Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi raises his arms as he attends an opposition rally in Tehran. –AFP Photo

Giving colourful labels to greed and plunder is an old European habit. The Wars of the Roses of the 15th century, for example, were a series of bloody dynastic campaigns for the throne of England that went on for decades.

The ongoing post-electoral turmoil in Iran has precedence elsewhere in Eurasia. The West bequeathed to similar turbulences it helped foment in Georgia and Ukraine, among other venues in the hydrocarbon-rich Caspian region, names such as Orange Revolution, Rose Revolution and so forth.

For the record, Iran, though projecting the West’s problem in the Middle East, is in fact a greater source of discomfort to its detractors for its enormous influence in the Caspian region. What is being televised from Tehran today, therefore, is of a piece with the orchestrated moves that changed the definition of sovereignty in other parts of Eurasia, from Belgrade to Kiev and beyond. Listen to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, who started the related business of jihad in Afghanistan. Here’s Brzezinski in the Foreign Affairs journal of September/October 1997:

‘Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 per cent of the world’s population, 60 per cent of its GNP, and 75 per cent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.

‘Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy….’

This week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Council in Yekaterinburg brought in nearly all the dramatis personae that would influence the future course the region takes. The ferment in Iran has little to do with the so-called quest for transparent democracy that TV anchors never tire of mouthing. For, if democracy meant anything to them it would have been allowed to thrive in Algeria and occupied Palestine, whose popular will was annulled by global consensus. Ergo: inconvenient democracies are not welcome. Nor, strangely enough, does the Iranian strife identify a verifiable western candidate although former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi is being projected as one.

Actually, Mousavi faces two choices: either the full force of the Iranian state will crush him now or his presumed supporters would discard him a bit later. Neither course allows for a further test of the much-hyped will of the people. A similar fate befell Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia not too long ago. He was a hero of the western media but only as long as he helped break up the Soviet Union. And when his time came he was thrown into oblivion just as cynically. The ‘popular’ coup against him was named the Rose Revolution.

The real power play being witnessed in Iran thus has little to do with an agreeable candidate for the West or otherwise. Just consider the people ranged against each other. On the one hand is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has the blessings of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad is accused of calling for Israel’s destruction. A correct translation of his comments belies the claim, but that is a separate point.

What has to be seen is who are the people with Mousavi and how were they different in their stance towards Israel or the West when they were in power. Two of Mousavi’s main supporters are former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani. As Ahmadinejad said on TV: ‘Today it is not Mr Mousavi alone who is confronting me, since there are the three successive governments of Mr Mousavi, Mr Khatami and Mr Hashemi (Rafsanjani) arrayed against me.’

I had occasion to observe Rafsanjani from close quarters when he was the speaker of the Majlis. He would lead the Friday prayers at the Tehran University in those days and his sermons were notable for the Kalashnikov rifle he kept firmly clasped with his left hand. Four standard slogans that echoed through the sprawling prayer grounds were: ‘Death to Israel,’ ‘Death to (the United States of) America,’ ‘Death to Saddam (Hussein),’ and ‘Death to the Soviet Union’ (Shauravi in Farsi). Two of those wishes have come true and perhaps Rafsanjani too would be sanguine that it really is quite sufficient.

And yet Rafsanjani is projected in the western media as a moderate. Perhaps he is, but the reasons offered to support the claim are not so compelling. Khatami is another story. I was in Tehran on the day in February 1989 when the Iranian government banned Salman Rushdie’s book and all hell broke loose. Like it or not, it was Khatami, the minister of Islamic Guidance (Ershad-i-Islami), who orchestrated the call for Rushdie’s head. I met him at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport where he was locked in a deep conversation with Kalim Siddiqui on the day of the ban. Siddiqui, though a Sunni of Pakistani origin, was Iran’s publicity agent in the West.

He was the main campaigner for an Islamic parliament in Britain, and it was this that led to his rivalry with London’s less enthusiastic Muslim groups. That is what led to Iran’s Rushdie fiasco. How else were the Iranians to know the first thing about anyone called Salman Rushdie? And yet, Khatami has been projected in the western media as an agreeable moderate leader. As for Mousavi, this is what he had to say in a 1981 interview about the hostage crisis when young Iranian revolutionaries kept American diplomats in custody: ‘It was the beginning of the second stage of our revolution. It was after this that we discovered our true Islamic identity. After this we felt the sense that we could look western policy in the eye and analyse it the way they had been evaluating us for many years.’

It is already very difficult to tell precisely at what point in their metamorphosis revolutions turn into bedrock of reaction. The question is best left unanswered though. Iran has so often proved the pundits wrong.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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