Author: The Nation

No sensible human being ever restricts his itinerary to aparticular habitat; to keep moving and migrating from place to place is the secret of human progress.     –    Arab poet

 

Preamble

Today’s article is a change of focus through which ‘The Message’, chooses to migrate psychologically from the insanity of Nigeria’s political, economic and religious rigmarole to the arena of an on-going global tempest if only for a change. After all, elasticity has its own limit. And by so migrating, though temporarily, a breeze of relief may blow on readers of this column over the current suffocating economic heat in the country devilishly being devilishly fuelled by religious bigotry. For now, that is a way of ventilating a peaceful atmosphere for peace-loving Nigerians.

 

Iran’s Nuclear Deal

In what looks like a prelude to a practical military faceoff between Iran and the NATO West, Iran has announced further enrichment of her nuclear programme with gas. This is contrary to the contents of the agreement signed by both sides with a condition of nuclear enrichment with economic ‘sanction’. But with the expiration of the time limit of that agreement a few months ago, Iran had warned of a post agreement action and gave an ultimatum of two months to the West to lift the economic sanctions imposed on her. However, the West ignored the warning even when it expected Iran to comply with the tenets of the agreement. Now, with a seeming stalemate in place, the world is paying a rapt attention on what the next level will be.

 

Fortuitous Military Encounter

A couple of years ago, Al-Jazeera Television throbbed with breaking news, saying that a United States military aircraft strayed into the airspace of Iran and the latter promptly responded by shooting it down. Iran announced another incident of the like a few days later.

That disturbing development further aggravated the tension between both countries, which started with the Iranian revolution in 1979.

That revolution had uprooted Iran’s imperial despotism which had caged the citizens of that country for decades.

S.’ Reaction

In reaction to the fortuitous military encounter, the US authorities explained that the destination of the shot aircraft was Afghanistan and not Iran. They explained that its pilots accidentally lost control and strayed into Iranian territory.

 

Threat to British Embassy

Shortly before that incident, Some Iranian students had besieged the British Embassy in Tehran protesting the meddling of David Cameron’s government in the internal affairs of Iran. And in a prompt retaliation, Britain immediately evacuated her diplomats in Tehran and sent the latter’s diplomats in London packing despite Iran’s regret over those students’ action.

 

Genesis of Faceoff

The genesis of the faceoff between the West and Iran took roots in the latter’s unexpected revolution of 1979. The faceoff actually started in February 1979 when Iran jumped onto the world stage with a surprising but successful revolution. February 11, 1979 was the precise climax day of a struggle, in that country, which began in 1963 between the oppressed people who were seeking emancipation from the shackles of imperialism and the implacable oppressors who wanted to keep that country’s innocent peasants in perpetual subservience. The success of that revolution has since changed the grand design of the Western powers for the Muslim world.

 

The Grand Design

That grand design for usurping the Arab wealth as a means paralysing Islam was first expressed in 1902 by a British Prime Minister, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman when he observed as follows: “There are people who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language and the same aspirations. No natural barriers can isolate them from one another….If, per chance, these people were to be unified into one state it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never- ending wars. It could also serve as a spring board for the West to gain its coveted objects”.

Follow Up

Sir Bannerman’s observation was in further pursuit of an earlier1979 in Contemporary History emand by one Theodor Herzl, a leader of the Zionist movement founded in 1879. Herzl, an Austrian Jewish lawyer and journalist demanded thus:“Let sovereignty be granted us (Jews) over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest, we shall manage by ourselves…”

In response to that clandestine demand, another British Prime Minister, James Arthur Balfour issued a devastating declaration that now bears his name, which conceded a major part of Palestine to the Zionists as a home. That (Balfour) declaration has since put the Middle East in incessant turmoil. The declaration read thus in part:“His majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this objective…. The rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country shall not be prejudiced by the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

 

Implementation

To facilitate that objective effectively, some other Middle East countries had to be decapitated economically and politically by excising from them, a juicy chunk of their lands. Thus, Lebanon was excised from Syria and Kuwait from Iraq. The strategy was to cause a dissention among the citizens of those countries with the intention of breaking the yoke of the Muslim unity which Bannerman had targeted in his infamous observation of 1902 quoted above.

Now, how does Iran come into this picture when she is not an Arab country?

That is a logical question that anybody who is not quite familiar with the Middle East and the intricacies of its political and economic set up would ask. Naturally, Iran is affected by three major factors:Politics, economy and culture. And by culture here, we mean ISLAM.

Iran is a foremost Islamic country even if her official language is farisi (Persian) and not Arabic. And, as an Islamic Country, whatever affects other Muslim countries must affect her.

 

Turkey for Instance

The case of Turkey is a good example of a Muslim country without Arabic as language. Thus, Turkey was, though, not an Arab country, she was nevertheless the seat of the Islamic Caliphate for about 562 years from 1362 until 1924 when a diabolical agent of the West came on stage as Head of State. His name was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; a man who wanted to prove to the West that it was possible for a non-Catholic to be “Holier than the Pope” especially when it came to adopting the so-called Western Civilisation. On March 3, 1924, just one year after assuming office as the ruler of Turkey, Ataturk introduced a Bill to   the Turkish Parliament seeking to secularize his country by abolishing the office of the Caliph without any consideration for the feelings and sensibility of the people he ruled.

Presenting the Bill, Ataturk said: “Ottoman Empire was built and existed on the principle of Islam. Islam is Arabic in character and in concept. It shapes from birth to death, the lives of its adherents; it stifles hope and initiative. The Republic (of Turkey) is threatened by the continued existence of Islam in its midst….”

With the passage of that Bill, Turkey was recognised as a secular state. Politics was separated from religion and Islam was relegated to a personal matter rather than the state religion that it was before then. The caliphate was abolished and Islamic law was abrogated.

Ataturk borrowed the new Turkish civil law from Switzerland, the criminal law from Italy and the international law of trade from Germany. The Muslim personal law was harmonized with the European civil law. Religious instruction in public schools was prohibited.

Purdah system was abolished and declared illegal. Co-education was introduced to schools. The use of Arabic alphabets was prohibited and replaced by the Latin Script. Adhan (the call to prayer) was no longer to be made in Arabic but in Turkish language while the national costume was changed to that of the Europeans even as the wearing of hat by men was made compulsory. What Ataturk did not do was to abrogate the tenets of Islam completely.

Thus, by one man’s whim, Turkey lost her values and heritage of centuries in a bid to adopt the so called ‘modernity’ brought by ‘Western civilization’. One can imagine what Islam would have become today if countries like Iran, Indonesia and Pakistan had adopted the same misfortune.

 

Emergence of Ayatullah Khomeni

It was a similar situation under the Iran’s last Emperor, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi that prompted the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatullah Ruhullah Mousavi Khomeini to embark on a liberation struggle in 1963 that culminated in a successful revolution in 1979.

Unlike Ataturk, however, Imam Khomeini knew that the greatest virtue that could be lost in the life of man was culture. He knew that without a clear-cut culture man couldn’t be better than a beast. He knew that such values as law, education and religion, which guide man in his peregrinations on earth, are the attributes of culture. He knew that a nation, which surrenders its culture and adopts that of another nation, has enslaved herself permanently to the caprice of the latter nation. Thus, Khomeini saw Islam, (the culture of over one billion Muslims in the world at that time), as the target of the Western imperialists, which needed defence and protection.

 

The Revolution

No one believed in 1979 that a mass protest which started like a small political billow, engendered by the country’s unarmed Mullahs could eventually grow into such a great magnitude of political ‘earthquake’.

By the time the foggy dust finally settled, a new Iran had emerged from the debris of the old. Thujs, against the wish and expectation of the capitalist West, the secular, monarchical Iran became an Islamic republic. The drama was quite electric. Characteristic of the West, all hands were put on deck, at that time, to ensure that an Islamic republic did not succeed the tyrannical monarchy headed by the Shah Pahlavi and heavily backed up by the oppressive West. America was most active in that ambitious but vain effort. She would not easily allow the massive benefit she had been enjoying for decades in that oil-rich country, under the Shah regime, to slip out of her hands just like that. Thus, under the pretext of wanting to rescue her citizens from the siege laid by Iranian students on that country’s embassy, in Tehran, the US attempted an invasion of the country.  The espionage activities by the American diplomats, inside that embassy, against the new Islamic government in Iran had warranted the siege.

 

The American Strategy

While a number of US F15 bomber jets were approaching Iran, President Jimmy Carter engaged his country’s media executives in a media chat without giving any hint of the impending military operation in Iran.

The tactics was to divert the attention of the press and that of his entire country from the illegal Pentagon’s military expedition. But no sane person can ever fault the contents of the Qur’an. Exactly about 1400 years before that incident, a verse of the Qur’an had been revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) thus: “They (the unbelievers) schemed, and Allah schemed. Allah is the supreme schemer”. Q. 3:54.

Jimmy Carter’s thought was that by the time he would be finishing his press address, the news would have reached him that America had successfully invaded Iran. He had therefore intended to announce the news of his ‘great’ successful scheme to the press as the epilogue of his address. And that would have served as his impetus for wining that year’s election for a second term in office. But, as Allah would have it, instead of the expected news, what he got was a shocker of his life.

 

Failure of the American Strategy

Two of the F15 fighters deployed for the invasion of Iran miraculously collided in the air, crashing with their contents, just at the pointof entering Iran and consuming the lives of 16 top air force officers on board while the other jet fighters had to turn back having run into confusion. When this devastating news reached Carter, it was too much

to hide and it quickly became a public knowledge.

Thus, the mighty America failed woefully, with her technology, in circumstances she has never been able to analyse and explain convincingly till date. With that scheme, it became obvious that Jimmy Carter of the Democrat Party had dug his own political grave. Of course, he lost the election to the cowboy turned Politician, (Ronald

Reagan) of the Republican Party. For about 444 days (well over a year), the 52 Americans held   hostages by Iranian students remained under the siege of those students. It took high-level diplomacy, through third party countries, to eventually get them released.

Yet, America was not done. She went ahead to freeze Iran’s foreign reserve of $80 billion in addition to imposition of economic sanctions with the intention of running that country’s economy aground. The only Iran’s offence in this case was to chart an independent politicalcourse that could liberate her citizens from the manacles of the Western imperialism. Ever since, the relationship between America and Iran has remained icy.

That relationship however, further deteriorated recently when Iran started a nuclear project with which to prop up her economy. America responded with a threat saying the United States would not tolerate any nuclear project in Iran because she could not trust that Islamic nation with the use of nuclear power. And of course, America’s voice was re-echoed by the United Nations, through the mouth of the latter’s then Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

 

Greyhound

Only a fool will not know that the UN, as presently constituted, is merely the greyhound of the US through which the latter barks randomly at the rest of the world when opinions contradict America’s position.

But for the recent Iraqi episode that became regrettable for the self-appointed policeman of the world, and of course, the North Korean case, which has become a cancerous sore on the head of the US, anothern Gulf war would have either ensued or about to ensue by now. The secret of America’s military successes in various parts of the world is neither in technological advancement, nor military superiority per se.

The failed rescue mission in Iran can confirm this. That secret is rather in her ability to cause schism among some other nations and races as the case in the Arab world.

Iran has never been a prey to America’s direct military aggression, even when the Shah Pahlavi was in power, because she has never played a fool dancing to the sour music of that predatory country in a seeming open brook.

 

Sanction as Weapon

Now, with the threat of invasion of Iran by Israel on the one hand and economic and political sanctions against her by the Western NATO

allies on the other, will history repeat itself? One fact has become clear about the US political trend ever since that country withdrew from her self-isolationism in 1945. Her internal politics has been regularly dictated by her foreign policy. Thus, many American Presidents have won or lost elections at home due to the foreign policy of the concerned President. Will this also repeat itself in Donald Trump’s regime? One fact that must be well noted however is that Iran is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. The world cannot afford another World War now. No one should attempt to plunge it into one. A word is enough for those who are wise in America.

 

Coup in Saudi Arabia

In the same 1979, some disgruntled elements fortuitously staged a coup against the monarchical government of King Khalid. The aim of the coup was not to change the system of government but to hijack the monarchy in the name of a Mahdi (a promised messiah). That incident caused a stoppage of salat and Umrah for almost four months.

 

Invasion of Afghanistan

Also in 1979, the now defunct Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with the intention of annexing her and that incident led to an unprecedented jihad that paved way for the emergence of the Taliban government of that country.

All these incidences of 1979 jointly formed the foundation for the global turmoil of the 21st century now pervading the world and threatening human existence. The details of the coup attempt in Saudi Arabia will be discussed in this column at another time soon. Watchout for it.