THE EFFECT OF THIS WAR

THE EFFECT OF THIS WAR ON IRAN: Juan R. Cole, who’s probably the best informed, sanest, and most articulate person around who writes on Iran, has given me permission to use the following assessment, penned March 17, on JWN. I should add that for his day job, Cole’s a distinguished Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
It seems to me that the likely scenario in Iran after an American Iraq war is … that it will rehabilitate nativism and anti-imperialism and help restore the popularity of the hardliners. While one cannot know for sure, it is even possible that the good performance of the conservatives in Tehran’s municipal elections was already in at least small part a sign of public concern about a return to U.S. hegemony.
When the US was far away, Khamenei’s anti-Washington rhetoric sounded increasingly old-fashioned and from another era. With GIs stomping all over Shiite Iraqi areas with large boots, occasionally shooting Shiites, and being in charge of the shrines at Najaf and Karbala, the potential for the US to give offense to Shiite Iranians is manifold. One could imagine enraged Revolutionary Guards slipping over the border to hit US troops, and an escalating series of reprisals and counter-reprisals.
Iranians have been politically mobilized during the past 25 years, and cannot be expected to react to such events sanguinely. Some young people may initially welcome the idea of greater US presence in the area, but that is likely to get old fast (remember a lot of Shiites in Lebanon at first thought the idea of an Israeli invasion in 1982 was a good one).
The hawks in Washington have failed to come to terms with mass political mobilization as a factor in decolonization. Their basic philosophy is that non-European peoples are easily led and easily fooled. It was the philosophy of the British Viceroys of India in the 1930s and 1940s, and of Anthony Eden and David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and it was false. (Its falseness is even demonstrated by the hawks’ recent humiliating failures in diplomacy at the UN and among world publics). Neocolonial arrangements can sometimes be made with fair success via local proxies, but whenever the veil slips too much and the hegemony becomes revealed as foreign domination, there is trouble. I don’t think the American planners of post-war Iraq, who are both incredibly arrogant and incredibly ignorant of history, understand the need for a light touch. And I don’t think Iran will react well to a heavy hand.