Three takes on the ‘Middle East’

After a brief trial last year, soon abandoned, I still can’t quite bring myself to ditch the colonial eurocentric term, Middle East, in favour of the politically correct but geographically inaccurate West Asia. It’s not just that key countries in the region, notably Egypt and Libya, are in Africa. I could get over my pedantry if I believed the substitution a meaningful strike against empire.

I don’t though. While I myself balk at “nigger”, “queer”, and the now rehabilitated “cunt”, I see such matters as personal judgment calls, not verbotens. And while “Northern Ireland” and “Londonderry” remain beyond the pale in my book, I’m wary of the absurdities – “people with vaginas”  and the like – to which terminological purism has brought the Woke. Wary too of its appropriation for virtue signalling or, worse, as stick to beat the deplorables with.

My favourite quote on such prioritising of word over deed?

In just 200 years we’ve progressed all the way from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned people while condemning racism.

Caitlin Johnstone

So till someone persuades me otherwise, middle east it is. On which subject I offer three third party pieces, none too time-consuming for a Sunday.

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On his website, onthebrynk, my good friend Bryan Gocke has posted a short review of a 2013 book – Going to Tehran – why the US must come to terms with the Islamic Republic – by two former US National Security officials, a husband and wife team who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given this, and the limited capacity of the liberal worldview to place at centre stage the reality of a US empire with proven capacity to turn the region – whatever we may call it – into a bloodbath to preserve its mighty but waning hegemony, such a book, its perspective flawed even in 2013, will be even more so now. The war launched on Iran (like those in Ukraine, Syria, Africa’s Sahel and countless other latent or kinetic war zones superficially unrelated) cannot be understood without grasping the lengths to which Washington is prepared to go to thwart the emergence of multipolarity and, more specifically, to weaponise energy in seeking to halt the rise of China as a potent challenger to its planetary hegemony.

But I urge my fellow anti-imperialists not to throw out baby with bathwater. Based on Bryan’s excellent review I’d say that for all its authors’ blinkered vision – or because of it – this book is valuable in much the way the Rand Corporation’s now infamous 2009 report – Which Path to Persia? – is valuable. Both showcase important strands of empire thinking.

The Resilience of Iran

Generally book reading seems to be on the decline, collateral damage in the age of short attention videos, podcasts etc. I am no exception, finding that it is all that I can do to keep up with the slew of geopolitical trends and events that characterise our current times.

However, when Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran repeatedly encourages his western audience to read ‘Going to Tehran – Why the US must come to terms with the Islamic Republic’ (2013 – Leverett and Leverett) I, for one, eventually felt the need to find the time. Professor Marandi, with close links to the Iranian Government, appears to have taken on a Western facing role in providing an Iranian perspective on the current conflict in Western Asia – in combative debate with commentators in western mainstream media and in  more considered and nuanced interviews on alternative media. He is my main ‘go to’ when trying to get a sense of what is going on in Iran and how it might be planning its next moves in its war with the US and its Israeli proxy.

The authors of the book, Flynt and Hilary Leverett are academics and former US National Security Officials.

The book opens with an absolute gem from a 1962 JFK speech, no less, that sets the context for popular western conceptions of Iran and more generally serves as a reminder to us all that geopolitical analysis is complicated and that conclusions and propositions are not to be reached and stated lightly:

‘We (often) enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.’ (i)

In our collective defence I would want to point out that so relentless and embedded are the propaganda messages in our western mainstream media that it requires considerable time and persistence to access alternative sources that allow such constructive discomfort!

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The Leveretts (writing in 2013) suggest that a western mythology has been developed about Iran that comprises three elements:

1) Irrationality. That Iran is an immature, ideologically driven polity unable to formulate foreign policy that is in its own material national interests.

2) Illegitimacy. That Iran has an illegitimate and unstable political order that is at risk of implosion.

3) Isolation. That through diplomacy, military action and economic pressures Iran can be isolated and brought to collapse.

Within a few pages I found myself coming to a very clear view that it seems unlikely that Iran would have been able to maintain in such a robust manner its resistance to persistent attempts at political and economic capture by the US without that resistance being firmly grounded in the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic State that developed from it. Key factors in my thinking comprise:

1) The largely ubiquitous nature of the Shia religion in the country means that nearly everyone has an engagement with it – providing a point for unity, the maintenance of morale and the development and exercise of popular discipline, especially when western attacks are at their most severe.

2) Islam, provides a series of moral imperatives that legitimises and empowers resistance against what is viewed as an amoral (if not immoral) neo liberal ideology characteristic of late-stage western capitalism / imperialism.

3) Ayatollah Khomeini’s writings in pre revolution exile explicitly politicised Shia Islam with a moral responsibility to resist and oppose the external meddling in the affairs of any state and its people. As such it chimes with anti-imperialist movements (largely in the global south) that promote the sovereignty of individual states.

I don’t think that the alternatives to the setting up of the Islamic Republic (ii) as a result of the overthrow of The Shah would have had its staying power and would have probably enabled a US led counter revolution to re-establish a dictatorship with a re-instatement of the internal state oppressive apparatus. ¹ : This would have:

1) Allowed the West to continue to plunder Iran’s oil reserves at knock down prices and open up its economy to imperialist value extraction and financialisation – to the detriment of ordinary Iranians.

2) Enabled Israel to more successfully progress its ‘Greater Israel Project’ that would have continued to contribute to dividing and destabilising Arab states in the region at the behest of, and in the interests of, the US (iii).

3) Empowered the US to control oil supplies to China, thus slowing what has become a phenomenal economic development and restricting its challenge to US global hegemony.

Of course, political elites in the West (aka The Ruling Class) argue that Iran continues to pose a threat (militarily, ideologically and economically) to the stability of the region and indeed to the self-evident wholesomeness of its hegemonic ‘rules-based order,’ which combined with human rights abuses, provides more than ample justification for its attempts to bring about its collapse.

Consideration of human rights abuses and the inherent violence of revolution is beyond the scope of this piece, but I will make three general points:

1) Western, dominant countries citing universal human rights as a crude stick to beat developing countries whose economies, societies and polities have been grossly distorted by colonialism and imperialism need to be challenged. These views are simplistic and often self-serving.

2) UN resolutions explicitly forbid external attacks (military, economic sanctions, covert regime change etc) on the basis of confronting human abuses. The logic being that external attacks increase resistance to change.

3) The violence involved in the revolutionary overthrow of a regime rarely ends with the establishment of a new government. Counter revolutionary forces remain at large, their potency often enhanced by funding and material support from countries who had supported the previous regime.

As a member of BRICS, inhabiting a key geographical trade location with abundant energy resources, Iran does indeed have the potential to become a regional superpower – and one that can and is making a significant contribution to challenging US global hegemony and the US $  financial system that underpins it. So, the Western Ruling Class is absolutely right to see Iran as a threat – primarily to itself. The extent to which waging war, imposing economic sanctions and promoting regime change in Iran is in the best interests of the majority of the populations in the West is moot – and one that a class analysis would suggest otherwise. Then there is the very real risk that this will all spiral out of control into a global conflict that includes the exchange of nuclear strikes ……..

That aside, the evidence that Iran poses a military threat to the stability of the region seems to me to be thin (iv). I view this as a classic propaganda strategy by the West – to accuse your adversary of doing the very bad things that you yourself are doing. To my knowledge Iran hasn’t invaded any other country or sought to impose its ideology or values on other states. It has undeniably supported groups in other countries in the region seeking to resist US and Israeli invasion / ethnic cleansing /  genocide in  Yemen, Lebanon, the West Bank  and , of course, Gaza.

Is that a reason to attempt to destroy it?

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Regardless of final and as yet unreadable outcomes – regardless too of whether Trump made a momentous mistake on February 28 or is simply the agent of more powerful players who seek energy chaos on a scale capable of thwarting the rise and rise of their primary foe, China – few doubt that the middle east is in the grip of epoch shaping convulsions. Nothing speaks more eloquently to this than the astonishing territorial gains of Yemen’s de facto government, Ansar Allah, and their attendant threat to a century of rule by another Western installed regime, the House of Saud.

Here, in just under twenty minutes on what he deems Riyadh’s catastrophic miscalculation in reversing its China facilitated rapprochement with Tehran – entered into solely because MBS was rightly suspicious of Biden – only to leap from frying pan to fire in trusting Trump 2 rather than BRICS, is the Duran’s Alexander Mercouris.

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The sweeping territorial gains of Ansar Allah went unremarked on during my recent periods of silence. As did Russia’s ongoing advances in Ukraine, the Great AI Brouhaha, ² Scott Bessent’s “economic D-day”, and two anniversaries of major historic events: viz, the quarter-centennial of 9/11, and third anniversary of post October 7 genocide.

I’ve written elsewhere on how I changed my mind about 9/11, and in diverse asides – here and here for instance – on how I came to see the “conspiracy theory” putdown as a tool on the one hand of bad faith actors; on the other of those too lazy to address on its evidential merits an argument or explanation which invokes conspiracy on high. There are also conspiracy theories about October 7. Though not my concern here it’s worth noting that the most plausible of these references a “Jewish State” forewarned but opting to turn a blind eye and so create a 9/11 style opportunity to advance a Greater Israel project which aligns an expansionist colonial settler state with empire agendas.

Back to the main thrust. Unlike two able scourges of Zionism, Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan, I refuse to condemn the Hamas breakout on that day, just over three years ago, which changed so much. Like Jonathan Cook, ³ I’m too aware of how corrupt elites use such condemnation to justify their abetment of mass murder in Palestine. And like Norman Finkelstein, his own family liquidated in Nazi death camps, I say Hamas had no acceptable choice. ⁴

Nevertheless both Owen and Mehdi, with whom I differ on a good deal more than October 7, have proven highly effective in adversarial debate – something neither Jonathan nor I engage in though Norman to his credit does – with genocide apologists of both Israeli and Western stripe. To this end they readily condemn the Hamas breakout. A fair-minded chap, I don’t presume to lecture those who enter the lair of the beast on how best to fight him. And as a tactician I must concede that their condemning of Hamas robs Zionism of an important weapon, so enabling them to fight on their own terms and to great effect. I don’t recall ever seeing Owen or Mehdi bested over Palestine.

See Mehdi in full flow here as, in just three minutes forty-seven, he interrogates October 7 in light of Israel’s infamous Hannibal Directive.

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1. Bryan’s point here is as unprovable as it is irrefutable but merits serious consideration. As a young Trotskyist in the first years after the Iranian revolution had seen the clerics under Ayatollah Khomenei liquidate all competing currents of resistance to the puppet shah – notably the Tudeh, a Moscow leaning communist party – I had deemed post 1979 Iran a case of revolution hijacked. (How good it felt to be young and know everything!) But who can gainsay the contention that no secularist rule – witness the fate of the region’s Arab Ba’athisms in Iraq, Libya and Syria – could have for so long defied empire efforts to roll back the revolution in the ever more transparently debased names of democracy, human rights and regional peace, and in its wake install a nominally independent comprador  regime (whether of royalist or republican stripe is entirely secondary) and thereby, in Bryan’s words, allow the West to continue to plunder Iran’s oil reserves at knock-down prices and open up its economy to imperialist value extraction?
2. On Elon Musk’s calls for regulation, Trump, like a stopped clock twice a day, got it right. When three of the world’s wealthiest oligarchs suspend their differences and unite to demand legislatory control over their own industry, it’s naive to take their piety at face value. For one thing, monopolists favour barriers, legislation included, to new entrants and the threat to margins they pose. (See in this regard my post twenty-two months ago on China’s pint-sized DeepSeek.) For another, so powerful a set of technologies will always be a threat to most of us: not, as the dystopias of sci-fi would have it, through the superiority of machine minds over human but because under capitalism (or the creditor ruled techno-feudalism Yanis Varoufakis says has supplanted it) AI will necessarily be at the service of profits or rents; not human need.
3. As it happens, Jonathan has posted today on how corporate media stenographers use such questions – “Will you or will you not condemn October 7?”  – in ways calculated to draw a veil over genocide. How the BBC sets a trap sees Jonathan doing what he does best, locating in particular instances – in this case the damning as antisemitic of the UK Green Party’s Jewish leader Zak Polanski – how those media serve, on every matter that most affects their licence to loot, our ruling elites.
4. I can’t locate it right now but, in an extended version of the same event – hosted by Chris Hedges – Norman tells of how his mother loathed Germans – “not Nazis, Germans“. As a Jew, the only Germans she encountered supported a Nazi regime bent on exterminating her people. “Do I condone my mother’s failure to differentiate?”, her son rhetorically asks. “I do not. Do I understand it? I do.”

   He rests his case. Why would we expect the emaciated and serially bereaved inmates of a concentration camp – not my words for Gaza but those of an Israeli Chief of National Security – to distinguish the Jewish from the Israeli oppressor?