Rational Prejudice Of Iran
Iran cannot and will not trust diplomacy to resolve the confrontation with the United Nations Security Council over the suspected violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran cannot and will not trust the inducements of European Union envoys, of United Nations dignitaries, of the honest Brokers of the Non-Aligned Nations or Non Govermental Organizations West and East. Iran cannot and will not trust anyone. Iran stands alone, and it will fight alone to the last stone of its three-millennia heritage.
While Iran's representatives exhaust the beseechers of the United Nations — another dubious dialogue, another deft procrastination — it's revealing to examine why exactly Iran is secure in its refusal to concede anything. The answer is in the collective memory of Iranians, not only for the glory of the empire that Cyrus built once upon a time, but also for the dark certainty that, ever since Europeans came courting Cyrus's inheritors, there have been treachery and thievery.
The wealth of the Persian empire preceded and outlasted the Roman empire, stretching from the conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE through the dream of Alexander and the swords of Rome and Byzantium and Islam, up to the revival in 1501 under the sturdy Safavid Dynasty and its successor, the Qajars. Eighteenth-century European voyagers found a self-confident conqueror, The Qajar dynasty, that extended the power of the Shahs into India. The Napoleonic wars brought European emissaries who discovered quickly that the Persians had not kept up with the machinery of warfare. This is a profound detail. The defeats and humiliations of Persia that followed were forced by the fact that it was outgunned: initially by the Tsar in the first Russian War (1804-1813), then by Bonaparte, who offered the Treaty of Finkenstein (1807) that entangled weak Persia in the European balance of power. Like a pirate ship, the English empire soon sailed into the bazaar, beginning a two-century-long abusive relationship in which Persia ceded sovereignty in exchange for insults. No Englishman helped at all when the Tsar again crushed Persia in the Second Russian War (1826-1828) and stole land in the Causcasus and on the Caspian Sea. Starting in 1872, when the British Baron Reuter grabbed the entire industrial output of Persia, there was a barrage of contracts that put the trading, banking and oil revenues of Persia into European hands.The English also came to see the Qajars they'd robbed for a century to be obsolete dupes, and in 1925 Mr. Whitehall installed a Persian junior officer who fancied himself the founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty.
America joined in the bucaneering when it invaded and occupied Persia, now Iran, through the Second World War, along with our allies the Soviet apparatchiks and English mandarins, and then conspired with Britain's MI6 to wreck the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 because it tried to balance the Russians against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The crime of the Mossadeq coup has outlived the Cold War and colors the rage in Iranian Grand Ayatollah Khamenei's eyes. The last fifty years of betrayals, purges and ambushes have reinforced the original lesson that the West, and especially now the American empire, will make any imaginable false promise in order to belittle Iran. Iran's leadership need only glance at the list of recent American policies to fix its opinion of American probity: American spying on the 1979 revolution, American arming the Baathists in the Iran-Iraq War, American reinforcing Israel against the Hizballah of Lebanon, American funding of anti-Iran factions in Europe and Central Asia, American targeting of Iran for the next regime-change in the Axis of Evil. (See Ali M. Ansar's new "Confronting Iran" for the full tale of Europe's abuse of Iran.)
After two hundred years of European and American infamy, Iran has settled on the rational prejudice that it will never again negotiate its sovereignty. Moreover, Iran has settled on the hard-lined political notion that hegemony comes out of the barrel of gun, and the more radioactive the gun the more the back-stabbers of the Security Council respect it.
The decades ahead will challenge Iran's ambition to learn from its own mistakes. At this vantage, it is good history to ignore the apocalyptic agitprop from the mullahs and listen for the imperial tone from the tyrants of Teheran. They speak with the majesty of Cyrus, the indignity of the exploited, the gravity of the unmoved. Any deal Iran entertains will be worthless on paper and in deed, which Iran believes is how to do business with practiced deceivers like us.
Mr. Batchelor is host of "The John Batchelor Show" on the ABC radio network.The show airs in New York on 770 AM from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
