We do not understand Iran’s position vis-à-vis the United States and its allies at all: the Iranian people are not surprised by the war. They expected it, given their anti-imperialist stance. They are not so much interested in negotiating an end to hostilities as in establishing a new international order. They are willing to suffer in order to advance their own agenda. Washington may win militarily, but it is Tehran that is making political progress.

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President Donald Trump, and with him all Western political leaders and commentators, believes that Iranians should focus solely on escaping the Pentagon’s bombs and restoring an acceptable standard of living. They should therefore abandon their nuclear program and open the Strait of Hormuz.

However, this is clearly not their priority. Westerners completely misunderstand what the Iranians want, a people they know nothing about. They still haven’t grasped the messages of Mohammad Mossadegh and Ruhollah Khomeini: Iranians can liberate their country from Anglo-Saxon colonial exploitation and free the world from Western colonial domination by drawing on their religion for the strength necessary to accomplish this revolution.

Mohammad Mossadegh demonstrated that it was possible to reclaim the nation’s assets. He nationalized the oil industry and negotiated the share his country had granted to foreign companies. Certainly, he was overthrown by the CIA and MI6 with the Shah’s complicity, but what he had accomplished could never be undone. Mossadegh awakened an exploited nation.

For many years, Ruhollah Khomeini dreamed that every Muslim could follow the examples of the prophets Ali and Hussein and dedicate their life to justice. He imagined that Iran would break free from its doloristic interpretation of the golden legend of Islam; that it could liberate itself and liberate the rest of the world, which led to his excommunication by all the other ayatollahs… and to his being chosen by Zbigniew Brzezinski to replace the Shah.

Certainly, Khomeini, who was very proud, fought Mossadegh, but they never differed on their conception of Iranian sovereignty.

We have retained from the Islamic Revolution only its excesses and madness. Every revolution is bloody, but we do not condemn them all in the same way. We remember the death sentences of Iranians accused, rightly or wrongly, of being agents of the colonial powers or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but not the war that these states imposed on the country. We have seen the brutality of the morality police toward women who refused to wear traditional dress, but not toward men who refused to grow beards.

In France, we experienced the same thing: our ancestors condemned to death those who supported the armies of the allied monarchies and sought to restore the divine right of kings, even going so far as to massacre the Vendéans. The sans-culottes imposed their uniform and martyred those who persisted in dressing as they had under the Ancien Régime. Yet, we know full well that these horrors were not the Revolution: they were the creation of a new order, founded on liberty and equality.

Contemporary Iran is aware that the decade of terrible war (1980-1988) waged against it by Iraq and the West was merely the prelude to the real confrontation. The goal was to prevent the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Now, the goal is to realize Khomeini’s dream.

Before our very eyes, the aging Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did not seek to reclaim his property, confiscated by the Shah, but upon his arrival in Tehran, called upon the army to side with the people and the entire Iranian people to side with the oppressed.

This is precisely what Iran is doing today.

From the outset, Iran was aware that it could not shoot down the Israeli-American air force. Its armed forces did indeed destroy some bombers in flight, but Iran chose instead to demonstrate to its Arab Gulf allies that the colonial powers were exploiting them. It attacked US military bases in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar. It explained to each of these states that they were complicit in the US aggression since they had ceded parts of their territory to the Pentagon, which was using it for its aggression.

The case of the Sultanate of Oman is somewhat different. It is a neutral state that does not host any foreign military bases. However, on March 12 and 13, it allowed US bombers and drones to fly over its territory to attack Iran. After a heated exchange with Tehran, Muscat put an end to these incursions. In contrast, the other Gulf states were unable to change their position. They stubbornly clung to Security Council Resolution 2817, which violates international law and enshrines the superiority of the Western perspective.

At the time, no one understood what was happening. International commentators scoffed at the Iranians’ folly in attacking their own allies. But with time, each of these six states began to wonder if it hadn’t brought about its own misfortune; if the problem wasn’t that they had accepted US military bases for their defense, and that, in reality, these bases had transformed them into mercenaries for the West and targets for the Iranians.

To drive the point home, Tehran wrote to the German, British, Cypriot, Romanian, and Bulgarian governments, informing them, in turn, that by allowing the Pentagon to use their military bases to conduct its aggression, they were becoming complicit and exposing themselves to retaliation.

Then the Iranians brought up the complicity of most of the world’s states - except Russia, Belarus, and China - in the theft of Iranian assets abroad and the siege of Iranian banks, with which no one dares to establish any relationship anymore. At the time, no one paid any attention to these accusations. So no one understood when the Iranians mentioned an administrative procedure for crossing the Strait of Hormuz. International commentators even mocked the supposed stupidity of the Iranians, who wanted to impose a toll in a natural waterway.

The Iranians explained that they would only allow ships not involved in the aggression to cross the strait, and that they were simply asking for bank guarantees from the others, in case of an accident. Panic then gripped the shipping companies: how could they provide bank guarantees to the Iranian banking system, which had been excluded from the global banking system for thirty years by the US Treasury Department?

This time Iran is addressing us: we are complicit in a policy aimed at starving it, and we were unaware of it. Just as Germany, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bulgaria, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, and the United Kingdom are complicit in the military aggression without ever having chosen to join it.

We will have to choose: either continue to starve the Iranians, pretending not to know, or break free from the United States.

Courtesy

https://www.voltairenet.org/article224477.html