Zed Books Iran, the Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Iran, the Green Movement and the USAThe Fox and the ParadoxBy Hamid DabashiZed Books LtdCopyright © 2010 Hamid DabashiAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84813-815-5ContentsAcknowledgments, vi, PROLOGUE A Parable, 2, ONE The Paradox, 7, TWO Jammed in a Jungle and Nowhere to Go, 17, THREE The Fox in the Hen House, 42, FOUR It's a Jungle Out There, 62, FIVE Outfoxing the Wily Fox, 85, SIX Paradox Redux, 112, SEVEN The Fox in the Box, 140, EIGHT Retrieval of a Cosmopolitan Culture, 173, CONCLUSION People and Their Parables, 212, Notes, 218, Index, 233, CHAPTER 1The ParadoxThere is a not so hidden politics to the prose and purpose of old Persian animal fables, deeply rooted as they are in even more ancient Indian and Mesopotamian wisdom literatures. Today scarce anyone reads these old animal fables except in useless academic and scholastic circles. But the enduring wisdom they contain and the allusions they happily sustain are deeply evident in the collective subconscious of a political culture that claims them and speaks their language in sublated disguises and colorful camouflages. If in the current geopolitics of the region, Iran were to be offered here as the wily Fox of the fable and the United States as that slumbering Lion, who or what would be the gullible Ass? This thing they call 'the Middle East'? There need not be a one-to-one correspondence in such parables that anticipate our collective fate and that always run ahead of any allusion or application one might ask them to offer. The moral of the story is the superiority of visionary wit (of course predicated on a politics of desperation) over the might and majesty of a hapless superpower, afflicted with an illness that it is clueless how else to cure. The key, the wily Fox had learned in his long and adventurous life, was to get the fat and balding Lion do for him what he could not do himself – like eliminating Saddam Hussein and his massive military apparatus on one of its hostile fronts, or amassing a mighty military prowess to dismantle the nuisance of the Taliban on another. This is not to attribute to the ruling Iranian clerical clique a political wit or ancient wisdom they so obviously lack in many other respects, but simply to offer a parabolic leitmotif hidden under how things have unfolded in a region so vital to world peace and yet so afflicted with chronic diseases of domestic tyranny and foreign domination.My principal thesis in this book, which I write under the playful light of the parable of the Lion King, the Wily Fox, and the Gullible Ass, and exactly at the moment when President Obama is weighing his options vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic, is that prior to the rise of the Green Movement in Iran in June 2009 the resourceful clerics in Iran had turned themselves into the key strategic factor in any move that he may make in the region – and that in an age of asymmetric warfare, whatever the US president may opt to do he will make Iran, perforce, even more powerful than it is. If President Obama proceeds to negotiate with Iran (over the nuclear stalemate, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or the Palestinian predicament – in a so-called Grand Bargain) he will strengthen its hand; and if alternatively he opts for a combination of military and diplomatic pressures on Iran he will lose even more spectacularly. Accommodating the Islamic Republic will give it even more regional power and prestige; attacking it will instantly bring out its scarcely hidden nature as basically a guerrilla operation and a garrison state. This paradox is not an indication of how diplomatically savvy or politically shrewd the Islamic Republic (the Fox of the fable) is; but how catastrophic is the enduring legacy of George W. Bush's presidency (the balding Lion King with his tail on fire and yet scarce anyone around him dared to tell). That this paradox has now assumed a new twist after the rise of the civil rights (Green) movement in