let the Iranian people get on with sorting out their own ruling class, they don’t need us to ‘guide’ them.

It is imperative to separate the issue of Western involvement in events from the distinctly Iranian issues of class, religion, gender and so forth, that regardless, have their causes (and solutions) in Iran. This is not say that Western involvement/interference doesn’t affect events and end up being part of the process, but then this is precisely the problem we in the West have to confront: How to separate out the effects of our incessant meddling in other countries’ affairs from the indigenous processes? So, whatever happened to analysis, class, economic, social and otherwise?

The election
It’s pretty obvious that regardless of any fiddling that took place, Ahmadinejad ‘won’. I put it in quotes because the real power in Iran, the entrenched theocracy, controls who can and cannot contest elections. Nevertheless it is apparent that Ahmadinejad garnered the most votes even in an otherwise engineered election.

That said, here in the West where everything is boiled down to simplistic headlines that hide the complexity of the underlying events, it is even more imperative that when the ‘left’ does throw its two-pennyworth into the mix, that we take care not to project our own desires (and misconceptions) onto a situation fraught with danger given the central role that Iran continues to play in the West’s ‘Great Game’, just as it has done for well over a century (See my review of F. William Engdahl’s excellent book ‘A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order’ for more on the disastrous effects of Western intervention in Iran, and most important, how Iran fits into Western strategic and economic interests, that form the background to the current situation).

“The early days of summer of 2009 proved quite stormy in the Islamic Republic of Iran in terms of politics. Almost the entire politically vocal population of the 70-million strong Iran, that’s 40 million people, took part in the election of a new president. It is for the first time in Iran’s history that a fully-fledged election campaign has been launched in the country, with the main opponents, old rivals in the struggle for power since the 1980s, namely the incumbent leader (rahbar) Ali Khamenei and Mir Hossein Mousavi, then Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had an opportunity to rally their supporters.” — Iran: the new elite By Vladimir YURTAYEV, 2 July, 2009, Strategic Culture Foundation.

What we (conveniently) forget is the fact that given the total domination by the Western media of events, no matter their location, it is virtually impossible for us to get a handle on exactly what happens, almost anywhere (for more on this see the excellent analysis of ‘news’ coverage in the West by Jeremy R. Hammond, ‘The Case of the ‘Fatwa’ to Rig Iran’s Election’). You need to spend a lot of time digging around to understand what’s really going on, even those engineered by Western interests, let alone the Machiavellian goings on of the Iranian state (just as they are everywhere).

But for the left, here in the West, it’s not an issue of whether to support Ahmadinejad or not, never mind the ‘opposition’ (an opposition that was allowed to contest the election, and as such is every bit a part of the ruling autocracy). After all, Ahmadinejad is not exactly a leftie (in spite of at least one writer, calling him such). No, the real issues transcend Iran and its election.

Yurtayev makes the following interesting observations,

“Meanwhile things in and around Iran are moving in groove, with the partisan media are working off what money they got to (what some quarters thought) spin-doctor a new president, although the previous one has been re-elected. 200 protesters are presented as if they were 200,000. Almost 13 million people make their home in Tehran, so even one million is just one sixth of the city’s grown-up population. The others voted against the protesters. The whole thing boils down to the following: part of the old revolutionary elite that’s taken possession of economic profits gave way to the new elite following M. Ahmadinejad’s win in 2005, an elite that’s emerged on the basis of the Army and that’s relying on the other part of the old revolutionary elite, related to rahbar Ali Khamenei. The problem is whether the new old elite will manage to persuade the opponents not to take all of their money out of the country or not.”

There are two things going on here, the first is Iran from the inside. We forget that inside Iran, the vast majority of people have other things on their minds than what the West says or advocates (another example of our damn arrogance). We assume that all or most Iranians view events just as we do and afford them the same importance, but forget that most of our contacts with Iran are effectively in and of the West, even those originating with Iranians (see Hammond above for examples). All the comments and opinions we get exposed to are designed for the Western mind(set), largely reinforcing existing stereotypes.

As Yurtayev points out, in Tehran, the majority supported Ahmadinejad. But what we saw on our tv sets were vast crowds, whether for or against Ahmadinejad, who knows? The media didn’t tell us or they misled us into thinking that they were mostly composed of Mousavi’s posse. One thing is clear: there all kinds of internal power plays going on in Iran that are tangenital to relations with the US and the nukes slash terrorism nonsense. If I were a student of Iranian politics, I could figure out what kinds of interests were involved and make some educated guesses at where its all headed, but I’m not. In any case, what we think of events in Iran are neither here nor there.

What is important is Iran in the international arena, as an ‘object’ of Western interests, whether economic, political, strategic, it inhabits a media ‘space’ created specifically for its Western audience. You know the stuff, ‘inscrutable’, ‘evil’ even, but definately beyond our ken and in need of ‘translation’ for us dummies.

Thus for all of us here in the West, let alone the lefties, it is vital to separate the two, after all we can support Iran’s independence and autonomy without supporting or opposing Ahmadinejad.

Let the Iranians get on with their own struggles and let us support them by concentrating on stopping ‘our’ governments interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations like Iran.

July 28, 2009 "Creative i" -- Okay, the battle on the ‘left’ concerning who to support in Iran appears to come down to the following:

On the one hand we appear to have those who say that the mass demonstrations are solely the result of the West’s attempts to undermine and overthrow the existing regime, utilizing a ‘colour revolution’ similar to those used in the Ukraine and Georgia. And there can be no doubt that Western intelligence agencies are up to their necks in destabilization strategies (see below). If this is indeed true the question to ask is: Have Western agencies fomented or exploited the opposition and to what degree has it been a success as measured by the mass demonstrations and by elements of the Left supporting the demonstrations?

On the other side as it were, are those who say there is no foreign intervention, the mass movement is wholly indigenous and reflects growing opposition to the theocracy, or at the very least Western machinations are only incidental to the situation. A good example of this approach is advocated by Hamid Dabashi in his essay ‘Left is wrong on Iran’ where he says,

‘The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry. But having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing, being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different, as being impervious to the flagrant charlatanism of an upstart demagogue like Ahmadinejad. The sign and the task of a progressive and agile intelligence is to hold on to core principles and seek to incorporate mass social uprising into its modus operandi. My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad and against the masses of millions of Iranians daring the draconian security apparatus of the Islamic Republic.’ — ‘Left is wrong on Iran’

The problem with this approach is that reduces the issues down to a one-dimensional ‘for or against’ analysis, for although some on the left are supporting Ahmadinejad, this is not the be all and end all of the debate. I for one, see the situation as more complex than either supporting or opposing Ahmadinejad, after all the ‘official opposition’ led by Musavi is exploiting the situation every bit as much as Ahmadinejad is, tapping into the discontent felt by many, especially the secular (Westernized?) strand of Iranian society. And it would be foolish let alone naive to assume that Western support for Musavi is predicated on the West’s desire for democracy to break out in Iran.

Layla Anwar in her essay ‘A Velvet Revolution or Lesser Shades of Black?’ tells us,

‘I also think that the Left in general is committing another huge mistake by not supporting the Iranian protests for change and reform. The idiotic conspiracy theories put forward by the leftists that the U.S, Saudi Arabia and even Israel are behind this unrest are ludicrous. This does not mean that the U.S would not add intensity to Iranian winds. However to argue that what is taking place in Iran is solely the work of American and British intelligence is stupid to say the least – as it willfully ignores the clear unceasing demands of the Iranian protesters.’

Idiotic conspiracy theories? What planet are you living on Layla? Anwar calls it a conspiracy, I call it US foreign policy. The problem I have with this is not that the mass demonstrations are solely the result of Western destabilization attempts but that the West have at the very least attempted to utilize them to their own advantage and I have yet to read anywhere that ‘what is taking place in Iran is solely the work of American and British intelligence’ being advocated by some on the left. It is surely obvious that a vast media operation  swung into action weeks before the election and one that continues to this day.

Moreover, is Anwar saying that had Musavi won he would have delivered (Western?) democracy to Iran (and in any case is that what Iran needs?)? I think not. It seems to me that we have two factions of the ruling theocracy vying for control with both using the discontent felt by at the very least two sections of Iranian society. Throw in Western interference (with it’s agenda) and the end result is confusion about exactly what is going on in Iran, and surely this is the objective of the West. It is naive to think that the US and its allies after demonizing Iran for the past three decades doesn’t want to see a Western-allied government in power, indeed ‘regime change’ is their publicly stated objective. The issue for the US is, how best to achieve it?

Anwar goes on,

‘And a friend remarked lately — IRNA, the official propaganda mouthpiece of the exclusive Shiite theocratic entity no longer needs to compose new propaganda pieces -it is instead relying on translations into Farsee of propaganda pieces from the leftist websites.

‘Having said that, I must also agree with Malcolm Lagauche who argues, that supporting the reformists may boil down to supporting in the end – Musavi and Rafsandjani – both advisors to Khomeini and I quote from Lagauche’s article entitled Another Grand Illusion (3) dated July 6-9, 2009 — “Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims he is the rightful winner of the June 12 presidential election, was part of the group (along with his current allies former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former House Speaker Mehdi Karoubi) that favored secret contacts with the United States and Israel to get the military supplies needed to fight the war with Iraq. Khomeini’s blessing allowed Rafsanjani, Karoubi and later Mousavi to proceed with secret contacts that involved emissaries from the Reagan camp and the Israeli government.”’

This smacks of a ‘lesser of two evils’ approach, in other words Musavi and co are a shade better than Ahmadinejad (Anwar’s ‘lesser shade of black’) and judging by the way the West has backed Musavi, they clearly think that Musavi is ‘their man’.

I think it’s vital not to forget that bringing Iran’s resources and strategic location under US control is the objective of this the latest attempt at a ‘colour revolution’ whether ‘indigenous’ or the result of outside interference, to think otherwise is as delusary as thinking that Ahmadinejad is a leftie.

‘Much intelligent analysis has pointed to similarities between a strategy employed by the Mousavi camp in June 2009, and the strategy used in earlier campaigns of destabilization against U.S. targets for regime change that date back to the elections in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and the Ukraine in 2004, to name three where it succeeded. As was the case in these three other countries, the challenger Mousavi and his aides started by declaring Mousavi the “definite winner” by very wide margins on the day of the election (Friday, June 12), long before the polls had closed and the votes were counted; one Mousavi aide even told Agence France Presse that “Mousavi has got 65% of the votes cast,” a “landslide victory,” AFP called it. This was followed by Mousavi’s claim on the next day (Saturday, June 13) that his rightful victory and therefore the will of the Iranian people had been stolen by the incumbent President Ahmadinejad’s supporters in the Ministry of the Interior, with the official result delegitimized; from here went the calls to Iranians and all democracy-loving peoples the world over to reject it.’ — Iran: Riding the “Green Wave” at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Herman and Peterson go on to detail nature of US meddling in the internal affairs of Iran, with hundreds of millions of dollars being allocated for ‘regime change’ “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” “(Seymour M. Hersh, “The Bush Administration Steps Up Its Secret Moves against Iran,” New Yorker, July 7, 2008. In the latter, Hersh makes it clear that this funding was for terrorist operations against targets inside Iran, and has employed both CIA and Joint Special Operations Command units, as well as regional terrorist groups such as the Jundallah (or Iranian People’s Resistance Movement), the Mujahedin-e Khalq, and the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan.)”

Therefore, the question to ask is: Had Mousavi and co ‘won’ the election would they have ‘delivered’ Iran to the West or is it no more than a ‘tiff’ between different factions of the ruling theocracy with Mousavi exploiting Western dreams of bringing Iran back into the imperialist fold? So who is using whom here?

Missing from the debate on both sides are the views of the (indigenous) Iranian left, surely the ones to consult. Isn’t this the core of our dilemma as the left was not only excluded from the election but we have no means of identifying to what degree the left participated in the mass demonstrations, nor what their take is on the situation.

As I have stated before, and I’ll say it again, the real challenge for the Western left is not which side, if any, to support in Iran but to focus our energies on changing the policies of our respective governments which regardless are bent on regime change in Iran by one means or another. To assume otherwise is pure self-delusion.

As Bill Blum says,

‘The classic “outside agitators” can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh’s residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well. Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters. The New York Times reported: “An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).”’ — Much ado about nothing?

What is depressing is that the left is having this argument in the first place! In this sense then, the arguments on the left have been an unqualified success, for the Empire that is, for they have diverted attention away from the US and its allies attempts to install a regime favourable to the West. Instead, we bicker about which side to back and find ourselves the unwitting accomplices of the Empire regardless of which side we support.