The lights must not go out in Tehran

In depressing clarity, the rules-based international order we have long known or spoken of has been crumbling around us. As the ferocity of the attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States (US) has so conclusively shown, the world is today a place imperilled, defined by danger it is not in our power to roll back.

The sovereignty of nations, an idea sacrosanct and therefore inviolable, has been given short shrift through the deadly strikes on places considered to be the centres of Iran's nuclear power. Iran is today a weakened nation. That it has yet refused to yield to the fury of Israeli-American power is much to be remarked on. Iran's has been a proud civilisation for centuries. It is now that pride which is in grave danger.

So there has been a tearing up of the rules-based international order. Who made the rules? And who violated them with impunity? Israel and its friends have been aghast at an Iranian strike on an Israeli hospital. Israeli politicians have loudly proclaimed that Iran's spiritual leader Ali Khameini has no right to exist. One would think Tehran has committed a grievous wrong by flying its missiles into that hospital, and one would be right to agree.

But then comes the moment when hypocrisy stares you in the face. In its barbaric assaults on Gaza, Israel has cheerfully bombed hospitals into rubble, homes into the stone age. Now when one Israeli hospital has been hit by an Iranian missile, Netanyahu and his friends are outraged. The world, now operating without rules, does not remind them of the crimes they have committed and still commit in Gaza.

That criminality has now expanded to an operation aimed at destroying Iran and bringing to fruition that abominable term, 'regime change'. Sit back and reflect somewhat on the sufferings of nations subjected to regime change in this first quarter of the 21st century. Afghanistan is a barren land today because of what the Soviet Union and then the Americans and their allies did to it.

Iraq passed into medieval darkness when George W. Bush and Tony Blair invented a lie and sent their forces into Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein from power. NATO had no time to respect international law when it decided that Muammar Gaddafi had to go. Syria has borne the brunt of outsider intrigue, this abomination --- let's say it loud and clear --- called regime change.

Men itching to go to war against self-respecting nations are unstoppable. Note, if you are not too shocked, how they operate with impunity. In 2003, two hubristic men decided that Iraq must be subdued through an illegal invasion. They achieved their sinister objective and no one demanded that they be brought to trial, that they be charged with war crimes. But should one be surprised? In the aftermath of the Second World War, German and Japanese war criminals were brought to justice in Nuremberg and Tokyo. They were swiftly despatched to their graves.

And yet the criminality of Harry Truman and his administration --- they dropped the atomic bomb, two of them, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remember? --- has been pushed under the rug. And we now have before us again the unedifying spectacle of two men, Trump and Netanyahu, doing everything they can to reduce the planet to an inferno. Somehow images of the ancient Vikings wreaking havoc in the lives of those at peace rise out of the mist in your pained heart.

Do we sympathise with the ayatollahs in Tehran? The question is irrelevant, for the ayatollahs and indeed all Iranians have since the overthrow of the Shah upheld their self-esteem, the dignity of their nation before the world. At a time when governments in Muslim or Muslim-dominated countries have been careful not to be critical of Tel Aviv and Washington, Iranians have demonstrated their intrinsic ability to respect themselves, to speak up against leaders in alien lands unable to appreciate the power of assertive nations.

Iran is a civilisation which has remained unbowed before predatory global powers across the generations. And so it must be brought to heel. Its nuclear programme must be blown to pieces. Its beautiful towns and villages must be torched by stealth bombing in the night by the orders of provincial politicians in distant Washington and closer to home Tel Aviv.

Qasem Suleimani became a martyr not long ago. In recent weeks, other Iranian generals and the country's scientists have perished in the aggression perpetrated by the Trump-Netanyahu machine. Which raises the old spectre of how earlier American administrations appropriated the right to bomb, for years on end, the beautiful country of Vietnam. The Nixon-Kissinger team had no qualms about bombing Cambodia and clearing the path for the Khmer Rouge to take over.

America's wars have been self-defeating and yet America has found new pretexts for new wars every few years. And this time the world is confronted with the horror of the murder machine of Israel leading the Trump juggernaut into war against Iran. Together the Israelis and the Americans have been unloading their bombs on Iran. They are mighty happy, in the macabre manner of bullies pouncing on the innocent at the bend of the road.

Ah, the demise of the rules-based global order. Israel can have its atomic bomb, both India and Pakistan can have their own bombs, North Korea will not be disturbed over its ownership of its own nuclear bombs. But Iran? Because it speaks up for Palestinian rights, because it refuses to pay obeisance to the world's remaining superpower and its homicidal friend in the form of Israel, it must pay the price.

Iranians paid the price in the early 1950s when the CIA, with Britain's complicity, engineered the return of the deposed young Shah to the throne and used its money and its influence to show Mohammad Mosaddegh, the nationalist leader Iranians remember as a heroic figure, the door. The Shah, profligacy and brutality underpinning his character, kept Iran in his grip for years. Washington, with its CIA, kept him happy in his palace.

Until Iranians took to the streets in 1978, forcing the Shah to flee in early 1979. Have the ayatollahs governed well? They have presided over a theocratic political system; they have kept a leash on freedom of expression; they have subjected women to repression; they have curbed dissent. All of these are harsh truths.

The more consequential truth is that, till this point, the ayatollahs have kept Iran safe from the grasping hands of its enemies. Iran has repeatedly impressed the world with its ability to deflect the poisoned arrows hurled at it by those who would destroy it. Its leaders have preserved its heritage and its history. Its poetry and its spirituality have been its weapons in the defence of its territorial integrity and its claim on history.

Iran will survive. It must survive. If it falls, if that dark moment comes to pass, all the lights everywhere across the planet will go out. The lamp must remain aglow in Tehran.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com