It was a curious episode. Last month the Foreign Minister of Iraq travelled
to Tehran to receive support from the ayatollahs against American threats
to topple Saddam Hussein.
The axiom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” comes to
mind, but it was still an improbable picture to watch on CNN. Saddam Hussein
is the very man who waged an eight-year war that killed about half a million
Iranians. The Iranian people ought to despise him as much as Iraqis who
for such a long, sad time have suffered his brutality.
The stories of Saddam’s barbarity beggar belief. Much is made of
his destruction of 4000 villages and gassing of Kurds in the north in
the late 1980s in which up to 150,000 people were killed. But we forget
about the grotesque viciousness of his campaign against Sunnis, Christians
and Shi’ites.
Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, the German human rights activist and Marxist
intellectual who is an expert on conditions in Iraq, has described the
cruelty of Saddam’s war against Shi’ites around Basra, in which
about 300,000 have died.
One technique for dealing with the Shi’ites (“dirty people,
not really Iraqis,” Saddam has said) is to make them lie in the street
and bury them alive in hot asphalt.
Osten-Sacken estimates that over the past generation Saddam has killed
or deported one-tenth of the Iraqi population of 25 million.
Saddam’s control by means of a secret police is merciless. Osten-Sacken
has described the fate of an intelligent young doctor who made a mildly
indiscreet comment about a television programme. He was sent to prison
and tortured for three weeks, returning a broken man.
Iraq is a place where anyone is at risk if there is no portrait of Saddam
in the living room. It is not a land where foreign reporters can move
about at will and accurately gauge people’s feelings about the regime
through random interviews.
So why would the Iranian ayatollahs prefer a country controlled by a human
reptile next door rather than, for example, a land resembling energetic,
democratic Turkey?
The reason is not fear of the United States as such but fear of freedom
itself. Unlike Iraq, Iran (population 66 million) is a country in which
foreign journalists can get an accurate idea of public sentiment, and
from everywhere the same picture emerges: the populace holds the ruling
ayatollahs in open contempt.
Iran is said to have the youngest median age of any country on Earth.
The Guardian reported figures indicating that 75 per cent of the
Iranian population is under 25; an alternative breakdown from the CIA
website has 41 per cent under 15. These young people are bereft of opportunities:
only 10 per cent who do university entrance can be admitted and unemployment
is vast.
This population is too young to empathise with official Government hate
campaigns against the United States. They know what life is like in other
countries because they use the internet to connect with members of the
worldwide Iranian diaspora. Like their peers in Europe and the US, they
enjoy youth culture and want to listen to pop music.
The black-clad public morality police who roam the streets looking for
infractions of public decency (for example, a woman who shows too much
hair from under her scarf) are despised in Iran.
The disdain for the Government and the mullahs is as palpable there as
the pervading sense of silence and fear is in Iraq. A telling statistic
is the official Iranian report of participation in Friday prayers nationwide
for all age groups — a little over 1 per cent.
If Saddam falls, the Iranian mullahs’ rule will be doomed in the
unrest that follows. Eventually, an archipelago of emerging democratic
Islamic states could stretch from the edge of Europe into the heart of
Arabia — Turkey, Iraq, Iran and even a civilised, independent Kurdistan.
There is plenty of oil around to support economic development. The peoples
of these regions are the most educated, creative and entrepreneurial in
the Middle East. Iranians thrive in Paris and San Francisco. We should
not have to be reminded that the Saatchi advertising agency was founded
by two Iraqi brothers.
Should it come to pass, this chain of democracies, which might connect
through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the largest democracy in the world,
India, would hang like an executioner’s scimitar over the great,
corrupt, totalitarian theocracy of the region, Saudi Arabia.
The domino theory was once much on the minds of cold warriors. Today,
it focuses the minds of the imams of Saudi Arabia. For if Iraq falls to
democracy, then Iran, the Saudis may not be far behind.
For generations, the Saudis have convinced the West that stability was
the key to continued oil for the world economy. Yet has the region ever
had stability? Look at the history of the Middle East and the best analogy
is to imagine that every New Zealand prime minister in the past century
had come to power by murdering not only her or his predecessor but the
predecessor’s whole family.
Between grisly coups, the stability of the Middle East is the stability
of a hellish but well-ordered prison.
If the Mullah Omar and the Taleban had not been so incautious as to shelter
a non-government organisation, al Qaeda, which slaughtered thousands of
Americans, they would likely still be in power, shooting women through
the head and cutting off men’s hands as public entertainments in
the Kabul soccer stadium. That is Islamic stability.
In New Zealand, the reactionary left still calls it the war of the Americans
against the people of Afghanistan. But it is a strange war against a people
that ends with the losers breaking out their ghetto blasters and dancing
for joy in the streets.
The Iraqis and Iranians do not need handouts. They merely need freedom
and the chance to take their rightful place alongside the world's other
democracies.
The call for stability in the Middle East masks the West’s lazy desire
for its own comfort, no matter how hellish that stability is for oppressed
peoples. It is time to apply our imagination and ingenuity, not to our
own comfort but to ridding the world of Saddam and achieving a better
life for all the peoples of the Middle East.
* Denis Dutton teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury.
