.
Next
act in America's grand imperial drama set to unfold in Iran
Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate. Georgie
Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington
May 30, 2003: (Chicago
Tribune) WASHINGTON --
If you think the steps leading to the war in Iraq marked a historically
strange pathway for America, take a look today at the developing
indicators of the next involvement, in Iran.
Already we can see the opening of a new act in the administration's
grand imperial drama.
The players' voices have reverberated in the nation's capital, as the
charges of support for Al Qaeda and the building of weapons of mass
destruction were leveled not at Iraq (where those charges so far have
turned out to be baseless), but at Iran, where the zealots here hope to
find more fertile fields.
American congressmen, both Republicans and Democrats, were widely urging
some kind of action against Iran (Florida Republican Rep. Porter Goss
and Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut), although not
military action.
And administration hawks like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
asserting that the May 12 Al Qaeda bombings in Saudi Arabia had support
from Iran, said there was "no question" of such links and that
action should begin.
Once again, just as after Sept. 11, 2001, a dispute within the
administration is developing, with intelligence factions counseling
caution and the zealots around Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney
urging a policy of confrontation, this time with Tehran.
How exactly is that confrontation to be waged? Here we approach the
interesting part.
- During the 1970s and '80s, as a correspondent on the lookout for
underground, guerrilla and militant groups that might someday come to
power in various countries, I met with the People's Mujahedeen of Iran.
They were that odd creature, a group of militant Persian secularists who
helped the Ayatollah Khomeini come to power in 1979, then were outlawed
by him when he formed his rigid Islamic theocracy.
I interviewed their leader, Massoud Rajavi, in Paris and then visited
their headquarters in Baghdad in 1984. By that time, Saddam Hussein had
given them sanctuary in Iraq, and they had armed camps of several
thousand men--and women--on the Iraq-Iran border. Finally, I interviewed
the woman who was their political chief, Maryam Rajavi, wife of Massoud,
in their headquarters outside Paris.
I found them interesting, if perplexing, militants for the Middle East.
In the United States, the movement constantly seesawed from being a
darling of many congressmen to being put on the State Department's
terrorist list.
Then they kind of disappeared--until last week, when American soldiers
in Iraq visited the Mujahedeen bases and signed a cease-fire with them.
Immediately afterward, the war-party zealots in the administration began
actively to push the long-forgotten group as the new opposition to the
Islamic mullahs in Iran.
The ascendancy of this organization, or the use of it by radical
hard-liners on the Middle East here in Washington, is being propelled by
political figures such as Daniel Pipes, who argues that there is no hope
for Israel-Palestine unless the Palestinians are totally humiliated and
defeated.
- The second place where hard-liners are seeking to enlist local and
regional forces against the Iranian government is in the northwest of
Iran, which is almost totally populated by ethnic Azeris who come
originally from neighboring Azerbaijan.
While these efforts are, for the moment, more murky than those with the
Mujahedeen, it is known that some leaders of the Iranian Azeri
population have been in Washington in recent days, meeting with
administration officials.
These events, not to speak of others that are surely taking place
without our knowledge, should raise some troublesome questions for
Americans who are serious about a responsible American role in the
world.
The Bush administration is avidly playing the old British game of
nations and of imperiums in which the metropole (London) armed the
tribes in its colonial empire, divided and ruled and, within 50 years of
its colonial height, was a struggling ex-empire.
These practices were exactly the opposite of American principles of
expanding the institutions and law of the West to other countries--until
this administration.
Today's American administration has shown so far that it is very good at
destroying, but neither interested nor talented, at least so far, at
building, much less rebuilding. With Afghanistan and Iraq in shards, are
we to move on to the most religiously, politically and ethnically
complicated country of all?
Moreover, Iran is in the midst of its own slow-motion civil war, in
which liberalizing and modern forces are fighting the Islamic
retrogression of the mullahs. Do we want to remind them of the
anti-Americanism of their past? Or are there actually forces in this
administration that want to perpetuate chaos in the world?
----------
E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com
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