A few days ago I posted links to some articles on Iran. One of them was “Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis” by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD).
In “Riding the ‘Green Wave’ at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond” Edward Herman and David Peterson respond to the CPD’s piece arguing that the “13 questions-and-answers do little to clarify issues related to Iran’s June 12 presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath, and even less to help leftists and ‘American progressives’ decide how they should respond to them.” A few quotes below…
We find it damning that as […] U.S. and Israeli threats to attack Iran have escalated in June and especially in July, the U.S.-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy, while remaining silent on this major threat to international peace and security posed by the United States and Israel, which if carried out would undoubtedly kill many more Iranian civilians than the Iranian government has killed since June 12, initiated its campaign to delegitimize Iran’s June 12 election as its cause celebre—and in effect laid down with the lions.
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Considering events inside Iran from June 12 on, it seems highly likely that many of Iran’s more affluent, urban-activist and technologically savvy youth had concluded that they could achieve their political objectives best, not at the ballot box in June 2009, and not by arguing their case before the rigid bodies of Iran’s executive branch, but by tailoring their messages of dissent to foreign audiences, taking to the streets to provoke repressive responses by state authorities, with every action of the state serving to delegitimize it in the eyes of the West’s metropolitan centers, whose recognition and validation the protestors have sought above all.27 Indeed, the West is where we find the real streets the demonstrators want to control. Not “from Engelob Square to Azadi Square,” as Robert Fisk reported it,28 but how Engelob Square and Azadi Square, Evin Prison and the Basij militia, play in the United States and other Western powers, where 98% of the “internationalists” wouldn’t blog, “tweet,” text-message, or take to their own streets to stop a single NATO missile from striking a wedding or funeral party in Afghanistan, however much they cheer Iran’s dissidents.
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While we agree that Iran’s political system has very serious defects, it towers above others in the Middle East that are U.S. clients and recipients of U.S. aid and protection. If Iran were a U.S. client rather than a U.S. target, its political system would be portrayed as a “fledgling democracy,” imperfect but improving over time and with the promise of a democratic future. Furthermore, in the current electoral contest, the three challengers (Mousavi, as well as the former Speaker of the Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, and the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rezai) seemed ABLE to voice sharp disagreements with the incumbent and with many aspects of Iranian life under its current executive branch; also, Mousavi’s candidacy was supported passionately by large numbers of people, and he had very contentious debates with Ahmadinejad as well as the others two candidates on national TV.34 We do not recall the CPD ever contesting the legitimacy of the U.S. political system or the fairness of U.S. elections on the grounds that an unelected dictatorship of money—as opposed to the Islamic Council of Guardians—vets the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties, reducing the options available to U.S. citizens to two candidates, neither of whom can change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime. Nor did the CPD draw any important comparison between conditions in Iran, on the one hand, and conditions in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, or Iraq and Afghanistan under U.S. military occupation, on the other. And though the CPD mentions that conditions are worse in the “dictatorship” of Saudi Arabia, the CPD never explains why its focus is (and has been) on Iran rather than Saudi Arabia or the United States of America.
You can read the full piece on ZNet or print out a PDF.
Update 2009-08-29: Joanne Landy from the CPD has asked me to post the CPD’s response to the Herman-Peterson piece. You can read it here: Fuller Rejoinder to Herman and Peterson from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.
My own view is that Herman and Peterson are right: it is much more useful for people in the West to focus on issues which they can impact and which won’t play into the hands of pro-war governments who’ve been demonising Iran for years.