I suppose it was too much for me to wish that someone over these last two weeks had mentioned the first time that hostages were taken by the Persian people. It occurred when the Mongols were attacking the Persians’ superior civilization in the 13th Century, and Mongol diplomats were held. A bit of historical irrelevance? Not at all.
One of the secrets of analyzing cultures is to see what they did before — because, hey, they just keep doing it over and over again. Driven by fear and also by geography, they are forced to repeat their actions as a protective measure. So it was that the Iranians, the modern-day Persians, took 15 British hostages two weeks ago, took eight hostages in 1994, took hundreds of Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and took 66 Americans in 1979. It’s what they do.
The most recent hostages — the Brits, who represent for the Iranians Britain’s hated colonial domination (the British and the Americans overthrew the liberal candidate for leadership, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, bringing the Shah to power until 1979) — have just been released. Why? It’s all quite simple.
To the Iranians, this taking of hostages — and thus humiliating British power and forcing London, the hated metropole, to respond to their anger — is not the serious foreign policy of more advanced countries (like we used to be), but rather a game. It’s the modern version of the “Great Game,” which pitted the British, Germans, Russians and others against one another in the 19th Century struggle for Central Asia.
This game is not essentially filled with the violent street anger you see on television from Tehran; rather, it is sophisticated and calculated gamesmanship in which the weak of the world strike out to humble the strong.
If it’s hell for the hostages (and meant to be), it is a kind of demented “fun” for the perpetrators. In a recent serious TV documentary on the Shiites in Iran, one Iranian was typically quoted as saying that President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are the “new oppressors”; he compared them to outsiders who killed the Shiite leader Imam Hussein many centuries ago. It’s hard for the West to deal with memories like these.
The 15 British sailors and marines were taken prisoner by Iranian Revolutionary Guards at the top of the Persian Gulf. Tehran said the British troops were in Iran’s waters; London said they were not. The radical Iranians around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards threatened that the Brits would be held, maybe harmed or even tried in court; the Brits threatened back but finally agreed on language that more or less said it won’t happen again, even while denying that any trespass had occurred.
All of this played out against the backdrop of speculation about new discussions between the United States and Iran, which the Revolutionary Guard opposes, and against UN-imposed sanctions and the threat of more. The situation also mirrored the internal struggle between the president and his radicals in the Guards and more moderate elements who have recently been gaining ground in Iran.
Remember, the Revolutionary Guards, who came to power with the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1979 Islamic revolution, have been given tremendous financial resources by the president; Ahmadinejad travels around the country ordering local construction jobs, then gives the work to the engineering branch of the Guards, who take a percentage for simply passing the job off.
Also keep in mind that before the 15 Brits were taken prisoner, the United States had moved in neighboring Iraq to capture a major Iranian diplomatic courier, just now released, and four other Iranians, who are still being held. Who, under these circumstances, would not expect the Persians to do what they always do: take hostages in order to turn the whole situation into a “victory” for themselves!
In a perceptive column in The New York Times, author Max Hastings, who specializes in the region, wrote of dealing with Iran: “It is hard to punish masochists. The problem for policymakers is that Iran’s leadership positively welcomes Western threats. . . . The game they play with considerable skill is to project themselves at once as assertive Islamic crusaders, and also as victims of imperialism. They crave respect and influence. Their only claim to these things rests upon their capacity for menacing the West.”
One does not need to forgive the Iranians’ depredations, either in the region or with the West, to suggest that, in order to achieve some semblance of peace in the area, the real questions that should be asked are these: Why haven’t the British learned from the destruction of their earlier colonial dreams? Why didn’t they warn an arrogant and unlettered Bush regime in Washington about the historical mires of Iraq and Iran? Why don’t we stop acting in ways — such as sailing provocatively around the Persian Gulf — that only give the Iranians the chance to do things that they think make them win?
We are, after all, supposed to be the advanced, rational West, the people who don’t need to play these infantile games. Except that we have, with our past and present meddling in the Middle East, brought ourselves down to the level of the eternal game players.
The only way we can gain and even win in the world is through true statesmanship, which is patient and strong — and refuses to give countries such as Iraq and Iran such obvious ways to humiliate us.
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Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington. E-mail: mailto:[email protected]
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