In Iran during the war with Iraq (1980–88), thousands of children died clearing minefields, blown up to prepare the way for the troops behind them. These victims were deemed martyrs for the cause of the Islamic Revolution, and are deeply revered and widely commemorated as patriots by the religious establishment, government and, to be fair, many ordinary Iranians.
20 June 2009 produced a very different kind of martyr in Iran, one for the Green Movement. The Green Movement stood in opposition to the rule of the Shiite theocracy and their nominee, President Ahmadinejad, the supposed – and hotly disputed – winner of the 2009 presidential election in Iran. Neda Agha Soltan was everything that a religious martyr is conventionally not: female, photogenic, divorced, in favour of secular rule and democracy and well educated. The twenty-six-year-old student was murdered by the Basij militia on 20 June 2009, and this being 2009, the event was recorded online. The mobile phone footage of her death flashed around the world and caused outrage among Iranian demonstrators and supporters of human rights and democracy.
The Internet (and YouTube in particular) transformed Neda Agha Soltan’s death into a very different cult of martyrdom, one that the authorities, who have done everything possible to crush even the smallest forms of dissent ever since, disapprove of. The film about her life by British director Anthony Thomas, For Neda, is banned in Iran. However, her cause still recruits supporters, in much the same way that Ayatollah Khomeini’s illegal tapes were listened to discreetly in the days before the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Supporting her cause is contentious and dangerous in Iran – Neda Agha Soltan’s grave has been desecrated six or more times, her boyfriend was tortured and is now exiled, as is the doctor who tried in vain to save Neda’s life. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, Oxford University reacted by founding a scholarship in her name. Much scholarship has emerged as a result of Neda’s death. On the first anniversary of the Green Movement demonstrations, British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out in the UK’s Guardian newspaper that the effects of Neda’s death have not been straightforward. Pre-eminent American Iran expert William Polk, seen by the last Shah as one of his key opponents, echoes this thought in his book Understanding Iran (2009).
Advocates of democracy supported the election of Mir Hossein Mousavi as president of Iran. While some reports suggested that this outcome might have been a possibility, these reports inevitably suffered from the bias dictated by their urban, English-speaking operating basis. This reportage therefore ignored the views of those living in the countryside or in the poorer towns far from the capital. Though the educated urban elite – from which background Neda came – may have supported Mousavi, this may not have been the case in the countryside.
There is little doubt that the Iranian elections were rigged, and that Ahmadinejad’s margin of victory was thereby substantially increased; however it is possible that he would have won anyway. Given this possibility, the scale of election fraud reflects anxiety on the part of the theocracy, which engaged in ballot rigging beyond what was necessary in order to ensure that their candidate secured victory.
As Geoffrey Robertson reminds us, Mousavi is also no saint. In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were hanged or otherwise killed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. At the time of these hangings, the president was Ayatollah Khomeini (the Supreme Leader), the commander of the Revolutionary Guard was Rafsanjani (the ‘moderate’ candidate in the previous presidential election against Ahmadinejad) while the prime minister in 1988 was no less than Mousavi himself. As a recent human rights investigation into the 1988 murders has demonstrated, Mousavi has never apologized for, or explained, his part in the killings.
Despite the fact that, much like Ahmadinejad, Mousavi is in favour of the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, compared to his opponents, there is no question that Mousavi represents much more commonality with Western values. Mousavi’s potential leadership has been the cause of much speculation: having been prime minister during the slaughter of the Iran–Iraq war, he may be less inclined to sanction this type of war again; the rights of women might be more respected; the ability to discuss contentious matters might be allowed once again; and while Iran would still be a predominantly Shiite theocracy, it would also be a country increasingly willing to implement democratic policies. This, in turn, might produce more adherences to human rights than the oppressive Sunni Muslim regimes notionally allied to the West.
All of this discussion is relevant to the key issue that keeps Iran in the international news, from Israel to Britain and from the United States to parts of the Middle East: nuclear weapons. Back in the pre-1979 days of the Shah, the United States did little to discourage the Iranians from developing nuclear power, whether for peaceful purposes only, or covertly for military reasons, since the Shah was then seen (later to his own disadvantage) to be America’s policeman in the economically vital Gulf area. The advent of the Islamic Republic changed American perspective drastically. However for a long time Iran was not economically capable of undertaking nuclear research of any description, let alone launching a warhead capable of destroying Israel.
Recent research provided by Israeli writer Dr Ronen Bergman in his chilling book The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Covert Struggle for Control of a ‘Rogue’ State (2008) demonstrates that, astonishingly, Israel and Iran actually collaborated on many military issues in the 1980s, on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Both states regarded Iraq as a major danger to their respective national security, and as a result, to use one example, Israeli jets destroyed Saddam Hussein’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons capability of his own.
But as Bergman also demonstrates, when the Ayatollahs decided to launch a similar attack aimed at Israel, the situation changed yet once again. Ahmadinejad has called for the annihilation of Israel, and while leading theocrats are aware that such an attack would result in the retaliatory destruction of much of their own country, concern for a potential nuclear war motivated by religious beliefs does pose a constant threat.
Nuclear war is very much the worst-case scenario. But as we have just seen, comparatively moderate Iranians whose main motivation is patriotic rather than religious also support the existence of an Iranian nuclear programme, Mousavi among them. Would Saddam Hussein have attacked a nuclear-armed Iran? Would the US attack an Islamic Republic in possession of long-range nuclear warheads in the same way that they invaded and conquered a post-Osiris Iraq? The answer to both is surely no, and so the desire of ordinary Iranians to possess nuclear missile capability, not designed to attack Israel or any other country, but to defend Iran against outside aggression, is understandable.
Dr Bergman’s sources are very close to the inner security apparatus of the Israeli state. As such, his research makes clear that his country regards the potential Iranian possession of long-range nuclear warheads capable of striking Israel as a reality that would not be tolerated. The projected Middle Eastern reply to this lack of tolerance exposes the hypocrisy of the West: Israel has not been asked to demolish its nuclear missiles, and both Pakistan and India have been forgiven for their continued possession of an even bigger and far more lethal arsenal, one that came very close to being unleashed in 2002.
But there is perhaps an even bigger danger to a nuclear-armed Iran. Iran is Shia, and Iraq’s Shiite majority now wields power. The predominantly Sunni states of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, regard the emergence of what they describe as a ‘Shiite Crescent’ with severe alarm, especially Saudi Arabia, whose large Shiite minority are housed in some of the most oil-rich parts of the kingdom. A nuclear-weapon-capable Iran would pose a threat to Sunni dictatorships as well as to Israel. If the Islamic Republic had a nuclear capacity, they would feel obliged to follow suit, not necessarily in order to aggress, but also in order to defend. The potential for a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race has the potential to resemble the Cold War (1947–91) conflict between the capitalist West and communist East.
Given this analogy, the real danger of President Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs having the ability to launch nuclear weapons can be framed in relation to the Cold War. First, during the Cold War both the US and Russia were regarded as ‘rational actors’, in ordinary English states that had leaders who did not wish to see the destruction of their own countries as a result of nuclear war. It is with good reason that what could have developed into World War III was otherwise named ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or MAD. Armageddon never took place and the Cold War is now over, even if its repercussions are still felt today. Most ordinary Iranians would also act as rational actors, as would, for example, previous Iranian President Khatami (who served from 1997–2005), or a President Mousavi, in the unlikely event that he or someone espousing his views ever achieved power. A nuclear Iran would pose considerable threat, especially for Israel and nearby Sunni Arab countries. However, in the same way that the doctrine of MAD prevented the Cold War from becoming ‘hot’, it has the potential to prevent the possibility of an Israeli– Iranian nuclear exchange.
Does Ahmadinejad, and those who believe that conflict might actually assist the return of the Hidden Imam, endorse nuclear Israeli–Iranian conflict? Some experts in the West think that this is unlikely, since deep down even the theocrats are rational actors. But as Yale Divinity School Professor Lamin Sanneh (himself a convert from Islam to Roman Catholicism) reminds us in his book Piety and Power (1996), the secular West under-estimates the depth of religion at its peril. The West may have fought its last religious wars in the seventeenth century, but in other parts of our planet it remains a prime motivation, a helpful point Israeli historian Benny Morris has argued, as we saw earlier, along with American scholars such as Mark Juergensmeyer, whose many academic works reinforce this point.
Rational actors do not want to die. In terms of terrorism, for example, there is a conceptual difference between, say, Basque nationalist organization ETA and the Irish IRA, most of whose members wanted to inflict some casualties on the enemy without wanting to die for their cause themselves. This approach is different from the religious terrorism of the post-9/11 world, where some perpetrators actually seek death in the pursuit of as many casualties as possible. The IRA was a devoutly Catholic organization, at least in name, but unlike other religious organizations, they never endorsed the belief that to lose one’s life in the pursuit of war would bring heavenly reward. By contrast, the idea of martyrdom is wired into many of the extreme forms of Islam, and features especially in the Shiite version. Martyrdom also includes a rich historical precedent – consider for example the loss of Hussein in 680 BC at the Battle of Karbala.
As the Pakistani-born writer and thinker Akbar Ahmed has frequently reminded us, millions of Muslims loathe and despise this view of martyrdom, all the more so because they regard it as discrediting their faith in the eyes of others. Many experts have warned against regarding Islamic hardliners as representative of the norm, including Georgetown Professor of Islamic Studies and International Relations, John Esposito.
To summarize, for some in the Middle East, death in combat is something that can be seen to be desirable, in that it achieves the reward of heaven. While millions throughout the Middle East contest such an interpretation, many secular Westerners find it incomprehensible. That being said, for those espousing a radically different viewpoint, the secularity of the West is precisely the problem.
The world is replete with different points of view. Attitudes about the consequences of possessing nuclear weapons are likely to be as faithful to the outlooks on life that accompany them. As such, and despite allegations that engendering such an attitude has been said to constitute scare-mongering and pandering to Western/Israeli fears, it follows that in the twenty-first century there are national leaders whose motivations are primarily loyal to histories that extend back to the seventh century, and not to the alien, contemporary demands of an international community.
This is a point also made by Middle Eastern authority Amir Taheri in his book The Persian Night (2009). In the West, with realist doctrine going back centuries, diplomacy is all about relations between states, which means that countries, and not the ideologies behind them, become focal points. For example, Iran both exists as a nation-state as well as an Islamic Republic that believes in the return of the Hidden Imam, and in exporting Shiite Islam well beyond the political borders of a single country. This, Taheri argues, makes Iran a ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde nation’, a nation-state with a powerful guiding orthodoxy that disrupts ordinary state behaviour.
However, as Taheri also goes on to say, not all Shiites would regard the Iranian interpretation of Islam as correct. Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq is equal to even Khomeini in theological authority but has a very different, much less theocratic view of Shia Islam, for example. The Ismaili sect of Shiism has further theological differences still.
But when President Ahmadinejad referred to his mystic experience when addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2006, with the Hidden Imam in the audience, bathed in a strange light, one can see that for the ruling elite in Iran it is their interpretation of Shiite Islam that actually matters. Experts may be right in hypothesizing that Iran will prove rational and act in a realist fashion in the case of war, but if they are wrong, the consequences of having irrational actors in charge of long-range nuclear weapons could be devastating.
Many are critical of what in the Middle East is perceived as Western hypocrisy, namely that Israel, India and Pakistan can all have nuclear weapons, especially the former, but Iran cannot. It is also important that the threat of Israel also extends to nations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. A nuclear Iran would create exactly the kind of arms race that many perceived to be over, and yet which would have far-reaching implications both in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Furthermore, at the time of writing Iran is winning a major propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of street-level Sunnis in Arab countries, as they support Hamas in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebanon and aid those perceived as standing up most to Israel throughout the region. This makes the position of non-democratic Sunni regimes even more perilous, as the Iranians, while zealously Shia, emphasize their Islamic nature over and above any doctrinal differences, in a quest to export revolutionary values throughout the Middle East. This makes nations such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt even more nervous – they all remember the fate of the Shah and the pre-1979 Iranian elite – and thus keener still on matching any weapons that Iran comes to possess in order to defend themselves from the theocrats of Tehran.
Iranian issues are, therefore, complex, with the stability of one of the world’s most volatile yet economically critical parts at stake in a starker way than ever before. Not only that, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only two atomic/nuclear bombs to have been dropped, over six decades ago now. Had the 2002 Pakistan/India stand-off escalated, it is estimated that fifty-six million Pakistanis and Indians would have died in the first nuclear exchange, and that the winds could have blown radioactive material either westwards towards Iran and Central Asia or eastwards towards China and South-East Asia, with further casualties still. A similar exchange between Israel and Iran could have similar consequences for far more neighbouring countries, since radiation does not halt at national borders. It would be the first nuclear conflict in history, over twenty years after the end of the Cold War, and one of the reasons why peace in the Middle East continues to be one of the most critical issues of our time.