From the New York Times, here’s an excerpt from Abbas Amanat’s commentary entitled “The Persian Complex”:
For a country like the United States that is built on paradigms of progress and pragmatism, grasping the mythical and psychological dimensions of defeat and deprivation at the hands of foreigners is difficult. Yet the Iranian collective memory is infused with such themes. Since the early 18th century, Iran has been involved in four devastating civil wars. America’s own highly traumatic Civil War was, notwithstanding Britain’s sympathy for the South, a largely domestic affair. In the civil wars that Iran endured, however, the Turks, Afghans, Russians and British played major parts. And before the arrival of Western powers, Iranians held bitter memories of the Ottomans, the Mongols and the Arabs.
These intrusions punctuated the Iranians’ modern historical narrative with conspiratorial fears and have helped to nurture a cult of the fallen hero, from the 1910’s guerrilla leader Mirza Kuchak Khan to Amir Kabir, a 19th-century reformist prime minister, and later Mossadegh. Such painful collective memories have made Iran’s pursuit of nuclear energy a national symbol of defiance that has transcended the motives of the current Islamic regime.
If the United States resorts to sanctions, or worse, to some military response, the outcome would be not only disastrous but, in the long run, transient. Just as the West did with Iran’s railroad and oil industry, it can for a time deny Iran nuclear technology, but it cannot wipe out Iranians’ haunting memories. And no doubt the Islamic regime will amply exploit these collective memories to advance its nuclear program even as it stifles voices of domestic dissent. Even more than before, Iranians will blame outside powers for their misfortunes and choose not to focus on their own troubled road to modernity.
If that course continues, Iran will most likely succeed, for ill or for good, in finding its own nuclear holy grail. Legend has it that the Persian king Hushang, an equivalent of Prometheus, introduced fire to the Iranians. But unlike his Greek mythological counterpart, who stole it from gods, he accidentally discovered it while fighting with a dragon.
As I’ve said before, I can readily understand why Iran wants nuclear weapons. But, as I’ve also said, the dangers posed by a nuclear Iran are simply too great to allow it.
There is a problem with the attempt to make the mullah’s pursuit of the bomb, a NATIONAL endeavor, supported by the entire people.
The mullahs themselves conducted a poll. And 80% of the Iranians DON’T WANT THE BOMB, for they well understand that the bomb would place iran on a collision course with the United States, and the West.
The iranian people want jobs, better salaries, SEWAGE SYSTEMS, paved streets, a genuine energy infrastructure. And they want the real fruits of the revolution, instead the poisioned fruit they’ve received in the mullahs.
This article, and many others like it, are nothing but an attempt to get us all comfortable with the thought of the mullahs and the bomb.
In fact, it’s an attempt to guilt trip for our attempts to prevent this “proud” people from getting the bomb.
The Japanese were incredibly proud, likewise the boche, we didn’t tolerate them and their vanities, their delusions, and we should have even less time for the mullahs, and their apologists.
My mother used to tell me that she didn’t give me a pillow when I was a baby so that I could tell my shrink when I was 40 that that was the source of all my adult problems…
I find this constant drum beat of “collective bad memories” to be a crutch for Middle Eastern society’s excuses of current failure. I am of Irish ethnicity. My ancestors came to the U.S. to escape the potato fammine and the confiscation of their land by the British. If I were to follow this same reasoning, I would give myself permission to be a complete failure (with a chip on my shoulder). Bah!