Unlike Arabs, Iran stands up to US
DONALD TRUMP’S RECKLESS dash into the Iran war last week reminds me of a question a young Jordanian posed at a meeting in Pakistan 36 years ago.
In October 1989, I was visiting the Pakistani city of Quetta as part of my fieldwork for a research project on democracy in Pakistan. But the big story in Quetta, as in some other Pakistani cities, was not democracy. It was the raucous celebration of Afghan Mujahideen’s victory over Soviet invaders in neighboring Afghanistan.
The anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan was mainly a Pashtun thing, and Pakistan had 26 million Pashtuns, double the number of those living in Afghanistan.
On the evening of Oct. 19, my friend Mian Jamil Ahmed, a well-known businessman in Quetta, came into Hotel Lourdes, where I was staying. I had invited him for dinner and chit-chat. Jamil had been a disciple of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom military dictator Gen. Ziaul Huq had murdered. He wanted to share with me the story.
As I received Jamil at the hotel counter, two Mujahideen activists asked him to drop in at their meeting in a hotel room. At their request, I went along. The room was packed with Arab, Uzbek, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Malaysian, and other Muslim youths, who were returning home after driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
A young Jordanian man asked a speaker: “Now that we are done with the [Soviet] Communists, how long do we need to throw the Yankees out of our lands?”
“Insha Allah, (Allah willing) soon,” the speaker said, without elaborating.
Back in my hotel room, I asked Jamil what he thought of the Jordanian’s question.
He said the Afghans could defeat the Soviet army because “independence is in their genes.” They had, he continued, defeated British invading armies three times,” and that “Alexander skirted the Pashtun area” while invading what is now Pakistan.
Jamil said that most of the “Pakistanis and Arabs” were “slavish” followers of their dictators and kings who had been “bought by Americans,” promising the protection of their regimes. It was hard to build a movement against American hegemony in the countries that were “American protectorates.” Pakistan, he continued, had been a pro-American army dictatorship, sometimes behind the civilian facade of a prime minister.
I remembered Jamil the other day when Trump was hosting the Pakistani army chief Gen. Asim Munir – not the elected Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif – at the White House. Soon after Gen. Munir’s return to Pakistan, Islamabad nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
O.K., if some Muslim states are “American protectorates,” what about Iran?
The Iranians, like the Pashtuns, are a breed apart. Iran (or Persia), has been the first of the six historic civilizations, according to philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The others: India, China, Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Iranians have never accepted the hegemony of another nation or civilization. The last example of their successful resistance to foreign hegemony was the 1980-1988 war against the U.S.-backed Iraqi invasion under Saddam Hussein.
It appears that Donald Trump, ignorant as he is of foreign affairs, was hoodwinked by Israel’s wily Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, potentially plunging America into war with Iran. Trump’s rationale behind bombing three of Iran’s nuclear sites was to eliminate its nuclear program, which he argued, without any evidence, was going to produce nuclear warheads soon.
It appears now that Iran’s nuclear program, including its stockpile of 400 kg of highly enriched uranium, remains largely intact. Trump has now shifted his focus to another foolhardy project, changing the Iranian government. Even if the regime of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is overthrown, the successor regime in Iran would be as or more committed to Iran’s nuclear project. The Iranians are deeply patriotic people, and as Mark Lander of the New York Times says, the nuclear program is “deeply embedded in Iran’s history, culture, sense of security, and national identity.”
I agree with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said two weeks ago that Trump’s Iran misadventure could consume the rest of his presidency, and may even mark the beginning of “the end of the American empire.”
~Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog ‘mustafamalik.com’, worked for 36 years as an American journalist and a research fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.