abbas milani and the commonwealth club.

Sir:

Just within the past few days, I have heard a talk with the Commonwealth Club as given by Professor Abbas Milani of Stanford in view of his new book about the Middle East and more specifically the case of Iran at present.  Dr. Milani has asked the question by his new writings and in his talk on how or what did someone in our system do so that in fact we now have extreme worries about nuclear proliferation and terror as related to Iran at present.  In the time of communism, Milani proposes, the place of the Shah, and in fact what directed his fall from grace and eventual demise, were the forces of fundamentalist religion, namely Islam as embodied in Islamic political clerics who primarily had ties to the soviets.  

Today, much of the political / administrative activity in the Middle East is ascribed to oil – pricing policies, and efforts at “democratisation” in Iran eventually have become known more popularly as “islamo – fascism” despite the long – time efforts of the soviets and their contribution to the expansion of socialist and communist influences.  In retrospect, the political upheaval around the Shah was caused not by rightist tendencies, but by the reaction to the Shah’s efforts to try to live with the religious left and centrist political figures of the day.  The case of Bin Laden in Afghanistan, formerly in places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Sudan, as a former U.S. ally against communism and presently a saboteur against the U.S. in its approach to the clerics in Iran, presents the impossibility of using a secular approach for the most part to Middle Eastern culture, even governance, and this as shown by the political missteps of the Iranian regime before the 1979 revolution.  

There has been literature published to the effect that, in Pahlavi’s words (to paraphrase here,) most Iranians and Arabs were ignorant of the Shah’s motives and policies, even internally, and most people in the region never comprehended these and never made the effort to do so, or even to plainly understand what he attempted to do for his people.  Hopes for actual democracy have been dashed for years by the use of Pahlavi as a scape – goat in his secular promises, and the false promises of the current clerical, even teleological regime.  It is possible there is another “perfect storm” brewing politically in Iran again after that in 1979 comprised by the dormant Middle East policies of Jimmy Carter, British policies as well, the fitful political attitudes of Iranian people along with the promises of the clerics around Khomeini and Khomeini himself.  All this seems additionally to be tied to petrol politics and the price of oil:  An unusual way to try to determine or work for democratisation and civic and political freedoms anywhere.

THS