Staring down Iran
Washington and Teheran are embroiled in a strong-jawed staring match and each is determined never to blink. The standoff is in the UN Security Council but it signals another war where the US bombs Iran to set back Iranian nuclear ambitions for some decades.
Whenever that happens, it may be more a war of religions than a pragmatic tussle to halt nuclear proliferation. Ideology, clashing worldviews and irrational beliefs seem to be driving this confrontation. Nothing good can come of going further down such a path of willful incomprehension and absence of dialogue.
Iran has a religion that says submission to Shiite commands rooted in the Holy Koran and commentaries should govern life at the levels of the individual, society and nation. The regime’s leaders, politicians, courts and laws enforce these beliefs within Iran.
Iran’s leaders want more power in their region to secure this way of life against foreign interference. Perhaps, they also want to evangelize their Shiite beliefs abroad but that is not yet clear.
America has a set of beliefs, not called a religion, which express submission to a revered core of works, called the American Constitution, its commentaries and corollaries. This revered core is said to lay down democracy, capitalism and human rights as universal precepts for the life of individuals, society and the nation. The US government, politicians, courts and laws enforce these beliefs, just like Iran.
The White House is trying to extend these precepts actively to the entire world. The United Nations is under severe pressure to spread them to other nations saying they are “universal human values�. The US punishes UN agencies and governments that are slow to cooperate by withholding financial and other aid. Currently, war is also being used as a means of persuasion.
Iran’s leaders disdain these American precepts, which go back a few centuries while their own ways go back over a millennium. It is hard to change, through force and punishment, what people believe generation after generation.
That was easier in the old days when military power sufficed to force colonized people to change their ways of life. Now, for reasons yet to be fully understood, force does not seem to work. Iraq and Afghanistan are current examples.
Yet, Washington is bent upon changing how Iranians live. The White House has branded as “evil� the government of a 3,500-year-old people. Congress has earmarked millions of dollars to help Iranians turn against their rulers to install some form of democracy patterned on American ideas.
To prevent American military intervention to dislodge them, Iran’s rulers wants to acquire the ultimate nuclear deterrent complete with missiles. America has used these deterrents for decades and US military doctrine still prefers to refine rather than renounce nuclear weapons.
Through its refusal to talk to Teheran, Washington is paying no heed to the fear caused by the mighty US military machine eye-balling Iran from nearby Iraq and the Persian Gulf. At the same time, China, Russia and nuclear-armed Sunni Pakistan, a close American ally, inhabit Iran’s other borders.
Nor does Washington heed the fear aroused among Iranian theologians by its repeated references in the same breath to God, the US Constitution, democracy and capitalism. Who is this God? Is there a new universal God of America’s Constitution who supersedes the God of Islam?
Or is He the God of Jesus Christ? That would make these American policies a proxy for a worldview that has been Islam’s enemy for more than 1,300 years. If so, America and Iran are stumbling to an awful war of religions disguised as something else.
9 Responses to “Staring down Iran”
To equate Iranian Shiite Theocracy to the Democratic values expressed in the Constitution is beyond beliefe. It is the height of chronic relativism equivilancy.
I am sorry, but they are not relatively equivilant ways of governing. I am not even going to go into the obvious differences.
Statements like
are falsely vague, to provide more weight to the writer’s suppositions. There is nothing unclear about their desires,as they have openly stated them on numerous occasions.
Statements like:
and
are banal, at best. Perhaps we need to go back to the old caste system in India, as it is very old, too. The feudal system in Europe lasted a long time, so it must be better too. And of course we need think about restoring the Pharoes and Roman Emporers while we are at it.
Rubbish is what I say to the underlying conceits of Mr. Khindaria. Government and politics based on the concepts of the Enlightment (which pre-dates the US, but is the basis of the concept of the people ruling the country, not religious leaders or Kings) is absolutly a more modern, and better, form of government.
I cannot believe you would actually advocate that because Shiite religous rule has been around 3500 years it should be allowed to remain.
Again, rubbish.
This analysis would make sense if Iran’s people truly wanted to live under a religious Caliphate. That view represents Iran’s current leaders, but not its people. If this was the majority view, then why would the govt be jailing and torturing student dissenters and purging progressive faculty from the universities?
I can agree with this statement:
“That was easier in the old days when military power sufficed to force colonized people to change their ways of life. Now, for reasons yet to be fully understood, force does not seem to work. Iraq and Afghanistan are current examples.”
I’ll suggest one reason force no longer seems to work to make colonized people change their ways of life. The force required boils down to cultural destruction if not genocide. The world, or the weight of worldwide public opinion, usually applies pressure to stop genocide; sometimes that pressure is light, sometimes intense.
I may disagree with this author on occasion; however, in this instance, he has accurately and thoughtfully boiled this confrontation down to its underlying and often unspoken issues. For anyone to deny the religious element of this dispute is ignoring reality.
This author does not require me to defend him, but I take strong exception to the criticism that he is engaging in ‘chronic relativism equivalency’. Impressive sounding criticisms look foolish when misapplied. Mr. Khindaria asserted a perceived linkage of core beliefs that drive both societies and their worldview. He did not say that one was better or that they are even the same.
The current administration’s core group of supporters has consistently hammered the message that this government is Judeo-Christian in nature following the precepts enshrined in the Ten Commandments. Do you really think the Muslim world ignores this message?
Others may choose to believe that the reason we face hostile Islamic fundamentalism is that they ‘hate our freedom’, but I would rather soberly face the facts.
This right here…spells it all out in my mind.
In my opinion, the Muslims do believe that America is trying to impose its values on the ME, and wants to destroy their religion as it conflicts with our democratic system. That is why the fundamentalists among them will use any means necessary, including the killing of innocent civilians on both sides.
We believe that men and women are equals, but in the Muslim culture they are not, and they believe that this is the way God set things up. They will never accept that way of thinking or us trying to establish secular governments that take the place of religious law.
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