Translated from GegenStandpunkt 4-2003

The Islamic Republic of Iran

Yet another enemy of the Western world,
yet another adversary in America’s “war on terror”

The verdict handed down on Iran by Washington leaves nothing to be desired in clarity. In the world power’s view, this state turns out to be a single accumulation of all the reasons why it sees its security interests being violated and is obligated to take correspondingly militant action against it. Since its beginning, the “mullah regime” has closed itself off from all the civilizational blessings of democracy and freedom. At home, it essentially deals with the “oppression” of its people; the foreign policy of this “mullahcracy” conspicuously practices “anti-Americanism” in word and deed. It helps the remnants of organized political opposition to Israel that still exists with some resources, thus making it a “state supporter of terrorism”; all sorts of verifiable ties to the “Al-Qaeda network” confirm that it is, in a sense, the “mother of modern terrorism.” Its nuclear program adds “weapons of mass destruction” to the threat posed by this anti-American, terror-supporting state, definitely making it a first-rate security risk for America, and consequently – immediately after the war against Iraq – the next, or the next after that … case in which the American world peace has to be defended in practice and with force.

As clear as this verdict may be: insofar as it is arrived at by categorizing this state under the security policy maxims with which the US seeks to shape its new, post-Soviet world order, it says nothing about the state itself, but more particularly about the fundamental as well as implacable hostility that the US directs at it. ‘Terrorist state’: This category applies to any regime that the American president refuses to concede respect – and this alone turns a state like Iran into a ‘criminal’ non-state that must not only be ostracized as such, but also, in the long term, stripped of its power. ‘Weapons of mass destruction’: These are weapons that America perceives as a very real threat to itself, even if they do not yet actually exist; weapons that must therefore be preemptively – that is, before a state even possesses them – wrested – by whom is not even in question – from the hands of any state that seeks to acquire them without authorization, or is even suspected of such efforts. “Undemocratic”: This refers not merely to a deviation from bourgeois norms of governance, and certainly not to a lack of respect on the part of an authority for the real interests and opinions of its dissatisfied masses; rather, the accusation criminalizes any policy that runs counter to the interests of the greatest and most authoritative democracy on earth, as well as any regime that would act in such a misguided way, and, indeed, the entire constitutional order of the polity in which such a regime with such a policy persists and maybe even gets majority support – a third way in which America assigns itself an unquestionable human right to liberate humanity from such a monstrous form of rule.

A serious threat to the American-defined free world order that must be wiped out as such: this is the prevailing political verdict on Iran. And once this verdict has been rendered, there is simply nothing this state can do right. Everything it does politically, everything it fails to do, but also the things it sticks to despite being forbidden by the relevant authorities: All of this is evidence of the malevolence of its intrigues, and thus of the urgency of eliminating it as a threat to America’s security. If it supports the Shiites in Iraq, it does so only to sabotage the reconstruction of that devastated country and to install yet another mullah regime there; if it evidently holds back, it does so only to press ahead undisturbed with the construction of a nuclear bomb so that it can strike with full force later on. An entire state apparatus is bent on nothing but ensuring a global supply of terrorists; its entire raison d’état consists of wanting to inflict harm on America: Once the world power’s declaration of hostility has been made, the image of the enemy is likewise set in stone.

I. The object of enmity: A revolutionary upheaval in the name of a higher justice

The Iranian mullahs made enemies with the West by successfully mobilizing their nation against the governing viceregent of Western interests in Persia. They set in motion an “Islamic revolution” – a “crime” of a very different nature than the one the West has been charging them with ever since. The Persian masses certainly had more than enough material reasons for their uprising against Shah Reza Pahlavi. The imperial sovereign’s grand project of transforming Persia into a modern capitalist industrial nation with revenues from the oil business paid off for him and his ruling elite, for a handful of domestic businessmen, and for the enterprising international business community – but for the people the impact was predominantly negative: Wherever, in the course of this ‘modernization’ of Persia, the traditional relations of production were politically undermined, this freed many Persians not only from feudal relations of domination and servitude, but also from all the means, however modest, by which they had previously secured their economic livelihoods. The rest of the rural population who were spared from this – those who, according to the Shah’s wishes, were allowed to continue serving their landlords and make ends meet in the traditional forms of rural destitution – got to feel very tangibly under the measures of the imperial ‘White Revolution’ what it means to be simply superfluous according to the rules of capitalist profit making that were put into effect: They were given the opportunity to migrate, along with all the other paupers in the country, to the few existing industrial centers or to Tehran and to make themselves somehow useful there – and that was no opportunity at all, because there was no demand for the capitalistically beneficial employment of the labor power they had to offer there either. So for the people who were made superfluous, emancipation from the old relations of usage and dependency culminated in those inevitable and hopeless practices by which a population of no use to capitalism looks after its survival in squalor, just like everywhere else in a world of states opened up to ‘free market’ progress. The Persians, however, perceived their material misery and accepted it as an argument for an uprising against their rulers on the basis of a higher, justifying reason: guided by their Islamic moral teachers – who the Shah had stripped of their religious authority and forced into opposition – the people renounced their obedience to the regime in the name of Allah. The Persian masses deduced their true collective identity as a nation from their duty of obedience to the otherworldly commander, which went without saying for any decent, orthodox believer. The political conditions in the country were measured according to the ideal of a moral law beholden to this fictitious omnipotent – and the interpretation that the people’s living conditions, the opulence of the Shah’s regime, and the source to which both were owed, learned in this way, was clear: What the Shah’s policies inflicted on the masses was a violation of the people’s higher right to be treated with the respect they deserved from their earthly authorities; his regime was therefore seen as a foreign rule hostile to the people. The people of Persia rose up against this, drove out their ruler – and replaced him with their spiritual leaders so that from now on they would be commanded by them. Their alternative to the Shah’s political rationale for rule seemed self-evident: namely, submission to a state system in which an indigenous Persian will for a shared moral life would ‘crystallize’:

“In the view of Islam, government does not derive from the interests of a class, nor does it serve the domination of an individual or a group. It represents rather the crystallization of the political ideal of a people who bear a common faith and common outlook, taking an organized form in order to initiate the process of intellectual and ideological evolution towards the final goal, i.e., movement towards Allah... It now intends to establish an ideal and model society on the basis of Islamic norms. The mission of the Constitution is to realize the ideological objectives of the movement and to create conditions conducive to the development of man in accordance with the noble and universal values of Islam.” (Preamble to the Constitution of 1979)

That they want to establish a class society and to appoint property as their civil supreme power is something that even bourgeois states are by no means in the habit of writing into their constitutions: they too want their polity to be seen as a manifestation of higher ideals such as “dignity,” “liberty,” and so on. However, they do not go so far as to seriously deduce their coercive work from an obligation to a higher, divine universality. Nor, in their idealization of profane power, do not go so far as to degrade the obedience demanded by them – as holders of highly real power — into a mere derivative of the loyalty their subjects display toward their imaginary All-Mighty – and for good reason: the absolutism of their political monopoly on force would be relativized rather than confirmed by that. The officiating clerics in Iran, by contrast, are serious about their project of giving material form within the state to the community of Iranians united in their faith in God: Committing their subjects’ will and consciousness to the “common cause” of the Republic – for which they seek to organize their people, in spirit and deed, as a maneuverable mass at their disposal – is not, for them, a matter of course to be summoned at will, but rather the object and goal of constant agitational influence. When these pious men invoke Allah and the murdered successors to His Prophet as their supreme patrons and as the all-powerful guarantors of a successful new future for their nation-state, they mean this appeal to a higher omnipotence seriously in a very material sense. They do not merely parade the pompous dignity of their bourgeois private person, as bigoted Christian democrats are known to do in this country, nor do they merely appeal to the private conscience, without whose sufficient appeasement no decent market-economy materialist would be able to conduct his legally regulated daily life, let alone fulfill without trouble the harsher duties of patriotically defending his imperialist state power. Rather, the Islamic leaders of the people seek to put into practice the highest conceivable form of authority – namely, a fictitious absolute master-servant relationship – which is as much the foundation of their particular personal authority as it is of the required devout subservience of their audience. “A people united in religion and outlook” – such a monolithic patriotic attitude is an ideal held by all statesmen who have grand ambitions for their country and its reason-endowed inventory. For Iran’s religious rulers, however, this idealized image of an internally united body politic is not merely a fitting mockery of the fact that, for the members of a well-established class society, a forcibly enforced canon of rights and duties has been made into a self-evident condition of life, forced obedience into a cherished habit, and adaptation to all conditions of life into accepted etiquette. For them, this ideal is not merely a justification used during war times and other emergencies for orders that leave absolutely no room for bourgeois self-interest: For the “mullacrats,” religious conviction establishes moral decency in a people and piety constitutes the unbreakable community of all those who call Iran their homeland, recognize the mullahs as their leaders, and keep faith with the community. Their Islam is the inner source of the great ‘we’ that forms a community that is bound together in material terms as well, and the spiritual leaders feel irrevocably called upon to build a state rooted in the spirit of religious morality and to bring about, through realpolitik, an Islamic-moral communal life:

“In creating, on the basis of ideological outlook, the political infrastructures and institutions that are the foundation of society, the righteous will assume the responsibility of governing and administering the country.” (Preamble to the Constitution)

II. Capitalism supervised by Islam: A power struggle between Allah’s moral commandments and the secular imperatives of the state

a) The details of the economic principles on which organized the country they were to “assume” was organized – the interests that were set free within it and that competed against each other for advancement, the political “administration” of which they saw themselves responsible for – were of no interest to these pious men. With their “revolution,” they took at any rate a decidedly conservative approach to the principles which organized the economic realities they found in the country: they ‘assumed’ Iran exactly the way it had been firmly integrated into the imperialist world economy as an oil-producing state, along with all the good and bad customs of the competition over property that had made their way into the country under the Shah’s regime. On this foundation, they then attempted – in an effort that was likewise not revolutionary – to extract from the inherited legacy whatever the guardians of the true communal spirit thought was necessary to foster a proper Islamic moral way of life among the masses, as well as to successfully mobilize them for the envisioned new beginning of the Islamic nation of Iran. Thus, Allah’s justice comes into being on earth as a result of everything that is required of the religious cynicism of a ‘war on poverty’ in the name of the Persian people’s higher purpose of being, and is therefore accused of ‘dirigism’ with regard to property rights. Government guidelines on economic ‘planning and development’ are intended to ensure a rudimentary supply of goods in agriculture and industry that allows the people to lead a God-fearing life in poverty and dignity:

“In strengthening the foundations of the economy, the fundamental consideration will be fulfillment of the material needs of man in the course of his overall growth and development. This principle contrasts with other economic systems, where the aim is concentration and accumulation of wealth and maximization of profit. In materialist schools of thought, the economy represents an end in itself, so that it comes to be a subversive and corrupting factor in the course of man's development.” (Preamble to the Constitution)

The talk about how the economy must not be “an end in itself” since, obviously, it is centered solely on the “needs of man,” the idea that property carries a “social obligation,” and even the view that the “common good” must take precedence over “self-interest” – this all sounds familiar; maybe not exactly from the mouth of Shah Reza Pahlavi, but certainly from the political-ideological treasure chest of Western secular societies. Yet while this is how their ideologues morally harmonize the very contrasting life chances offered by the arrangement of the bourgeois common good – some, in buying and using labor, have a guaranteed increase in their wealth, others have the hope of eking out a living by selling their labor power – the religious leaders in Iran mean business with the moral contrast to their deontology which they identify as capitalism. For them, ‘capitalist accumulation’ and the ‘profit’ at its core stands for the negation of an Islamic common good as they envision it – specifically, for the depravity of a “lust for profit” which both pauperizes people and leads them astray from the righteous path to God; it allows – to them there's no difference – the national community to go to the dogs. Of course, such a thing is to be feared only insofar and only so long as they themselves do not make any grand plans to control the undesirable effects of the principles of a capitalistic life based on money – and, conversely, promote the desirable effects they expect from the very same capitalistic life for the strengthening of their religious state. They therefore take into account the necessary protection of their people from the devil’s work – which they see rooted solely in a private pursuit of profit left entirely to its own devices – in the form of a regime of moral and religious rules and prohibitions which bring to heel the interest in enrichment which is instituted, carried out in state and private sectors, and developed into an entire economic system:

“Preventing the exploitation of another’s labour;” “prohibition of infliction of harm and loss upon others, monopoly, hoarding, usury, and other illegitimate and evil practices; the prohibition of extravagance and wastefulness in all matters related to the economy, including consumption, investment, production, distribution, and services” (Principles of the Constitution).

b) The pious men in Iran, in all their moral strictness, have by no means lost sight of how the relationship between power and morality, which is supposed to be lived out in practice, is in actual fact structured – for the sake of their project of ensuring the correct way of life and its material foundations among the people, they not only preach, but correspondingly exercise the power in the state which, in the bourgeois world, remains the most compelling argument in matters of persuasion. The “rule of the clerical jurists,” represented by their supreme religious leader, determines the nation’s ‘policy guidelines’, commands the national military and the surveillance troops of the ‘Revolutionary Guards’ – a ‘private religious army’ that, by bourgeois constitutional standards, oscillates between absurdity and scandal – and decides in the last instance all disputes over domestic and foreign policy, as well as on the formation of religious and secular opinion within the country, which naturally entails censorship regulations and brigades of militants tasked with hunting down deviant and subversive “Western influences.”

This power operates in parallel with a political apparatus through which Iran is governed in accordance with the formal achievements of bourgeois rule: competing economic and other social interests find political recognition in the form of parliamentary representatives elected by the people; the agents of these interests show their gratitude by submitting – as demonstrated in practice in free elections – to a secular authority headed by a president and a prime minister; society is thus governed by holders of political power who are entitled to make decisions about how to deal with all the acknowledged variables in the country: The representatives of the people carry out, through legislation, the political tasks arising from the economic necessities of the money economy they have established, as well as from the needs that come onto the daily political agenda in the course of planning and shaping the national renewal project. With funds they receive primarily from the revenues of the state-owned oil, gas, and petrochemical sector as well as other state enterprises, they finance a wide array of social programs for the education and welfare of the people, the country’s infrastructure, industrialization projects, the banking sector, etc.; in short, everything necessary to ensure that, in the long run, capitalist wealth in the country grows in private hands and, above all, in the hands of the state power itself.

These necessities, which the government obeys in the execution of its official duties, not only do not coincide with what the clerical leadership considers necessary for its program of pious public education, national-social welfare, and a nationwide awakening. They are, insofar as they come into play as an “end in themselves,” in the eyes of the Islamic leadership, precisely the source of the moral corruption that the mullahs have vowed to eradicate from the face of the earth, and for which they have assumed state power. Consequently, an inevitable part of the reality of government is a religiously inspired critique of the pluralism of the societal interests, perpetual suspicion toward a “materialism” that corrodes morality and customs, as well as an ineradicable distrust of all those capitalist institutions and practices that contradict a God-fearing life as envisioned by the clerics and thus, in their eyes, simultaneously undermine the productive enlistment of these lives for the nation. The need for militant control on the part of the “righteous ones” on the supreme Guardian Council is single-mindedly focused on the political institution through which profane competitive interests are empowered, promoted, and overseen. In an institutionalized power struggle between a moral-religious leadership and an Islamic-bourgeois-capitalist government, compromises are wrested for governing the nation, despite and because of these two opposing political principles which, though weighted differently, are equally recognized. All the material necessities of the common good, which are situated far below the obligatory Islamic moral code, must be taken into account, while simultaneously giving due weight to the moral-ethical reason of rule itself. It is precisely this conflict between the principles of religion that they hold sacred and those of capitalist profitability – which they likewise respect and practically utilize as a lever for advancing the power and wealth of their community – that the political rulers of Iran then resolve with and among themselves. Since decision-making concerns such as how to make the nation primarily an economic power – but without any corruption of morals – or, first and foremost, a shining moral example – but without undermining its capitalist foundation; how the nation must assert itself and its economic and strategic interests in its dealings with other nations; how, to what extent, and by whom the pluralism of interests existing in society has to receive its just political recognition… – since questions of this kind do not initiate an objective debate in the usual sense, but raise a question of power between the two viewpoints institutionalized within the state, how they are decided initially rests with a “Guardian Council.” Six Islamic legal scholars and six civil-law jurists each determine whether a law, a regulation, or even a candidate seeking to run for parliament conforms to the dictates of the raison d’état and those of Allah. With wise foresight, the government anticipates that parliament and the clergy will at times find it extremely difficult to reach a consensus on what the writings of the Prophet cover in terms of bourgeois-legal provisions and what they do not, so that, as a last resort, a ‘mediation committee’ appointed by the ‘Supreme Leader’ makes the final decision on all essential matters of national security, social, economic, and fiscal policy.

c) So the state’s firmly established oversight of the morality of the nation’s activities asserts itself positively in all the forms in which the Iranian state looks after the preservation of its people as the resource of its power as well as practically enlists them for the success of the Islamic Republic – therefore, at the same time, always negatively, namely as an insurmountable objection to business-promoting measures which are deemed immoral, but are the very means through which the Iranian economy is to be transformed into a capitalist hub that enriches the nation. Religious foundations which manage large swaths of the country under their own, non-governmental authority and provide the people with food, education, and religion have now risen to become, through real estate and other businesses, the “second-largest economic force” alongside the state, and enjoy explicit state protection and support, yet pay no taxes, but instead make donations to the mullahs and imams; a bazaar closely linked to the clergy, which handles two-thirds of trade, nearly half of artisanal production, and a significant volume of private credit transactions in the country, is equally generous with donations to the community, yet exempt from taxes to the state; state-owned and private capitalist enterprises which, in order to ensure the production of affordable goods, are required to operate with fixed prices and are thus guaranteed not to engage in “immoral” self-enrichment; prohibitions on interest, which often make the granting of credit contingent on the outcome of Koranic exegesis regarding usury – all this may appear to the “High Clergy” as the praxis of their ideal of a communally lived out morality. All this, however, runs somewhat counter to the interests of the state – which they also support – which derives its resources from the business success of its society; hence, a state that seeks to open up agriculture, trade, production, and the banking sector to private interests in capitalist enrichment to a greater extent than before, and to enrich itself from the wealth produced by taxing all incomes earned within the country. Because of this conflict, the nation’s economic life is shaped by whatever compromises these two powerful interests agree on – in the final analysis, by whatever the High Clergy, from its moral and ethical perspective, is willing to tolerate as the devil’s work of capitalism. The institutionalized conflict between the necessities to which the desire to promote capitalist growth in the country must submit and those dictated by the moral life of the nation plays out as an institutionalized struggle between the powerful parties over formulas of ‘both – and,’ according to which the country’s “modernization” is to proceed. Consequently, ambitious “growth targets,” government “austerity programs” aimed solely at reducing social costs to ease the burden on the budget, the “privatization” of state-owned enterprises, “job creation,” and similar measures are therefore very much part of the government’s “economic planning” agenda to “boost” the location’s economic performance. But always at issue is how far the “reduction of subsidies” for energy, food, and medicine may go if need be, where the line must be drawn on calculating with labor solely according to the criterion of its profitability, and which companies and industrial sectors must under no circumstances be handed over solely to the private power of money – so that the domestic economic base is not left at the mercy of “forces” which erode its morality, and so that the force that organizes the Iranian nation’s awakening may continue to rule unchallenged.

d) From the very beginning, it was clear to the Islamic revolutionaries that their project of a powerful Islamic nation would have to assert itself beyond the borders of their own country and against those who take it for granted that they can use the human and material resources of the entire world for the sake of their own exclusive enrichment. They generally saw the material root of the nation’s whole misery and the erosion of its good Islamic customs mostly in the “dependency” of their nation on foreign interests, in the “plundering” of national oil resources by the West (and especially by its leading power, the USA), in the “opening” of the nation to Western business interests and in the accompanying “foreign infiltration.” Just as rigorously as they oppose “money grubbing” within the country itself, the Ayatollahs therefore also oppose the customs of political and commercial dealings between nations. Principle No. 152 of the Constitution establishes the nation’s self-assertion against both East and West as a binding tenet of Iran’s foreign policy: “The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon the rejection of all forms of domination, both the exertion of it and submission to it, the preservation of the independence of the country in all respects and its territorial integrity, the defence of the rights of all Muslims, non-alignment with respect to the hegemonist superpowers, and the maintenance of mutually peaceful relations with all non-belligerent States.” The next principle, No. 153, reiterates this struggle against ‘self-subjugation’ in international relations as follows: “Any form of agreement resulting in foreign control over the natural resources, economy, army, or culture of the country, as well as other aspects of the national life, is forbidden.” That this should by no means be understood as purely defensive is established at the very beginning of the Constitution, namely in Principle No. 3. In opposition to the powers seeking ‘hegemony’ across the globe, the state wages its own struggle for power and influence by proclaiming itself the vanguard of an Islamic International and of all peoples suffering under the moral corruption of the West: “framing the foreign policy of the country on the basis of Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unsparing support to the mustad'afun of the world.”

Admittedly, a rejection of the capitalist global economy – which strives to organize oil production and sales according to the political criterion of an ‘avoidance of dependency’ on the part of the buyer countries – is necessarily confined to narrow limits: The country does not, in this way, reverse its status as a mere supplier of raw materials whose primary source of income lies in supplying other nations with raw materials for their wealth-producing industries. Attempts to generate more revenue by increasing production volumes, efforts to establish a new petrochemical industry or expand existing ones, and indeed all projects aimed at “modernizing” the rest of the country’s industry merely serve to highlight the dependency of the state on other nations as a capitalist business location: For the accumulation of vast sums of capital that puts the entire country to use as a foundation and opportunity for increased accumulation, which thereby improves its position in the freely raging competition between national capital locations, which thereby, in turn, ensures the widespread use of the nation as an international engine of capital accumulation – for this, it lacks the all-decisive means that others possess: the already completed accumulation of sufficient amounts of capital.

Consequently, the field of Iran’s foreign economic relations has also become a point of contention between the nation’s “secular” and “religious” leaderships, following the same logic as that governing the country’s domestic capitalization: The need for capital imports in large-scale industrial projects, in the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the rationalization of private businesses, in the banking, stock market, and insurance sectors, etc., is undeniable and is also acknowledged by the ruling economic experts. However, in the last instance, whether and to what extent this need is taken into account is ultimately decided on the basis of the criteria that the politicized clergy invoke to guard against the nation being “overrun” by foreign influence and “surrendered” to “Western interests” in terms of credit and other transactions. So this contradiction has also been institutionalized in this state and is the subject of internal power struggles: The stance of an uncompromising and uncalculating rejection of imperialist global business for the good of the moral nation serves as a corrective to all those calculations and compromises – which are likewise politically recognized and permitted – that state trade envoys and economic diplomats pursue or are willing to make in negotiations with their imperialist counterparts for the good of Iran’s economic power.

Yet the success of Iran’s foreign economic and political efforts to develop into an independent economic power and, moreover, to assert itself as a sort of globally recognized alternative power standing up to godless imperialism does not depend in the slightest on the specific outcomes of the decision-making processes through which the relevant bodies in Tehran struggle to resolve their internal contradictions. For ever since they came to power, the Ayatollahs have enjoyed the special attention of the Western world order and the supervisory power residing in Washington, and that power is not interested in the contradictions within the Iranian system of government, but regards it entirely as a flagrant contradiction to everything it understands – that is, can accept – as “good governance.” It acts accordingly.

III. The political response of the leading Western power: an escalation of hostility against a dissenting regime

a) The moment the “Islamic Revolution” succeeded, it became immediately clear to the hegemonic liberal West where precisely this “rule of the mullahs” belonged in terms of the international order. A clique that wrested state power away from the custodian of all Western interests in Persia; which, in the name of a long-overdue national-moral consolidation and self-assertion, not only nationalized the domestic oil industry but also presumed to scrutinize international business to determine what it might yield for the nation’s new beginning, and then decides whether and to what extent the country will “open up” to Western business interests; a clique of fanatics who, in all this, still present themselves and their inhumane regime as an anti-imperialist model for other nations that are to be similarly revolutionized in an Islamic manner: This exclusion from the realm of the imperialist human right to the capitalist exploitation of all the world’s resources was, of course, unacceptable to a power for which the enforcement of this “higher good” against an entire alliance of states would have been worth even a world war, and nowhere was it less tolerable than in the “strategically crucial Gulf region.” By refusing to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran and subjecting it to international ostracism, by pursuing a policy of containment designed to politically marginalize the country, and by imposing sanctions intended to effectively cut it off from the economic resources necessary for its successful self-assertion, the world power deployed every resource at its disposal to weaken this regime which it found intolerable. It did not, however, succeed in compelling the mullahs to step down in this way, nor by having Saddam’s Iraq wage war against the pious anti-imperialist revolutionaries for as long as possible with its weapons, and thereby in a sense as its proxy: The Iranian leadership withstood all these efforts to reduce Iran to the status of an oil supplier useful to imperialism and to force it to renounce all anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli hostility. Even though the “Islamic Revolution” has been anything but a success story abroad, and even though the country has neither emerged as a leader of a group of “non-aligned” states striving for emancipation from American tutelage, nor has it managed to shake off its dependence on oil revenues in any way, the Iranian nation has at least stood its ground against the regime of exclusion and containment imposed by America. Iran has managed to arm itself as a partially autonomous military power, and one that calculates its chances of survival even in a war against Israel. In the face of the global political quarantine imposed by the USA, it has skillfully managed, to some extent, to leverage the calculated anti-Americanism of other nations: It maintains political relations with states in Central Asia and Europe, “friendly relations” with neighboring countries in the Gulf, and “special relations” with Lebanon and Syria. And moreover, it asserts itself as the political counterweight to Israel, with its military buildup and with arms and financial aid to the Palestinian resistance and other anti-Israeli “freedom fighters.” As for the nation’s economic foundation, it has succeeded, in the shadow of the US sanctions regime, in expanding its business ties with Russia and India, other neighboring countries and Third World nations, as well as even Europe, the USA’s rival – so successfully, in fact, that Iran has now become a lender to other “developing countries.” Rather than caving in to the balance of power, it has instead officially committed itself to the ambitious plan of completing its rise to become an Asian economic powerhouse within the next 20 years.

So America’s efforts to coerce Iran into “reintegrating into the international community” by force have run up against a state that has secured something akin to the status of a regional power in the Gulf – however limited in scope; which possesses a network of business and political relations and therefore calculates that it has the means to exert its own political influence; and which demonstrates its unwavering interest in national autonomy and self-assertion in defiance of the American-imposed regimen of undermining and exclusion, even in its ambition to become a civilian nuclear power. But as the United States’ responsibilities as a global power grow, so too do the resources it deploys to achieve its political objectives against its adversaries. This is especially true when it perceives its security threatened by “terrorism,” and all the more so when its fight against this threat will no longer be seriously hindered by anything or anybody.

b) Consequently, Washington is now engaging in constructive criticism of the “tolerance” that Bush’s predecessor, Clinton, certainly never actually evinced in his political dealings with Iran; an approach which, nevertheless, the Bush administration believes must be abandoned, given that this country created a first-rate security problem for America precisely during its phase of calculated “dialogue with Iranian reformists.” One does not engage with a self-proclaimed rogue state that also supports terrorism – the first step is to finally and consistently cut it off from the economic lifeline of power that is causing concern:

“Iran's terrorism must be paid for, and that could not be done without the sale of oil and natural gas that is abundant in that country.” (Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the U.S. Congress Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, NIAC, June 26, 2003)

There are still “200 publicly traded companies that maintain ties with Iran,” failing to realize that in doing so they are providing “the Iranian government with the critical infrastructure for business ventures” from which the state profits. Thus, the implementation of long-enacted U.S. laws[1] is no longer merely threatened but has begun, with the aim of drying up Iran’s oil revenues by pressuring foreign companies’ oil-related deals, effectively denying Iran the ability to earn money altogether. This policy, which operates against all Iranian business partners and the governments responsible for them through pressure and penalties, threats or the imposition of business disadvantages – up to and including the termination of business relations – is already yielding its first successes: Thyssen has, in order to reduce Iran’s shareholding in its company to below 5%, purchased shares from Iran for 400 million. bought back at 1 euro – three times the market value – to avoid being blacklisted by the Pentagon; a $2.5 billion deal through which Japan intended to secure Iranian oil supplies for the next 25 years was put on hold due to American pressure; US companies are aligning themselves with this hardline stance by preemptively complying and reviewing their business relationships with firms involved in the oil trade with Iran; the Pentagon is excluding companies that have invested in Iran from reconstruction projects in Iraq under the ILSA sanctions law; and a congressional hearing on ILSA is currently deliberating how to secure the “cooperation” of the EU and Japan with US sanctions policy – that is, what forms of pressure on these partners is most effective in persuading them to participate in the economic strangulation of Iran, etc.

The USA complements its program of economic damage with the necessary diplomatic steps, which seek to establish its political approach to this “terrorist state” as a binding principle for all other nations as well. The celebrated “human rights” which are “flouted” by the mullahs serve as the fundamental justification for the mission undertaken by America on behalf of all other civilized nations: to ensure “democratization” in Iran. Under this banner, the world power proclaims its far-reaching imperial interests in the form of its – self-evident – obligation to assume guardianship over foreign populations, even over the heads of their sovereign rulers. It sets out to liberate these populations from their leaders who exercise their governmental power so “abusively”– and to finally guide them, along with everything else of interest in their country, toward the only politically acceptable from of existence, namely one that is functional for America’s world order. And since America has already provided such a compelling legal justification for interfering in Iran’s sovereign affairs, the world power’s rivals don’t need to be asked twice. After all, they have their own rights and interests in Iran, and therefore invariably need the means to enforce them through coercion. Consequently, “the people of Iran” also hear from European lips that they essentially need to be liberated from their “religious” rulers – in the European view, the secular wing alone, also known as reformists, with whom the European champions of free humanity are currently cultivating and expanding their business relations, would be sufficient for looking after the Persians. But the fact that the “liberation” of Iran has to be a much broader project – namely, a global political joint effort combining blackmail and military force under American leadership, culminating in the elimination of Iran as an anti-American threat – is immediately conveyed to the international community by authoritative sources:

“The audience he (Bush) was addressing was not only the three countries he called ‘the axis of evil,’ but also Russia and China, which the administration has accused of selling the means to produce and deliver weapons of mass destruction, and those US allies who remain hesitant regarding the possible need to expand military operations in the war on terrorism.” (Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2002)

Any states that maintain business or political relations of notable importance with Iran can thus count themselves among the targets of US diplomacy. These are now burdened with a heavy liability: the suspicion that the state which pursues them – solely in its own interest – is a co-supporter of a “state that supports terrorism.” Consequently, they immediately raise the question for that state as to whether they are worth the “deterioration” of its relationship with the USA, which it inevitably risks by continuing to cultivate them. And just like in its war against Iraq, the world power in its plan to finally and effectively isolate Iran on the global stage is also pressing the relevant body of the international community into its service: The US declares Iran to be a relevant case under the international legal framework of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT), with which it once sought – ideally – to prevent other states from acquiring these war-deciding devices, or at least to keep wars manageable and thus calculable for itself, and in doing so leaves no doubt as to the nature of the political interest at play here under the pretext of punishing “violations of binding international law.” The fact that Iran, with its civilian nuclear program, is merely exercising a right that arises precisely from its signature on the Non-Proliferation Treaty is irrelevant – because the only legal interpretation that matters is that advocated by America, according to which a state that exports oil simply has no legitimate economic or civilian interests in the use of nuclear energy:

“We have grave concerns when a nation that is as awash in natural resources, such as Iran's oil and gas, why they would want to develop – as they claim, for peaceful civilian purposes – nuclear energy when they have abundance of oil and gas and don’t need nuclear energy... That, coupled with Iranian attempts to develop nuclear energy in a country that doesn't need nuclear energy, does give cause for a great concern.” (White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, June 18, 2003)

Iranian economic planners certainly have other concerns and are making different calculations; specifically, they are counting on increasing the volume of fossil fuels available for sale on the world market to somewhat offset the financial hardships that their oil- and gas-rich country will soon face as a result of America’s sanctions program. But insofar as it is clear to the world power that the mullahs signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty only to secretly violate it anyway, the treaty, according to the American interpretation, serves only one purpose: to compel Iran to submit to the monitoring regime stipulated in it. Thus, the IAEA is tasked with substantiating Iran’s violations of the NPT; in addition, Iran, by signing the NPT Additional Protocol, is required to authorize the international community to exercise more extensive oversight rights over its nuclear program – and alongside this, the world power makes it explicitly clear that it has long since moved beyond the intention of merely seeking to control an Iranian nuclear program. For in Washington, it is well understood that the distinction drawn within the NPT framework between the permissible “peaceful” use of nuclear technology, on the one hand, and its prohibited “military” application on the other is nothing more than a fiction born of political calculation and correspondingly built into the treaty. A “civilian nuclear power” that possesses all the necessary technological capabilities to feed nuclear energy into its power grid is just a short step away from being able, if necessary, to harness that same energy for bombs, and thereby attains the status of a “military nuclear power” capable of commanding respect for its political interests by virtue of its possession of the ultimate weapon of war. For the USA, therefore, the IAEA’s verification regime – whether or not Iran has signed the NPT Additional Protocol – is an instrument that is indeed useful for monitoring Iran, but one that is far from sufficient for the intended purpose of preventing that nation’s rise to the status of a ‘civilian nuclear power’: First, the treaty has demonstrated to American strategists its complete inability to cut off this nation’s access to nuclear technology – “Here we suddenly discover that Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had... It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders if they really are determined to do it.” (Secretary of State Colin Powell, quoted in LA Times, March 10.) And secondly, it is anyway certain that, for this particular treaty partner, its ability to use nuclear technology merely testifies to its intention to build the incriminated bombs for itself – “Mr. Bolton said that the main concern for Washington is not whether Iran is complying with its treaty obligations, but whether it is developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons.” (Financial Times, June 20)

c) All the same, thumping on the fulfillment of treaty obligations which America otherwise couldn’t care less about serves its purpose as a diplomatic tool, specifically for bringing global partners and adversaries into line and forcing them to go along with the world power’s interest in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Appeals to international law and treaty obligations are eminently suitable for this purpose, and the first practical results of the anti-Iranian containment strategy are very welcome: In accordance with the political guideline issued by Washington – “We, the United States and its allies, will not allow the construction of a nuclear bomb in Iran” (New York Times, June 19) – a coalition of the willing – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Spain – has agreed to support the US Non-Proliferation Security Initiative and to intercept on their national territory, in the air or at sea, any commodities destined for Iran that are not supposed to reach it – not just military equipment, but the broad and constantly expanding field of dual-use goods is targeted; in addition, Russia[2] and China, as the main suppliers for the nuclear reactor Bushehr, were pressured to withdraw from the project and also to refrain from making any other deliveries which are classified by the US as a “high security risk.” Yet because the political objective that America is pursuing in the “nuclear dispute” with Iran at the international diplomatic level, and implementing step by step, aims to neutralize Iran as the security threat that its misguided rulers constitute for America with their means of power – actually existing ones as well as those that might merely soon be possible – all these diplomatic maneuvers are merely the public-facing framework for another stage that the world power has embarked on in its “war on terrorism”: They are setting up Iran as a test case in which the USA intends to exercise, if necessary, the same right to the preventive assertion of its security interests that it claims for itself in Saddam’s Iraq. Essentially, the ruling mullahs are being presented with a proposal to voluntarily step down, along with their nuclear program and all the other national ambitions that America finds objectionable – otherwise they risk becoming a case study for the “regime change” principle which the US has applied in the neighboring country in a manner that is virtually paradigmatic for its 21st-century security and global order policy. Therefore, part of this pre-war diplomacy involves letting the general global public – and the intended recipients in particular – know just how seriously the world power takes the militant enforcement of its security interests in this case as well. Deliberately circulated reports regarding targets, the nature and scale of potential “preemptive strikes,” invasions of strategically important areas of Iran, covert intelligence operations within the country, the consolidation of military deployment zones in neighboring states, etc., certainly do not indicate mere “scare tactics” – any more than the practices aimed at the internal subversion of Iran which have long been underway under the banner of ‘democratization.’ Whatever the opposition speaking out in Iran may take offense at: it is in any case classified as the Fifth Column of freedom and instrumentalized accordingly. In response to the recent student unrest, Bush paid tribute to “those courageous souls who speak out for freedom in Iran. They need to know America stands squarely by their side.” “And I would urge the Iranian administration to treat them with the utmost of respect” (NYT, June 19). The ‘Iran Democracy Act’ expands “US-funded radio and television broadcasts into Iran and calls for an internationally monitored referendum to allow the Iranian people to peacefully transform their system of government” (Voice of America, July 9); and as models for this peaceful “implosion” of the Iranian state – to be set in motion by the people – freedom heroes such as Pinochet and Lech Walesa are then cited for those souls who have not yet mustered sufficient courage.[3]

And certainly by the time America’s ally in the Middle East publishes its own strategic plans for the preventive military elimination of the “threat” it perceives to be coming from Iran, one should abandon the belief that this is merely the “typical saber-rattling” without which Bush supposedly cannot even conduct foreign policy.

IV. Iran’s reaction: Attempting a defensive self-assertion

The representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who see their nation being militarily threatened by the USA’s unmistakable policies, but also their economic survival and domestic stability under attack even before any war breaks out, are striving to politically limit the damage:

– In its foreign policy and diplomacy, the Iranian leadership is attempting a balancing act: doing everything it can to refute the label of a ‘rogue state’ without compromising essential elements of its own anti-imperialist rationale for governance and at the very least not provoking any further escalation of America’s hostility. The world power’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are seen as self-evidently aimed against them; they see the positions of political influence they have gained as being significantly called into question by these conflicts, their nation’s strategic encirclement as complete, and they therefore vehemently reject America’s expansion of power. To counter them with anything other than solemn declarations is, of course, beyond all political rationality given the balance of power; thus, they accept them as the basis for a more promising strategy that commits to a policy of “active neutrality”:They interpret the world power’s wars as a potential political basis for a better relationship with it, demonstrate a willingness to cooperate in carrying out tasks in the American war on terror – and in return seek to be accorded precisely the political respect that America has consistently denied:

“During Friday prayers in Tehran, Rafsanjani said: ‘Iran does not pursue an adventurous policy toward America, and if that country demonstrates its good will and treats other nations as equals, Iran is prepared to cooperate with America in any way.’” (Tehran Times, June 22, 2002) “‘If America abandons its brutal and imperialist policies, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to cooperate with that country,’ said Rafsanjani, citing Afghanistan as an example of cooperation that Tehran could offer the U.S.” (Iran Press Service, June 23, 2002)

In the wake of the very same war on terror that Tehran accuses the world power of waging as brutal imperialism – and without the United States having ‘demonstrated’ anything other than an escalation of hostility in its dealings with Iran – the Islamic Republic is striving, under the guise of ‘cooperation’ with the United States, to assert its deeply entrenched interests in the region. It frames its attempts to secure its influence in neighboring Afghanistan as a nonpartisan concern for “a stable, strong government that guarantees peace, stability, and prosperity for the Afghan people” (Foreign Minister Kharrazi, PakNews, Aug. 7) – a goal that is surely also in America’s interest. In occupied Iraq, the aim is also to secure its influence, which it holds particularly with the Shia community, by presenting it as a constructive contribution to the same overarching consolidation effort that operates under the American banner of ‘nation building’: International humanitarian aid “for reconstruction and relief efforts” in Iraq is channeled there via their own ports; as advocates of the principle of non-interference in internal affairs, they argue that the formation of a government in the neighboring state must be a matter for the Iraqi people to decide for themselves; accordingly, their own protégé Hakim – who has since passed away – with whom they themselves have been involved in the country, distances himself from attacks on US soldiers, committed himself in principle to political confrontation through ‘peaceful means,’ and has his own corps in Iraqi service take on law enforcement duties; another Shiite leader, who controls several ‘troubled’ neighborhoods in Baghdad, is toning down his anti-American rhetoric at Tehran’s urging, etc. In this way, Iran seeks to assert its own means of political power and influence against America’s imperialist encroachment by using these means to position itself as a significant ‘factor’ for ‘order’ and the ‘stability of the region’ – thereby making its own foreign policy concerns respectable even to Washington. The result, however, is that in the world power’s selective political perception, all these attempts at political self-assertion and defensively consolidating influence ultimately reveal only the ‘rogue state’ that is expanding the means of power, which it already has far too much of.

– The international dispute over the nation’s nuclear policy is causing a rift within its own power elite. Representatives of the ‘conservative’ faction initially regard the mere fact that Iran is subjecting itself to an international monitoring regime under the NP Treaty as an affront bordering on treason. They reject any demand for more extebsive oversight as utterly beneath the nation’s dignity – and view every diplomatic proposal to this effect as merely confirming their suspicion that the NPT serves America only as a lever to undermine their nation’s sovereignty. However, their anti-diplomatic rigidity eventually gives way to the political calculations advocated from the beginning by ‘reformist forces’, according to which the promotion of one’s own national interests cannot realistically be achieved through a radical rejection of international diplomacy, that is, it can only be secured through negotiations with the imperialist West, and that is precisely what the government is focused on: While upholding the standpoint of its own legal and political interests, it strives to defuse and ideally eliminate the conflict with the world power that it has instigated through its nuclear ambitions and continues to exacerbate by clinging to them. In its dispute with the USA and the international nuclear watchdog, it vehemently rejects the suspicion that it intends to enrich uranium for purposes other than purely ‘civilian’ energy generation – it wishes to claim nothing more than the right to its own nuclear industry, as guaranteed by the NPT. At the same time, however, they also use their own ‘capabilities’ – derived from their possession of nuclear technology as an argument for the political respect that, in dealing with an autonomous nuclear power, is supposedly self-evident and, moreover, precludes any form of “blackmail”:

“‘The use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons is ‘haram,’ meaning strictly forbidden in Islam,’ Kharrazi said in one of the strongest rebuttals to suggestions that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. ‘You cannot treat Iran this way,’ he told the lawmakers. ‘You cannot pressure us and say, ‘Accept the protocol,’ or pressure us not to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes ... Whether you help us or not, we have the capabilities to carry out our plans … You cannot speak to a capable Iran in the language of violence and threats, and it will not be persuaded by pressure to give up its nuclear expertise. A capable Iran must be met with understanding and cooperation.’” (AFP, June 8; Tehran Times, June 9)

Iran thus points to its existing nuclear capabilities, using them to justify its right to pursue their ‘civilian’ development free from any external interference, attempting in this way to refute the accusation that it merely seeks to acquire ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – yet, in doing so, only confirms the political verdict passed on it in Washington: it is a ‘terrorist state,’ which, even without gas centrifuges and a ‘closed nuclear cycle,’ but all the more so with them, poses a single ‘security risk’ to America. Therefore, when the head of the Iran’s National Security Council emphasizes that his nation is making voluntary concessions and renouncing the exercise of certain rights, this in no way grants other nations the right to impose an international regime of prohibition on Iran – “any clause in a resolution aimed at transforming Iran’s voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment into a legal obligation is unacceptable” (SZ, Nov. 20) – this has been known in Washington all along: The mullahs only make diplomatic concessions of any kind “because they have been caught red-handed” (Powell, ibid.). Therefore, first, diplomacy with Iran must be consistently geared toward continuing to expose the country for all the crimes it cannot stop committing, so that, secondly, the world will gradually become convinced once and for all that it can ultimately be saved from Iran and the evil it represents only through America’s next “Alliance of the Good.”

– In the face of the military threat posed by the United States and Israel, the government is preparing its military for action; in the face of the country’s internal subversion, it is mobilizing its people against the enemy. As for the latter, just as in any bourgeois state facing more serious times, Iran’s rulers have long since sensed their enemy within their own ranks, and in the methods they employ to ensure the unconditional loyalty of the populace, they are in no way inferior to their bourgeois counterparts, who keep volumes of legislation on ‘internal emergencies’ ready for comparable situations: Against the subversive activities of “foreign forces” which manifest themselves in the dissemination of propaganda via the internet and satellite dishes, in the emergence of “Western-American” customs and practices, but also in critical remarks regarding religious and parliamentary leadership – they respond with censorship regulations and bans on criticism; wherever protests threaten to get out of hand, they have them beaten down by their guards of ‘revolutionary volunteers.’ Disputes between the ruling parties institutionalized within the country are, of course, inevitable, particularly regarding the question of how best to consolidate the body politic and ensure the unity of the people and their leadership. Whether one should do more to preserve moral purity among the people – a task that would prove a challenge even for a world power – or whether one should finally strive for the undivided authority of secular state power: From the self-interested, partisan perspective of the West, this dispute between ‘conservatives’ and ‘reformers’ may give rise to all manner of hopes for a voluntary self-disintegration of the “mullah’s state.” For now, however, it remains merely the form characteristic of this state, the method of rule in which its religious rulers adhere to the principle – which applies to them as well – that, in order to defend the nation against its external enemy, all internal conflicts must take a back seat: those between the Persian masses and their leadership, as well as, ultimately, those between religious and secular-authoritarian moral codes.

V. The rest of the imperialist world’s reaction: Comrades-in-arms reckon with America’s offensive

America’s aggressive stance toward Iran is creating new realities in global politics, and not just with regard to this country, which has been labeled part of the ‘axis of evil.’ The rigidity with which the world power is pushing forward the economic strangulation and political isolation of the ‘mullah regime’ and the determination it displays in weighing all necessary measures – including a “preventive” resolution of its security problem with this state – can be interpreted by its European rivals in one way: The easy route – maintaining lucrative business relations with the very state against which a sanctions regime organized by the US and made binding on the entire West is aimed, while acting as an official co-sponsor of that regime – is over. In any case, the Western superpower has decided that this must come to an end, and Iran’s trading partners based in Europe are currently attaching greater weight to this fact than to the reduction in business volume they will undoubtedly face in the near future. So they are supporting the UN monitoring and verification program regarding Iran’s nuclear industry initiated by the USA, even declaring themselves quite competent advocates of non-proliferation – though certainly not because they have adopted America’s security interests as their own and wish to grant their leading power a mandate in the next phase of its ‘war on terror.’ Rather, they are going along with America’s offensive in their own characteristic way – a strategy that remains as unbroken as ever – by carving out room for their own political freedom of action by accepting the facts set forth by the world power. The diplomatic wrangling over the application and interpretation of the NPT, along with its famous Additional Protocol, gives Europeans the opportunity – backed by the authority of international law and the threat of further UN sanctions – to coerce Iran, through their own independent power, into voluntarily submitting to the international oversight demanded of it. With this calculated intent, they reduce America’s offensive campaign against Iran to a level that allows them to position themselves as an independent global power shaping the international order: Europe presents itself as a power that – unlike the US – considers the political harassment of Iran to be provisionally ended by virtue of its claimed international legal oversight of Iran’s nuclear program. Germany, France, and England – the three leading European nuclear powers, competent in every respect – are presenting themselves to Iran as a force that promises to temper America’s offensive, and are thus seeking to channel Iran’s interest in autonomous self-assertion toward themselves as a guarantor power. While the USA uses the diplomacy surrounding the NPT to publicly frame Iran as a case for “preventive” disarmament within the framework of its “war on terror,” Europe’s powers aim to use the same diplomatic coercion to demonstrate the opposite – namely, that Iran can be induced to adopt ‘civilized’ behavior, including in its handling of nuclear energy, without any ‘regime change,’ and can thus be effectively managed even as a global ‘security risk.’

So the world power’s European rivals have also taken a liking to placing foreign states under supervision – citing “terrorism” and the “dangers to the international community” – and to bringing their weapons and other capabilities under control. Of course, this is to promote a world order that suits their needs, which is why Iran’s assurance that it intends to sign the NPT Additional Protocol and, for the time being, refrain from the uranium enrichment that has raised such suspicion, constitutes merely one side of the diplomatic success of which the Europeans are so proud. The other side, after all, consists of a “new basis of trust” (Foreign Minister Fischer) that they claim to have established between themselves and Iran, which would also allow for “new forms of cooperation,” provided that Iran continues to “address international concerns” about this matter (FAZ, Oct. 22), including the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how. Making the completion of Iran’s nuclear program contingent on their approval, thus ensuring that Iran becomes an “autonomous nuclear power” only as a European concession (and therefore a highly conditional one), to control and limit the power of this state themselves: This is Europe’s alternative to the toppling of Iran that America is pursuing. In this respect, therefore, it is indeed a wonderful “contribution to world peace,” as Iran’s head of government has gratefully proclaimed, and on top of that, a splendid prelude to the new civilian blackmail maneuvers that are part of this peace. For Iran may well hope that the agreement with its European partners will secure recognition of its right “to make peaceful use of nuclear energy” “in accordance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” and also promise itself “easier access to modern technology” (agreement of October 21, according to dpa). As mentioned, both are granted to it solely on the condition that all the “international concerns” it has raised with its nuclear program “have been completely dispelled” (ibid.), and the decision as to whether and when this is the case is not in its hands: It is now contractually enshrined within Europe’s discretion, and the ‘European Troika’ headquarters will then inform Iran of the conditions it must fulfill for a positive decision to be made, if at all.

For Russia, America’s offensive against Iran puts more than just a lucrative foreign business venture on the chopping block. Firstly, the export of nuclear technology and weapons counts among this nation’s only significant sources of wealth aside from oil and other raw material exports, and it is precisely these business items that have – for some time now, and increasingly so – brought Russia under fire from the US administration as a supplier to the Iranian “terrorist state.” Secondly, Iran, whose political degradation and disempowerment is being pursued by the world power, is not only one of the few customers for Russian commodity exports, but also a partner of considerable strategic importance in Russia’s efforts to “stabilize” its own southern flank against Islamic separatism and against NATO expansion, as well as to maintain a residue of influence in the Gulf region. However, Putin does not want to risk jeopardizing the good relations with America that he has worked so hard to maintain; nor is it an option for him to abandon his economic and strategic interests in Iran as a partner. So Moscow approaches American demands for stricter monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program with a degree of sympathy in principle, but interprets these demands – with no less self-interestedly and no less skillfully than the world power’s European rivals – as constituting a single, specific mandate: to relieve America of the burden of having to resolve the ‘security problem’ posed by Iran on its own: Consequently, it sticks to its own distinct nuclear policy toward Iran – and explicitly dedicates it to the objective of controlling the Iranian nuclear program and by, for example, taking back spent nuclear fuel, allaying America’s concerns about ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In this way, or so the calculation goes in Russia, Moscow demonstrates to the US the kind of good behavior in global politics that then in turn permits it to assert its own rights – in any case, Moscow remains committed to the further expansion of its ‘strategic partnership’ with Iran, which, in addition to nuclear and arms deals, also encompasses regulatory issues regarding Russian access to surrounding oil reserves: “Now that Iran has … declared its willingness to cooperate unreservedly with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Kremlin believes nothing stands in the way of resuming arms deals.” (SZ, Nov. 13)

So Iran is effectively being told – even by this partner – that the competition between the imperialist powers against the American world power can, at best, be used only to a limited extent for the success of its assertion against the latter. It is being used by the very same state actors on whom it is gambling for support in its self-assertion against its superpower enemy – as a means for their self-assertion against America’s world order requirements and as a test case for how far they can go.

Footnotes

[1] The most important of these is the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), which was enacted in 1995, extended in 2001, but has not yet been implemented. It also prohibits non-US companies from investing more than $20 million in Iran and, in the event of a violation, penalizes them by barring them from the US market and from doing business with US companies.

[2] Because Russia is “cooperating” with Iran in the field of nuclear technology, NASA, citing the so-called “Gilmore Amendment,” has now prohibited itself from providing “financial assistance” to the Russian ISS space program – assistance that had previously at least made it possible to build Russian rockets on credit.

[3] The days when there were still ‘secret machinations’ of the imperialist West to ‘uncover’ regarding desired ‘regime changes’ are over: America’s absolute moral and political right – in every respect – to rid itself of a “terrorist state” simply justifies any means. It is therefore perfectly acceptable to download from the websites of the largest pro-democracy movement the world has ever seen – “we must do everything we can to assist the pro-democracy forces in Iran in their struggle to reclaim their country” (Senator Brownback, IranMania, July 9) – a catalog of all effective “strategic” measures, from general strikes to military coups, that can be used to bring about the collapse of the “regime” in Iran and “crumble the pillars of government power.” So much for the content of the “thirst for freedom” (Bush) and for democracy, as well as for “gender emancipation” (Claudia Roth) which the West cherishes in Iranian students. And so much so in advocates for women’s rights that one of them has already been preemptively honored with the Nobel Peace Prize apropos the logic of preventive warfare.