DM: Almost all the neighbouring countries around Iran are either allies of the US or being administered by the Americans, which may somehow be a sign of a tough American policy against Iran. Mrs. Rice has talked about sorting out historical problems with Iran and addressing issues of human rights and terrorism.
- What are the implications of these statements? Is it the issue of hostages of 1980? Or is the issue resolved according to the protocol of Iran and the US? Or do they intend to apologize to Iran? Iran has also got similar claims in the case of the coup de tat of 1953 when the US overthrew the national government of Musaddeq.
JK: Well, it’s a snake pit of conflicting memories and interests, I think, in Washington towards Iran. The points that you mentioned are, of course, not forgotten and they continue to be significant, but it does seem to me that the present American sabre rattling towards Iran ought to be understood in a much more contemporary sense. It’s part of an intensification of the global quest for power of the United States that has been developing since 9/11, and the American motives are specifically now concerned with the broader dynamics in the region, underlying these, of course, is a military domination of the region, and one can even see, I think, in the tensions with the European Union, a certain jealousy that is developing towards the European Union, certain hostility even towards the European Union about which countries, which states, will actually predominate within this region, and there is a dispute as well, I think, about the different forms of power. The European Union seems to me to be championing what has been called ‘soft power’. I mean investment, technological transfer, opening up of exchanges among universities and schools, tourism and the development of cross border links in terms of media and so on, whereas the American perception seems to be that the non-governmental sector is okay but only as fifth column of American geo-political strategy. And it’s worth saying here I think that if the United States does indeed pursue a strategy of commando operations and of outright intervention, then it’s clear from the historical record that the outcome is unlikely to be democratic. There is a very fine study that has been done recently by the Carnegie Institute which examines some 18 American military interventions in the name of democracy since 1945, and with the exception of three of them, they have all failed. They did not have democratic outcomes. The exceptions were Italy, Germany and Japan. They are each very specific examples. But the point is that the big majority of such military interventions or threatened military interventions have not resulted in democracy and that is likely to be the case with the present American strategy. It’s not the way to bring about the opening up of the regime which has now the strong support from many citizens within that regime. It’s as if the Americans are doing precisely the opposite of what political wisdom should teach them.
DM: As regards the human rights issue, it appears that foreign intervention is practically harming the process of democracy and encourages the political system to bring more restrictions to the political arena and limit political and social liberties and militarize the atmosphere.
- In comparison with the Arab allies of the US in the region, how plausible is it to focus on Iran while in those same countries, we have still got serious issue regarding women’s rights, practice of religious laws and the level of political and social rights?
JK: Well, you correctly spot the double standards within the American language of championing democracy and the actual geo-military strategy. It’s selective. It has blind eyes. It’s prepared, for instance, to praise Colonel Qaddafi’s regime now. The new found ally, which threats negotiations, avowedly has given up its nuclear strategy. So the United States and Britain have now formed some sort of an explicit alliance with Qaddafi despite the fact that within that regime there is scandalous violation of civil, and of political and social rights of the population. And that double standard is also evident in quite a number of cases throughout the whole region that we are discussing. Saudi Arabia is a striking case in point. The willingness in Afghanistan who subcontracts out military and policing powers to warlords. This is another instance of these double standards. And for anybody who globally feels some affection for principles of non-violent power sharing and the rule of law and social pluralism, for anybody in the world who is a friend of democracy, these double standards ought to be seen as profoundly threatening to the whole ethos and the institutional dynamics of democracy. I am currently writing a new history of democracy. It hasn’t been done for more than a century. And one of the many points, lessons if you like, that’s clear in the examining of this complex history of democracy, is the problem of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy has been one of the principal enemies of democracy, of the life and institutions of democracy. In other words, among the enemies of democracy, there has been a recurrent pattern where those enemies point out the double standards within democracy. They point the finger at the double standards, at the hypocrisy that surrounds democratic institutions and ways of life. And this has in the European case been the prelude to the formation of deeply anti-democratic politics. It was the kind of criticism that was made by the early Fascist and Bolshevik groups for instance. This smell of hypocrisy that comes from the house of democracy may well encourage us, I think it’s presently doing throughout the region, it may well encourage not only anti-Americanism, which is skyrocketing as a result of the Iraqi intervention and occupation, but even the Salafist, active rejection of democracy, even a certain Mujahedeen effort to blow up the house of democracy wherever it has been or is being built. And this radical rejection of democracy ought to bother its friends because in the present climate the great danger is, as I think Walid Junblat put it in a very pithy way, that democracy will become synonymous with American tanks, with self-bomber, with Humvee military bombers, and this, I think, both democrats outside of Iran and within should feel great discomfort at.
DM: Regarding financial and military support of terrorism and specifically the Hizbollah and Hamas, Iran has denied the claims and even in their foreign policy, they have reduced their preventive role in the Middle-East peace process. Yet they are still not recognizing Israel.
JK: Well, we should go back to the key point that democracy only flourishes within geo-political regions which in effect are “security communities” where the threat of war, violence and terror by states and non-governmental organizations is lifted. That if it’s true that democracy only flourishes in “security communities”, then the basic weakness of the American geo-military strategy at present is its failure, and huge symbolic failure as well, to solve the Israeli problem. And we see in the present some recognition of this in the Washington scene that there ought to be an independent territorial state for the Palestinians. The devil lies in the details. The current American strategy is inadequate. Much of the policy statements are mere words. Until this problem is resolved there will continue indeed to be so-called terrorist attacks on the Israeli states, and understandably so, the crushing of a whole people, the removal forcing of people from its land, their extended humiliation over a lifetime. I mean these kinds of double standards produce the sort of desperate acts of violence that we see within this region and in this sense there is something fundamentally mudelled in the American law against terrorism that not only does it not presently address the key sources of terrorism so called, but appears itself terroristic. It uses threats, fear, and actual military intervention; it behaves like a bull in a china shop, and all of this generates an atmosphere globally which is highly unconducive to pacification, to the opening up of societies, to the making more publicly accountable of governmental institutions wherever they exist. I could put the point differently. If we are discussing the United States, democracy and the Middle East, then a new problem has surfaced in the history of democracy. For the first time, the problem is how to democratize the democratizer. That is to say, how can the United States, the first ever global power that uses the language of democracy, how can it be humbled, how can it be made to see that it has to give and take, that it has to allow endogenous developments to take place, which enable the flourishing of civil, political, social liberties. I think we understand poorly how to solve this problem. It’s a new one in the history of democracy and one can see from my remarks the outlines of some solutions to this problem. It means what is required in this democratization of the global democratic power of the United States is the cultivation of the global public opinion, which is opposed to military intervention, the use of force, and the pursuit of strategies of all kinds; and develop soft power strategies that enable businesses to invest, trade unions to organize themselves, journalist to publish freely, students to study and to travel, artists, musicians, and theatrical groups to pursue their love for art. I mean strategies that enable flourishing these institutions; soft power institutions are clearly the solution. But what role the people of Iran will play in this is of critical importance and the opening up, the further opening up of Iran is, I believe, a basic precondition of developing a political culture of rights, of responsibilities through the region, of a reduction of military tensions, and, of course, the flourishing of power sharing institutions.
DM: As a final question, religious and political extremists consider the confrontation of Iran and the US a sort of symbolic battle between good and evil and between two contrasting ideologies on the role of religion in the society (Armageddon interpretations of the Bible and the Quran). Are these perceptions, which are seen in both camps, not a threat to the world peace process?
JK: There is a strange symbiosis between the two sides, when for example, speaking freely, Ali Agha-Mohammadi, head of the publicity committee of the Supreme National Security Council in Iran, reacted to New Yorker magazine by saying that this was psychological warfare on the part of the United States, it strangely mirrors the view in Washington that Iran is a terroristic, fanatical, religious (read Islamic) regime, with its people firmly under its control. And we have seen this dynamic develop during the Cold War period and it’s utterly unproductive. It does not readily produce relaxation, which is the condition of possibility of the flourishing of freedoms on both sides, so to say. The point is that this kind of Washington’s view of Iran as part of the “Axis of evil”, as a fanatical regime, simply flies in the face of, it’s contradicted by, its ignorannce about the sorts of use that one will hear from Ayatollah Hadavi, for whom the really important goal in Iran is a further loosening of the structures of power, of the constitutionalization of that power, and of making that power publicly accountable in the way of democracy. Because for him, for Hadavi and others, democracy is the best weapon we have for checking claims upon reality, for reversing bad decisions, and wrong headed decisions, and he is surely right about this and the great potential tragedy within American policy headed by Condoleezza Rice in the coming days, weeks and months. Potentially the great tragedy is that it overlooks completely this advanced enlightened view that has spurned out of a culture of religion.