Tuesday, March 05, 2013

The Bald Eagle and the Arabian Mirage

As America shapes its Iranian discourse on the flawed logic of Arab’s Persian mistrust, Tehran has the last laugh on the Arab streets, says Saurabh Kumar Shahi

Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, used to take on Sweden quite frequently, during the days of latter’s dominion in Scandinavia, and used to get thrashed every now and then. During one of those hundreds of defeats, he is purported to have said to his gloomy general, “Be not concerned! Eventually the Swedes are going to teach us how to fight.” And that is what happened. Peter managed to stop the Swedes’ Eastward march by learning the tricks of the trade from the Swedes themselves.

The 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll by Zogby International and Maryland University says the same about Iran. After being whacked by the US all these years in propaganda warfare, the Iranians seem to have learnt the tricks and have successfully applied them on the US itself.

This magazine for quite a long time has maintained that the policy debates and discourses about Iran in the US are warped by a number of “myths” and “misinformation”. This misinformation mainly concerns the functioning of the regime, its domestic and foreign policies, its outreach and its power – both hard and soft. Among these scores of misinformation, the most significant one that has been driving the Tehran discourse in Washington is through strenuous diplomatic exploit, the US can isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran, both regionally and globally. And how do Americans believe that they can achieve this? The entire gameplan to isolate Iran in the Gulf is based on a proposition that since Iran has a deep-rooted Persian identity and that it adheres to Shiite Islam unlike many of the countries in the region, it will always be viewed with mistrust, if not outright resentment, by West Asia’s mostly Sunni Arab populace. The poll suggests that these assumptions are just that – assumptions. Not only is this unchallenged but is, in fact, diametrically opposite to what Arab street thinks.

The Iranian discourse was propelled by the proposition that this supposed mistrust and antagonism against Iran in the region can be played up to convince Arabs that a nuclear-armed Iran is more dangerous than the obviously nuclear-armed Israel.

“The suggestion that the US has a staid and tactically dynamic alternative to isolate Iran in its region is, evidently, not new – it is mirrored in efforts by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations to build a regional federation to ‘contain’ Iran, encompassing ‘moderate’ Sunni Arab nations along with Israel. But this conception has gained a larger toehold of late, beside claims of ‘rumblings’ that fresh sanctions have started to kindle domestic political strain on the Iranian regime,” says Jim Lobe, a Washington-based Iran analyst.

Shibley Telhami released the results of his 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll, conducted annually with Zogby International. One must also keep in mind that Telhami holds the Anwar Sadat Chair at the University of Maryland and is a non-resident fellow at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. So it is very clear that he can be anything but a “pro-Iranian” voice.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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