For the last 20 years, most people in the United States and Europe have comfortably taken it for granted that former US president George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair committed a dreadful mistake when they ordered their armed forces to invade Iraq. They stand accused of creating a situation that led to the appearance of the terrorist Islamic State and other equally murderous groupings that many young Muslims raised in Europe would find so appealing that they became willing to butcher their presumed compatriots on its behalf.
Since then, the Western consensus has been that regime change, let alone nation-building, is a fool’s game and that it would have been far better for everyone if the North Americans and British had left Saddam Hussein in charge of his notoriously fractious country and that – unless he tried to annex another of his neighbours – they had limited themselves to prodding him now and then with economic sanctions, humanitarian exhortations and stern diplomatic statements. Though at the time most agreed that, even by Middle Eastern standards, Saddam was an extremely vicious dictator, the assumption they came to is that, by removing him from power, Bush and Blair made an already appalling situation far worse.
Among those who for a while gave lukewarm support to the Iraq War but on reflection decided that it had been a stupid blunder is Donald Trump, who now faces a situation much like the one that confronted Bush and Blair in the months preceding the invasion. In his eccentric way, Trump shares their conviction that Western nations should do something to help people in backward parts of the world who want the freedoms they have grown accustomed to. So having pledged himself publicly to “protect” the millions of Iranians who are protesting against the theocratic tyranny that has ruled their country since 1979 and seeing thousands of their number getting slaughtered by the regime’s thugs, he has left himself with precious little room in which to manoeuvre.
If Trump contents himself with some largely symbolic “surgical strikes,” the regime in Tehran would be likely to survive and he will be accused of making empty threats. That would make him look like a loser. If he goes in all guns blazing, as he said he would, he could involve the US in a civil war every bit as violent as the conflicts that have continued to afflict Iraq and could last for years to come. For the many who loathe Trump, watching him trying to wriggle his way out of the dilemma in which he is caught thanks to his own verbosity is proving most enjoyable.
Unfortunately for Trump and a great many Iranians, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not Venezuela. Even if US commandos somehow managed to get their hands on the octogenarian “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei and shipped him to New York to answer charges of looting his country (and, while about it, committing crimes against humanity) that would change little. Trump would not be able to tell whoever replaces him to obey his orders as, it would appear, Delcy Rodríguez is doing after a fashion in Caracas.
And while many of the clerics ruling Iran, including Khamenei, may be just as corrupt as the individuals who still run Venezuela, the order they have established has far firmer foundations as it is based on a strain of religious fanaticism that has deep roots. Although it would seem that the bulk of the population no longer takes seriously the fierce theological certainties of the ayatollahs, Shiite Islam evidently retains its hold on many who would not necessarily take kindly to an intervention by hordes of armed unbelievers seeking to liberate them from a dictatorship which, as far as they are concerned, has distinctly Iranian characteristics.
Every political movement needs a flesh-and-blood figurehead. In 1979, that role was played in Iran by Ruhollah Khomeini; had it not been for the personality cult that grew up around that grim and puritanical ayatollah, the Islamic revolution would have been unlikely to take place. Could Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was toppled almost half a century ago by the Islamists, provide those rebelling against the regime with a leader? He clearly thinks he could and he does have supporters in Iran whose number appears to have swollen considerably in the last few weeks.
Though to judge from his public appearances and what is said about him by those who know him, Reza Pahlavi is a respectable and level-headed fellow, he has yet to acquire the charisma he would need to get enough people to flock to his banner. Nonetheless, by proposing that, for an interim period, Iran could become a constitutional monarchy that, once things have settled down, would be discarded if a majority decided it would prefer another arrangement, his backers are offering people a plausible alternative to the present set-up. After all, in Spain the restoration of the monarchy did much to ease the transition to democracy from the militaristic dictatorship of Francisco Franco; with luck, something similar could be in store for Iran.
When in power, the Shah did his best to remind his subjects that, long before the Islamic invasion in the 7th century, which took place before Persia had time to recover from the wars waged against the Byzantine Empire, civil conflicts and a series of plagues, their country had often been a very great power and a centre of civilisation. Like many Iranians today, he tended to look down on the Arabs and stress the many differences between their traditions and those of Persia whose language remained Indo-European despite the incorporation of thousands of words taken from Arabic, proportionally as many as English received from Latin, whether directly or via French, and Greek.
Such nationalistic sentiments persist and, by influencing attitudes, continue to aggravate the on occasion ferocious rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. They could also be exploited by Reza Pahlavi and his friends in an effort to give shape to the movement they hope will eventually put an end to the clericalist dictatorship that for decades has stunted their homeland and led it to its present plight as an impoverished international pariah that Israel – a far smaller country with a fraction of its population – could thrash with near impunity after summarily destroying the armies of proxies on which it had lavished billions of dollars it could not afford.
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