The nuclear fat is in the fire (Iran)

[IndianaGreen]

The nuclear fat is in the fire

Cover story

James Buchan

Monday 14th February 2005

Iran - Iran is not some ill-sorted colonial confection like Iraq with 80 years on the clock. This proud, ancient nation would resist US invasion at all levels. By James Buchan

The dispute over the Iranian government's nuclear programme is only the latest quarrel in a half-century of animosity between Iran and the United States. What makes this dispute immeasurably more dangerous than the CIA's Operation Ajax in 1953, or the anti-American riots of 1963, or the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, or the shooting down of IranAir Flight 655 in 1988, is the new world order in which it is being fought.

In a post-colonial and post-cold war world, neither Russia nor Britain, the old historical powers in the region, nor even the institutions of international diplomacy, have much power to persuade, threaten or restrain. Each country, Iran and the US, has a deep-seated resentment of the other, which is hard to express in traditional diplomacy, or to contain. The taste they share for Manichaean rhetoric - "Great Satan!", "axis of evil!" - makes the quarrel an agony to witness.

At the heart of the threat to peace is the Iranian hankering for security. Though never colonised by the European powers, Iran was for much of the 19th and 20th centuries a battleground of Russian and British rivalry. The naive Iranian faith in the US as its champion against these old-world bullies evaporated in 1953, when the CIA helped overturn the nationalist government of Muhammed Mossadeq to protect British interests and restore the young shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In Iran, Mossadeq is regarded with veneration, not least because he wasn't a clergyman. The shah went on to forge close relationships with both Democrat and Republican US presidents, dictate terms to the Ba'athist regime in Iraq and, for a while, make Iran both rich and influential.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200502140004