Iran: Darkness at Noon
By John J. Metzler
MONTREAL, CANADA ― Political reverberations are still shaking Iran three weeks after the disputed (perhaps one should be less polite and say rigged) presidential elections where ruling hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was ``re-elected" to rule the Islamic Republic.
Global outrage subsided with the shifting of the news cycle but Iran's turmoil is still alive. Here in Montreal, hundreds of local Iranians marched for freedom in their former homeland, some with the now iconic placards ``Where is My Vote?" while others pressed for total regime change.
Yet, protesting in democratic and secular Canada is one thing, try that back in old Tehran and taste the tolerance from the guardians of the Islamic Republic.
On the 25th anniversary of the Iranian revolution in 2004, I wrote the following column which is re-issued to the memory of those who have fallen to the truncheons of the past few weeks, in solidarity with a democratic Iran, and in the fervent hope of good relations between a free Iran and the U.S.
``A quarter century ago a dark shadow eclipsed the light of Persia as the shroud of the Ayatollahs fell over Iran. This vibrant and economically virile land was smothered by the heavy coarse cloak of fundamentalism.
In a bizarre sense, the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to turn back the hands of time, not in a remotely romantic way, but to a dour and dismal past through which the medievalist mullahs would impose a regime of political and social sterility and religious intolerance on the remarkably talented Persian people. Darkness had fallen at noon.
The politically inspired Islam which seized Iran soon spread like a virus throughout parts of the Middle East and indeed Southeast Asia. The Islamic Revolution in Tehran served as a grim and heady inspiration for fundamentalists the world over.
When the Shah of Iran's modernizing state was toppled by the mob in 1979, few realized, least of all President Jimmy Carter, the deep geopolitical impact this would create on American interests.
In the short run, a key U.S. ally and oil exporter in the Persian Gulf was now spouting a toxic form of anti-American hatred. Later, the hostage crisis, triggered when radical Iranian students seized the American Embassy and took 53 diplomats hostage for over a year, was merely the tip of the iceberg ― elements of which still lurk in the deep recess of the Islamic psyche.
Iran's fall into the hands of fundamentalists caused a major shakeup of the players on the Middle East geopolitical chessboard ― the original, if ill-placed Western support of Saddam's Iraq as a counterbalance to Islamic Iran was one such outcome. Iran's support to the Hezbollah militias in Lebanon was another rooted in the Iranian Revolution.
But the enduring curse of fundamentalism in places as diverse as the Casbah of Algeria, the mountains of Afghanistan, to the rugged heartland of Yemen was in the Western view, the worst-case scenario.
What many had overlooked was that this toxic brew of fundamentalism led the likes of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to export the threat beyond the Middle East ― to London, to Paris and New York.
The heinous horrors of September 11 in many ways had their philosophical roots in the high-octane hatred concocted by Iran's Islamic regime.
Interestingly, young Iranians, those who have only lived under the Islamic Republic, have grown increasingly restless and openly opposed to the regime. Knowing only privation and sociopolitical sterility, people are disenchanted with the ruling mullahs.
Reza Pahlavi (son of the late Shah of Iran) addressing correspondents at the Paris-based French-American Press Club stated, ``A quarter century ago, a disease from the middle ages took over my country. Its symptoms were fear of freedom and a fanatical zeal to reverse the march of civilization. With strange mutations, the disease spread as far as North Africa and the Far East, creating a brotherhood of terror, which is the greatest threat to international security today. May the darkness of this dismal regime soon pass and light be restored to a Free Iran!"
Now five years later, Iran's Atomic Ayatollahs are closer to controlling the nuclear genie, the country remains in atrophied the grip of economic privations, and the United States remains only so very politely committed to Iran's freedom, lest the rulers in Tehran's political thugocracy take offense, and not open a dialogue with Washington.
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of ``Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China" (University Press, 2001). He can be reached at jjmcolumn@att.net.