The mess made in the name of Islam

Paul Sheehan:

... it is a good time to reassess the gravitational force that engulfed him, a force that is spreading wider and growing stronger. Nobody saw it coming. The revolution was unforseen and unheralded.

As usual, the Central Intelligence Agency did not see it coming. Nor did the secret services of the Middle East. Or the academic community, or the media. Not even those who espoused the revolution saw it coming until the day it arrived.

That day was January 16, 1979. There was no election, no war, no coup.

Suddenly, the most loyal client of the US in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, left the country his military and vast secret service could no longer control. He was soon replaced as national leader, by the sheer weight of popular will, by an old man living in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The great majority rejoiced at the fall of the shah. Even the revolutionary leftists who dominated dissent. Few in the intelligensia took these primitives seriously. Anti-American imperialism trumped everything.

The first sign of what was to come arrived within days of the mullahs and their followers taking control of government. Women were "invited" to wear the veil. Those who declined found themselves beaten and abused by the gangs of self-appointed revolutionary guards who roamed the streets.

The revolution reserved its most brutal behaviour for the universities.

Leftist students activists were murdered. Faculties were purged. Students expelled. Books banned. Women were constrained at every turn. They were penalised for talking to members of the opposite sex, for running in the corridors, for laughing, or wearing rouge, or allowing strands of hair to show, or wearing bright colours.

As for the revolutionary left, it was liquidated. "Criminals should not be tried," Khomeini declared when human rights organisations decried the wave of executions. "Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known they were criminals."

When the US embassy was spontaneously invaded and occupied by Islamic fundamentalists on November 1, 1979, it was soon adorned with the slogans that spoke the larger truth of the revolution, such as "This is not a struggle between the US and Iran, it is a struggle between Islam and blasphemy" and "The more we die, the stronger we become".

The Islamic Republic has never lost sight of the big picture. It has waged war against the Sunni in Iraq. For four years, it has been at war with the US via its proxies in Iraq. Last year it attacked Israel via its surrogates in Lebanon. It has helped destabilise Afghanistan. And it is acquiring nuclear capability.

The Islamic Republic does not lack certainty, constancy or confidence.

...

The seeds of this revolution do not lie in the excesses of US foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. These have been symptoms not causes. The roots of the revolution are far deeper and older than the events of the past 50 years, which is why it is proving both durable and implacable.

Actually, the regime in Tehran is in a fragile position if the world would just exert itself in defiance of this evil regime. Europe commerce is what sustains these monsters more than their ideology. Without European commerce they would be just more religious nuts in their isolated kookdom.

Militarily they are greatly overrated. They could not defeat Iraqi armies that the US and others defeated in a matter of weeks twice. Instead they were in a stalemate that wound up expending a million lives. With our navy and air force we could wipe out much of what sustains them within their country. Yet we don't. We have withheld our hand and allowed the true believers of Islamic mush to humiliate our people.

They have been at war with us since 1979. They have been responsible for the murder of our troops in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Yet, we still pretend that they will act honorable in negotiations. Why do we keep pretending that these are reasonable people?