Beyond the economic and geopolitical factors that lie behind the US (and Zionist) obsession with Iran, there are also really ideological, if not even eschatological, elements that animate the minds of Washington hawks deeply influenced by the rhetoric of the clash between civilizations.
by Daniele Perra
The recent hyperbolic exchange of threats between US President Donald Trump and his equal Iranian rank Hassan Rouhani, despite the obvious bad taste, has revealed an absolute truth: a potential new conflict against Iran could really have devastating outcomes not only for the Middle Eastern region but also for the whole world. From the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran to today, the relations between the two countries, excluding the short life of the nuclear agreement JCPOA - Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (however never fully respected by the North American side under the Obama administration as well as the present), have never known a real relaxation of tension.
The 1979 hostage crisis, as a result of which Pope John Paul II sent a request for release that Imam Khomeini rejected by arguing his answer with the fact that the Iranian people would have expected from the messenger of Christ a warning against the oppressors of the people and not solidarity with them, and the terrifying war of aggression that Saddam Hussein's Iraq, on US and Saudi commission, moved against the newborn Islamic Republic were only the first episodes of a long series of more or less direct confrontation between a nation with ancient history and culture and that paradise of Protestant eschatological heterodoxy in which, as the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin affirmed, the outcasts have become creators of public norms.
Add to this the fact that between the imposition of sanctions regimes on several levels and in different periods and direct interference in Iranian internal affairs (heavy exploitation of the protests of the so-called Green Movement and support to various terrorist groups that aim to destabilize the country: first among all the Mojahedin-e Khalq with offices in France and Albania), the US has never stopped aspiring and dreaming of that "regime change" that now, with the appointment of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State but above all of John R. Bolton as a national security advisor, seems to have come back very closely.
Also, and above all, because the fears for the Iranian presence in Syria, considered as an existential threat to Israel, has triggered various hysterical reactions between the North American Zionist lobby and the Israeli military and political leaders themselves. See in this regard the bombastic as unreliable presentation of "irrefutable evidence" on the Iranian violations of the JCPOA by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the twelve requests, drawn up by Mike Pompeo, that Iran should meet if it intends to renegotiate the agreement with the USA. Requests among which there appears to be at least a ridiculous cessation of aid to al-Qaeda and to the Afghan Taliban that Iran have always been sworn enemies and which, on the contrary, have often enjoyed the support of the US and Zionist intelligence. The Taliban, among other things, have carried out real massacres of the Hazara: the ethnic Shiite component of Afghanistan.
For what concerns Italy (Iran's first European commercial partner), the new sanctions imposed by the USA following the unilateral exit from the JCPOA would damage the economy much more than those, however useless, inflicted on Russia and the whose removal has been included (even if at the time it is taken into the background) in the program of the new yellow-green government [5Stars - League].
The low negotiating power of European economic actors, faced with the forced choice between access (with the risk of sanctions) to the Iranian market or to the "imposed" US market, and the cultural subalternity that many governments continue to suffer towards the US, despite of the desire to preserve the JCPOA, do not foresee anything that does not go beyond the usual forms of masochistic schizophrenia of Europe.
Now, from a purely geopolitical point of view, the North American obsession with Iran is more than justified. The Islamic Revolution has overthrown a regime that in previous decades, except for the small parenthesis of the nationalist government of Mossadeq (not coincidentally overturned by a joint Anglo-American operation), had made of its total alignment to the United States its only form of international legitimacy and which, with Turkey, represented one of the "pillars" of North American geopolitics in the Middle East. And the Revolution has also prevented the North American elites from directly managing huge energy resources. Iran, to date, is the third country in the world in terms of oil resources and the first in terms of natural gas reserves. It is therefore clear how the Trump administration, by launching the Energy Dominance doctrine aimed at achieving dominance on the global energy market, can not help but perceive Iran as a fearsome potential competitor and at the same time as a "prey" for the effective expansion and implementation of the aforementioned plan.
Nor should we forget the fact that Iran, as a pillar of the new multipolar order and a hegemonic power in the Middle East, represents a sort of black hole that threatens the US control of that Eurasian rimland that the geopolitical scholar Nicholas J. Spykman laid the foundation of the North American hegemonic system. However, there are other factors that, although preliminary to the North American hegemonic design, remain more related to the rhetoric of the clash between civilizations and the perception of an Islam that can not be used for its geopolitical purposes as an enemy to be fought and annihilated whenever possible. And even in this sense, the North American obsession with Iran appears more than justified.
Today's Iran, albeit with obvious defects (though not alien to any nation in the world), represents the antithesis par excellence of a model of civilization set on the magnificent and progressive fate of modernity. The Khomeinist Revolution developed as a reappropriation of the dimension of the sacred, as a restoration of that direct thread between the physical and metaphysical order that the Western modernity imposed by the Shah regime had almost irretrievably split. The Revolution, understood in the etymologically correct sense of the term re-evolution, has shown how the phenomenon of modernity has no connection with contemporaneity. Modernity is only a model of society, of civilization, of the vision of the world which through a process of reversion of time and of reappropriation of one's traditional "being in the world" can be overturned.
Western colonialism, from the perspective of Imam Khomeini, has been able to counter the reality of Islam by introducing into the Muslim countries foreign laws and cultures incompatible with it so as to make it totally inauthentic. The colonization of the minds is the step immediately following the economic colonization aimed at expropriating natural resources and making the colonized territory a market for the sale of western products. For this reason, according to Khomeini, in the time that the necessary conditions for the Parousia of the Imam of the time are not met, it is not possible for the Islamic Law to remain unused. But this law must refer to authentic Islam and not to its version counterfeited by Western colonialism. The Imam, for example, never stopped defining Wahhabism as American Islam. The doctrine of the velayat-e faqih (vicariate of the jurisconsult) as the foundation of the current Iranian political system, by the admission of Khomeini himself, is not the product of his theoretical elaboration. This is not something new, but is at the center of the question of Islamic government from the beginning. Khomeini limited himself only to a more in-depth analysis, identifying its roots in the Islamic tradition.
The vicariate of the jurisconsult is the order to fulfill a delivery. The assumption of the obligations of government and of the burden of command by the doctors of the law implies the realization of a precise purpose: to confirm the truth and to eliminate the lie. According to a well known prophetic hadith the doctors of the law are the custodians of the trust of the prophets. And as the Imam reiterates in his speech on the Islamic government:
the general aim of the prophetic mission is the rectification of humanity in the framework of a righteous and neatly developed social structure, which can be achieved through the definition of a government able to run the law.
A concept present on several occasions even in his most strictly focused works on irfan (gnosis) in which to the divine Nuncio and fixed archetype of the Perfect Man is given the task of preserving the limits established by God and preventing them from coming out of the confines of moderation. A call, that to measure, present in a relevant way also in Western culture, both in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages. It is said, for example, that Frederick II Hohenstaufen, questioned by the legendary Priest Gianni (figuration of the Guenonian "King of the World") about what was the best thing in the world, replied: "the best thing in this world is measure".
It is therefore obvious that as a philosophical-metaphysical logos set entirely on the sense of measure and on the virtue of moderation it can not necessarily clash against a vision of the world based on excess (on that "gigantism" so stigmatized by Martin Heidegger) and on the negation of all that is human. Man realizes himself through thought. Being human means first of all to think and investigate around the sense of truth. And if the instrument of the intellect is not exercised and developed, man is transformed into a machine and is sacrificed on the altar of technique. The fact that Western thought has produced such an artificial act by determining its own suicide does not mean that every other civilization / culture must do the same in the name of unipolar globalization.
The hatred of Iran comes from the fact that this represents a concrete example of resistance, and in some respects an alternative, to this destructive and culturally racist model of civilization. And the same idea is also valid for what concerns Zionism that has imported this model in the Near East, openly confronting the Islamic world. In this regard, the Imam was particularly critical in the first place with the rabbis: "they - said Khomeini - despite being the guardians of Jewish religious law have done nothing to prevent the oppressors to pronounce their sinful words, spread lies, slander and distort the truth".
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Original article by Daniele Perra:
https://www.lintellettualedissidente.it/esteri-3/usa-ossessione-iran/
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo - Pravda freelance