LISTENING to the rhetoric spewing out of Tehran in recent days one could easily imagine oneself back in the post-Revolution Khomeini era. America is ‘the Great Satan’, ‘thirsty for human blood’, the American government wants ‘to spread its hegemony through the entire world’, comments by the US President were ‘bellicose and insulting’.

These remarks by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as moderates, President Khatami and Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, followed George Bush’s harsh riticism of Iran in his State of the Union address. Lumping Iran with Iraq and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ and implicitly threatening it with US military action, Bush was open in his hostility.

The history of US-Iranian relations since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 is replete with hostility, accusations, counter-accusations and no small measure of mutual misunderstanding. The Islamic Republic viewed America as the ‘Great Satan’ and its puppets (notably the Gulf States) as legitimate targets of its ‘export-the-revolution’ policy. Washington, correspondingly, saw the new regime as a threat to its vital interests and a destabilizing influence that had to be countered. The hostage crisis, the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US, sanctions and the rhetoric that characterized their cold war will all be familiar to readers.

Hopes of a change came towards the end of the second Clinton administration. The harsh orthodoxy of Ayatollah Khomeini had been succeeded by the liberalism (part actual, part potential) of Muhammad Khatami. In a ground-breaking interview with CNN in 1998, the new president said he wanted to break down the ‘wall of mistrust’ between Iran and the United States. In Washington there was a growing realization that sanctions were not working (indeed were hurting US companies and America’s relations with Europe) and that the seeds of moderation germinating in Iran needed to be encouraged.

The result was a small but perceptible shift in America’s Iran policy from containment to engagement. In March 2000, one month after the election of a reformers-dominated Majlis, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced the easing of US sanctions on some Iranian exports and offered ‘open dialogue’. But further progress was put on hold while America was in the process of choosing a new president. In January 2001 George W. Bush entered the Oval Office.

George Bush’s perceptions of Iran conformed much more to those of his father when he was president than to Bill Clinton’s. He still saw Iran as it was seen by the US in the early years of the Revolution: a ‘sponsor of terrorism’, a threatening force in the region, and an avowed enemy of the US. As such, he reversed the Clinton-era shift in Iran policy firmly back to containment. Iran could have been expected to respond in a similar manner, but after the terrorist attacks of September 11 it put aside bilateral differences and cooperated with America.

President Khatami joined the rest of the world in condemning the September 11 attacks and expressing sympathy for the American people. Following the US decision to wage war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Iran offered the use of its territory to carry out search-and-rescue missions for American soldiers. Notwithstanding the ‘with us or against us’ atmosphere created by the White House after 9/11, that was a remarkable concession on the part of the Islamic Republic. [Contrast it with the refusal of long-time American ally Saudi Arabia to allow the use of bases on its soil.] Finally, Iran played a positive role in post-Taliban talks, using its influence with the Northern Alliance to persuade Burhanuddin Rabbani to stand aside. The Bonn Accord would not have been possible without Iranian cooperation. Even the Bush administration commended Tehran’s ‘constructive role’.

Bearing in mind Iran’s assistance, one would have expected the State of the Union address to contain a ‘thank you’ rather than threats. The latter were a depressing reflection of the lack of sophistication in American foreign policy-making under President Bush. Seeing everything in black and white, his vision of the world allows no room for grey: it fails to appreciate the complex contexts and factors that shape international relations.

Following 9/11, that failing has become more pronounced. [Note the absence of any mention of the causes of terrorism in last Tuesday night’s address.] The threats — indeed, the ‘with us or against us’ approach — also reflect American unilateralism; it underlines the belief that the United States’ superpower status gives it the right to do what it wills. That belief, sadly, has also become more pronounced — not after 9/11 (which prompted a brief phase of multilateralism) but after the easy victory in Afghanistan.

Both failings are apparent in George Bush’s handling of Iran. As seen, he still sees Iran as it was in the years immediately after the Revolution: hating America, wanting to undermine its interests, sponsoring terrorism. But Iran today is not the same as Iran under Khomeini. Iran today is a country that acknowledges it has to live in peace with its neighbours and that regional stability is in its own interests, that it has made headway in improving relations with the Gulf states and Europe, and that it appeared willing to do the same with America. The transition from 1979 isolationism to 2002 engagement is still underway. Its progress is intimately linked to progress in the internal struggle between reformers (led by President Khatami) and conservatives (led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei).

Iran’s clerics do not favour normalization of relations with the US: for them it is still the ‘Great Satan’. They particularly oppose the notion of Iran changing its internal policies to court Washington. Their reformist rivals do favour normalization and accept that this can only come about through reciprocal measures. Depending on which of these two camps has the upper hand, Iran offers a more or less reconciliatory face to Washington.

Since the initial election of Muhammad Khatami to the presidency in 1997, the reformers have made steady inroads into the conservatives’ power bases. Khatami was re-elected president in 2001, while in February of the previous year reformers captured the majlis. But attempts to bring about change are constantly thwarted by the conservatives, using their control of the judiciary and security services as well as the Supreme Authority of Ali Khamenei.

Bearing in mind Iran’s internal tussle and the foreign policy benefits that would accrue from a reformist victory, one would have thought it was in the international community’s (especially the West’s) interests to encourage such a victory. Clinton in his second term as president appreciated that point. So too do the Europeans, who have long been advocating constructive engagement with Tehran. Not so George Bush. His ‘bellicose and insulting comments’ have played right into the hands of the conservatives as well as alienated moderates. It has to be stressed that irrespective of ideological leanings, all Iranians hold national sovereignty and independence very dear. They will never take kindly to being ordered around by Washington.

The concerns which the American government has voiced about Iran — that it is harbouring Al Qaeda and Taliban members, that it is arming Ismail Khan and trying to undermine the Karzai administration, that it sent arms to the Palestinians and backs Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it is developing weapons of mass destruction — have varying degrees of credibility.

The first, in view of Iran’s active and long-standing opposition to the Taliban, is impossible. The second, in view of Iran’s support for the Northern Alliance which dominates Afghanistan’s interim administration, its influential role in achieving the Bonn Accord, and its desire to be rid of its million-plus Afghan refugee guests, is unlikely. The third is true but would be justified by Tehran as support for a legitimate resistance movement. It is a justification many outside Washington would accept. The fourth would be a source of concern, were it proved to be true. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov recently said, “So far we don’t have evidence of this”.

President Bush’s attack on Iran has attracted widespread condemnation. Europe and Japan added their milder voices of criticism to Iran’s blistering ones. Even within America, a few have had the courage to speak out: Madeleine Albright said the address made it sound as if America was ‘losing its mind’. Such negative responses prompted a slight toning down by President Bush: he magnanimously announced that the US was ready for dialogue with Iran (and North Korea) “if they show a commitment to peace”. But the damage had been done. The prospects of liberalization within Iran and, in a wider context, of ending a cold war that has gone on far too long, now appear dim.

WITH the militant Hindu elements continuing to harden their position on the question of construction of a Ram temple at the site of the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Muslims in India may be faced with a highly unpredictable situation in the coming weeks.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and other Hindutva parties have given Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government until March to give them the permission to commence construction of the temple. Without any historical evidence, Hindu revivalists believe that the Babri Masjid had been built on the site of a Hindu temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram, which was demolished by the Moghuls in the 16th century.

More than 2,000 persons were killed in the communal riots that broke out all over India when the Babri Masjid was demolished mosque is under the protection of the relevant court for the time being. Large sections of Indians, including many historians and archaeologists, maintain that there is no evidence to suggest that a temple ever existed at the controversial site.

However, Mr Vishnu Hari Dalmiya, VHP president, following a meeting with Mr Vajpayee last week, bitterly complained that the prime minister was totally apathetic to their demand for a plot to build the temple at the disputed site and for the grant of official permission to commence construction in March, regardless of what the court or the scholars say.

Since Mr Vajpayee is the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition, they expect him not to be ambivalent about their demand. The VHP, along with several other Hindutva parties, support Mr Vajpayee’s government at the centre. However, the prime minister is reluctant to override the court’s verdict on the site. He fears this could alienate him from the non-communal elements in the ruling coalition.

Mr V.P. Singh, head of a short-lived National Front government in New Delhi in 1991, in his deposition last November before a special commission inquiring into the Ayodhya affair, held the BJP responsible for the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

The BJP was in power in Uttar Pradesh (where Ayodhya is located) when the Masjid was demolished. He accused the BJP of consistently carrying out a hate campaign against religious minorities and declared: “This is nothing new in history. The Nazis used the Jew as a hate object; the same tactics are being used to unite the Hindu society.”

Many Indian critics believe that the same obscurantist mentality has also prompted Mr Vajpayee’s government to censor school textbooks, specially those published by the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT), and rid them of what it calls “unpatriotic distortions” of history. A widely respected Indian intellectual, Praful Bidwai, has recently expressed the view that “rewriting of history” from this point of view is “an assault on the pluralist-secular conception of India.”

Quoting several instances of how statements in textbooks are being replaced by a “convenient” version, Bidwai believes that the BJP has been prompted to undertake the “rewriting of history” to appease the Hindu orthodoxy and secure its support in the forthcoming elections in two of India’s major states — Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Bidwai and a number of other well-known Indian intellectuals also attribute to BJP the same motive behind its on-going military stand-off against Pakistan.

Although compared to some of his hardline coalition allies, such as Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, Prime Minister Vajpayee is regarded as a moderate, by going soft on extremist ideas and elements within the country, he is also contributing to the discomfiture of his Muslim compatriots. Since Mr Vajpayee’s government is fully supportive of the US-sponsored “war against terror” spearheaded by the Americans, many Indian Muslims are reluctant to criticize the US for its intense bombing of Afghanistan. They fear that they may be seen as being unpatriotic.

The renowned Indian historian, Dr Irfan Habib of Aligarh University, known for his liberal views, articulated the Indian Muslims’ predicament when he told an Indian news journal: “A Hindu can criticize the US but if a Muslim does so, he is vulnerable to attack as the BJP government is conducting its foreign policy with an eye on the UP elections. It believes it can make use of the perception that Muslims make up the major body of terrorists.”

A young Muslim student of Aligarh University has been quoted by a leading Indian weekly as saying: “If Osama is becoming a hero, it is because the media has given him a larger than life image; and if some (Indian) Muslims are glorifying him it is because they have no other heroes and feel alienated from a system where they are repeatedly asked to prove their nationalist credentials”.

This view finds an echo in what a renowned Indian scholar, Prof Mushirul Hasan of Delhi’s Jamia Millia, has said. He has been quoted as saying that for some Indian youth, bin Laden has become a symbol of protest: it reflects their “tremendous sense of beleaguredness and alienation from the mainstream, where they increasingly feel they have no opportunities.”

Syed Hamid, Chancellor of Delhi’s Hamdard University, has explained the position saying: “Even Muslim institution like Madressahs are being unfairly attacked on the pretext that they are breeding grounds for terrorism...”

While it is in the Indian Muslims’ own interest to integrate themselves into the national mainstream, the Indian leadership should not need to be reminded that Gandhiji, although totally committed to his Hindu faith, regarded communal antagonism and violence as “a national catastrophe.” The leadership in India that has since assumed power is obviously devoid of any such belief. It has to be understood on both sides of the border that the endemic state of confrontation between India and Pakistan vastly adds to the tensions and uncertainty which the Muslims in India have to face from time to time.

It has to be emphasized, even at the risk of repetition, that the environment created by President Pervez Musharraf’s decision to curb religious extremism in Pakistan offers an opportunity for India to reciprocate positively in a spirit of cooperation.

The aftermath of the trauma which the subcontinent has had to experience with the rise of Taliban-type militancy in Afghanistan and the subsequent “war against terror” launched by the international coalition has its implications for both India and Pakistan. New Delhi has nothing to gain by maintaining an attitude of mistrust and hostility.

On the other hand, tensions between the two countries could begin to abate if the Indian leadership accepts the determination expressed by Gen Musharraf, in his interview with the Newsweek, that he is determined to make peace with India.

THERE are many kinds of Pakistanis who go away to live in the United States. Some go to earn a quick buck, others are attracted by the business possibilities there, while still others are bent upon having a good time in the permissive American society.

There are also those who, like rats, think this country is a sinking ship and want to make a getaway. I have still to hear of someone who went away to the States (or Europe) for the freedom of expression available there. Raheel Akbar Javed falls in none of these categories and yet he lives in the USA, in a university town bearing the delightful name of Champagne.

Raheel is an artist, as he was when he left Pakistan in 1976, and shall actively remain so for the rest of his life, since painting is what he does best, apart from being a good conversationalist. I enjoy his company because he hardly ever speaks American with us, his friends, when he visits the homeland every two or three years, and feels more comfortable in Punjab. (I don’t know what his son and daughter speak). Being a Lahori he is crazy about Punjabi jokes, and even when he is alone laughs out aloud on remembering some of those he has heard recently.

In painting, Raheel’s forte, or rather his pet genre, is abstract art, and he was by way of being at the top among this class in Pakistan when he decided to move to the States. I am not much of an admirer of abstract art, and am only moved by the composition and the placing of the colours. That is why I have two or three hanging in my house. But I like most of Raheel Akbar Javed’s work because I am somehow able to descry signs of life in them. His old pieces on the streets of Lahore are particularly fascinating.

Raheel did not go to America to become a better painter. As I have just hinted, he was good here, and well-known too, when he emigrated in 1976, soon after he was named Pakistan’s first national award winner in contemporary painting. Otherwise that eminent critic and art connoisseur, Dr Akbar Naqvi, would not have mentioned him in his authoritative book “Image and Identity — Fifty Years of Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan” in such glowing terms.

But first let me tell you how Raheel Akbar Javed became an emigre. His wife who was teaching in the College of Home Economics, Lahore, got a scholarship for higher studies in the US. Since both were anxious to have their little son’s foot treated there, Raheel also went along, and stayed on. In Lahore he had done his M.A. in psychology. I came to know him when he joined us in the Punjab Information Department, and then went on to serve in WAPDA Public Relations. He used to write poetry in English and is the author of a collection of short stories in Urdu. Dr Naqvi thinks his degree in psychology made him a theoretician of art and gave him the intellectual base for investing his abstract work with sensitivity.

The learned doctor wistfully adds, “He was a prolific painter and there was hardly any subject, be it seasons, man, woman, city or nature that he did not paint. Today the name survives indistinctly among painters of his generation, but his works are not known at all. There is need to identify and catalogue (his) works in order to put the start of modern art in Pakistan... in documented perspective.” He could have added that Raheel Akbar Javed too needs to learn more about his generation, and what the later generations of artists in Pakistan are doing. The last three decades have produced a fine crop, and some of the up-and-coming artists are simply outstanding.

Maybe that is why Raheel’s present visit to Pakistan is not simply a pleasure trip meant to fuel himself on the atmosphere of his homeland. He has brought with him book-size reproductions as well as transparencies of a hundred of his paintings. He has already talked to a publisher in Lahore with a view to having a volume printed, comprising these reproduction as also something about himself, from his own pen and from the pens of others in Pakistan and aboard. That should satisfy Dr Akbar Naqvi.

But Raheel is getting to be known in the United States too. One indication of this is that the Bank of Oklahoma has purchased two of his paintings. The bank says that corporations are increasingly becoming art collectors because paintings are a “profitable investment in time, beauty and people”. Its board room looks more like an art gallery than a place for conferences, for the walls are decorated with the works of masters, both classical and modern. It found Raheel to be one of the most intriguing among its new acquisitions.

Critic Cindy Maciolek writes about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who commissioned Raheel for two paintings. This gentleman told her, “I fell in love with his painting Barcelona by Day, but unfortunately it had already been sold and I couldn’t convince the person who bought it to sell it to me. So I commissioned the artist to paint a piece with the same colour scheme. It took about six months to complete. He wanted to take his time to complete it when it came to him. That’s all I really wanted”. For his other Raheel commission he required a large bold piece for a particular wall. “I told Raheel just to do what he wanted. It took about eight months, but when it was delivered I loved it”.

One art critic, Katherine Kerr by name, went to the extent of describing each and every painting of Raheel’s in his exhibition held locally. So did Jenny Hauser, another critic, who also quoted Raheel extensively about his work and his inspirations. “These paintings are composites of what I see at different times,” he said. “Nothing is planned. I don’t consciously decide what to paint”. To which he adds, “My audiences don’t have to see what I see in my works. I wish I did not need to title my paintings for this reason. I want people to title my art for themselves.”

There are many other such notices. It must be great for a Pakistani artist to be thus recognised and praised in the West.Let us hope he gets the same recognition and praise when his book is published and the art world of Pakistan gets to know him properly.

UNDETERRED by its failure to link the Iraqi president to the events of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax scare, the US has now served Iraq with another ultimatum: It must re-admit UN arms inspectors or “suffer the consequences,”.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and a potential 2004 White House contender, back home from a tour of Central Asia and Afghanistan has set the tone for the frenzied anti-Iraq campaign: “The unique threat to American security by Saddam Hussein’s regime is so real, grave, and imminent that, even if no other nation were to stand with us, we must be prepared to act alone. ...”

About 200,000 Iraqis died in January-March 1991 during and immediately after the Gulf War. Almost overnight, the most developed and progressive Muslim-Arab country in the region was pushed back to the stone age by a barrage of 1100,000 aerial sorties—averaging one every 30 seconds, dropping a load of bombs equivalent to the power of seven and a half Hiroshima bombs. Despite desperate calls from its own official for an immediate lifting of sanctions and restoration of the country’s basic civilian infrastructure to avoid a human disaster of unprecedented magnitude the total blockade imposed on Iraq in August 1990 has persisted to this day.

According to UN statistics, 500,000 children under five have died over the period of 1990-1998 and 5-6,000 children continue to die each month mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. Wide scale use of depleted uranium has led to a veritable epidemic of horrific birth deformities and cancer in southern Iraq. In western countries children afflicted with leukemia have a 95% chance of recovery. In Iraq where radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs, even morphine are consistently blocked by the US and the UK, hardly any one survives.

Thanks to their veto in the Sanctions Committee (661) even the pittance, (about 125 dollars per Iraqi per annum not only for food but also health services and everything else) under the oil for food programme does not reach the population. In his report last October UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called the US and the UK blocking of $ 4bn of humanitarian supplies as “by far the greatest constraint on the implementation of oil-for-food programme.” The two governments have further tightened the screw. On Jan. 9, the programme director Benon Sevan expressed his “grave concern at the unprecedented surge in the volume of holds put on contracts’. He disclosed that a total of 1,854 contracts are now on hold worth a total of 4.956 billion dollars. The worst hit sector is electricity, followed by water and sanitation. Combined with a 30% fall in oil prices since last September, and tighter control over Iraq’s oil sales, the results are devastating. According to the UNICEF, the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five, at the beginning of this year has increased by 160% compared to 1990, the highest increase among the 188 countries surveyed.

The goal-posts for lifting the sanctions, initially imposed to force the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, have been constantly moved back. Iraq accepted the new border with Kuwait.

It accepted all the incursions, insults, violations of its sovereignty by UNSCOM and its spies, because it believed that it would eventually lead to the lifting of the sanctions. But every time Iraq accepted and implemented the requirements, a new set of requirements and conditions would be imposed through another UNSC resolution.

Iraq was persuaded by Kofi Annan to readmit Butler and his team and the IAEA on the stipulation that such cooperation would lead to a comprehensive review of the situation.