Iran — what happens next? | thearticle

The shock of Qasem Soleimani’s assassination has passed. The commentators have chewed it over. The remnants of his body have been buried. Even his death cost lives, those of the mourners

crushed to death at his funeral. Iran duly fired missiles into two large American air-force bases in Iraq to honour the deceased. What have we learned? What comes next? On the American side

there was confirmation of the US President’s psychological weaknesses. Trump — the sociopathic narcissist — needs to draw attention and adulation to himself from his adoring Republican base,

hence the drone-strike outside Baghdad. Hence, also, the promise of war crimes to avenge a litany of Iranian-backed killing, and the hostages taken by Iranian revolutionaries some forty

years ago. Behold the great timeless Warrior-Defender fierce in anger. And, at the drop of a few Iranian missiles, the Great Defender becomes the Great Deal-Maker, the peace-seeking

statesman flanked by rows of grim generals, weighed down with medals and the need to look fierce and peaceable at the same time. The wonders of the consistency of inconsistency as strategy.

Can we expect a future call to Rouhani for a Geneva meeting? On the Iranian side we have Ayatollah Khamenei’s variations on “Death to America” alongside a diplomatic attempt by the Iranian

Foreign Minister to draw a line under tit-for-tat acts of aggression. Despite the cruelty, theocracy and the theology of martyrdom of the Shi’a clerics who are in power, Iran’s policies have

a cold rationality. The overwhelming military advantage of the US was reflected in the calibrated and limited nature of the Iranian military retaliation. It would be a mistake to imagine

that this limited response indicated cowardice or that Iran’s “stepping down”, as Trump called it, indicated defeat. The vast acreage of war cemeteries along the road from Tehran to

Ayatollah Khomenei’s mausoleum, with their poignant photographs of the deceased, the terrible death toll of the Iran-Iraq war, tells a different story: a nationalism hardened by a history of

foreign control and invasion into a dreadful level of human sacrifice. A _Hujjat-ul-Islam_scholar sitting next to me at dinner in Tehran, breaking into a harsh, hacking cough, reminded me

of how apt the comparison was between Northern Europe 1914-1918 and Iran 1980-1988. “I was gassed in the war,” he said in an off-hand explanation. The gas weaponry had come from Europe while

support for Saddam Hussein had come from the US. Many Iranians will regard Soleimani’s death as a heroic martyrdom. Others wanting to see an end to the _velayat-al-faqih_— clerical rule by

legal experts — will place his assassination in the context of Iran’s history, a proud Persian culture and now a fervent, secular nationalism. For Soleimani was, after all, a hero of the

Iran-Iraq war. Trump can speak of the American hostages taken in 1979. Iranians can speak of the UK and US-instigated 1953 coup that deprived Iran of democracy under Mossadegh, and of the

Shah’s torture chambers that came after. History and religion matter — neither of these are Trump’s strong points. Iran effectively has two — interacting — parallel governments. President

Rouhani is seeking negotiation and reform and the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards oppose any compromise. There are Iranian clerics, even in the throbbing heart of clerical Qom,

who have come to see the adoption of political office as the poisonous root of corruption — they want to get out of politics. The streets of Iran fill up intermittently with citizens who

want freedom from the Puritanism, cruelty, human rights violations and foreign adventures of the clerical regime, only to be gunned down and imprisoned. The path to reform is long and hard.

US intervention under Trump, giving the Revolutionary Guards a martyr and a national hero, thwarting the considerable achievements of the nuclear negotiators and making Rouhani look like a

naïve fool, while undermining his government with devastating sanctions, have blocked this path for a long time to come. There are three ways things can go. Business as usual: continuing

chaos in the Middle East with growing Iranian desperation at sanctions and a grim determination not to be one of the only military powers in its region that lack nuclear weapons. The nuclear

deal was a deal reneged on by the US, not by Iran; it was essentially a matter of “we’ll end sanctions if you end the uranium enrichment required for nuclear warheads.” Trump was determined

to reverse anything Obama had achieved. Or there is preferred path of the Washington hawks, Netanyahu, and the US military-industrial interests who seek more and more pressure and

provocations that risk triggering full-scale war. Or there is what Trump pledged and Iran wants: to get troops out of the Middle East’s wars, allowing Iran’s reformers to gain in prestige.

Lets hope Trump’s narcissism allows him to play the part of Great-Deal Maker.