In the latest issue of Standpoint, Amir Taheri discusses James Buchan's Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences:
According to Buchan, Iran, under the Khomeinist regime, holds one of the weakest hands it has had in its recent history and yet is adamant in playing it by rejecting all compromise. He writes: "Contemptuous of diplomacy, the Islamic Republic is now incapable of it." On two of the occasions that Buchan studies in some detail, the impasse created by Iranian intransigence ended with regime change in Tehran. On two other occasions, the Iranian leadership was forced to accept a dramatic change of course, in effect tactically surrendering to foreign diktat in order to save their regime....
The mindset that Buchan describes is that of a decision-making elite of clerics, military and intelligence officers and technocrats drunk on an intoxicating mix of Shia messianic mumbo-jumbo, pseudo-Marxism and what many call pan-Islamist fascism.
According to that mindset the Iranian regime is the only "divinely guided" government in the world, all others being in the hands of deviant Muslims or outright infidels. The present world order is a concoction of "Zionists and Crusaders" and is sustained by military force, propaganda and economic domination. The fall of the Soviet Union removed the only serious challenger to this despicable order. The Islamic Republic in Iran has the duty to fill that gap by assuming the role of challenger. Its aim should be a new Islamic world order. And that, in turn, requires the end of American domination. A key step in that direction is the destruction of the United States' principal "bridgehead in the heart of Islam"—that is to say Israel....
It is not only with the US and Israel that the Islamic Republic cannot conceive of normal nation-to-nation relations. Caught in the tangled web of a sick ideology they are prisoners of myths that are not easily circumvented. The Khomeinist ideology cannot conceive of a relationship with an adversary, a rival or a competitor. Whoever deviates from whatever happens to be "the path of the Imam" at any given time is regarded as enemy (dushman). While compromise is possible with an adversary, rival or competitor in personal life as in international relations, an enemy can only be defeated and destroyed. Because it has cast itself as a "sacred cause", the Khomeinist regime cannot behave as a nation state. And that has made it difficult, at times even impossible, for the Islamic Republic to deal with a host of mundane issues that a normal nation state would handle with little difficulty.
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