[lit-ideas] Shall Iran blink or shall we?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:56:46 -0700
On page 193 of The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama writes, "We
value praise or recognition of our worth much more highly if it comes from
somebody we respect, or whose judgment we trust, and most of all if it is
freely given rather than coerced. Our pet dog 'recognizes' us in some sense
when he wag his tail in greeting when we come home; but he recognizes
everybody as well in a similar fashion - the postman, or a burglar - because
the dog is instinctually conditioned to do so. Or, to take a more political
example, the satisfaction of a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein on hearing the
adulation of a crowd that has been bused into a stadium and forced to cheer
on pain of death is presumably less than that experienced by a democratic
leader like a Washington or a Lincoln when accorded genuine respect by a
free people.
"This then constitutes the tragedy of the master: he risks his life for the
sake of recognition on the part of a slave who is not worthy of recognizing
him. The master remains less than satisfied. Moreover, the master remains
fundamentally unchanging over time. He does not need to work, because he
has a slave to work for him, and he has easy access to all of the things
that are necessary to maintain his life. His life therefore becomes a
static and unchanging one of leisure and consumption; he can be killed as
Kojeve points out, but he cannot be educated. . . ."
Comment: No one in Iran has the power that Saddam wielded in Iraq. It is
possible that someone could in a coup gain that power. Ahmadinejad doesn't
have popularity but he may have the support of the Pasdaran and so might
attempt a coup if he had a reason - perhaps the greater good of the Middle
East through the destruction of Israel. But baring something like that the
present authoritative Iranian regime bears more resemblance to the Soviet
Union after Stalin than it does a dictatorship. A group of Mullahs have the
final say much as the Soviet Politburo did. The president has considerable
power but he can be removed. Sharing power are the insiders, and they are
loyal to the regime or they don't stay insiders. Khatami was a bit of an
outsider, or perhaps a renegade in the sense that he came up from inside but
wanted to reform the Iranian government, perhaps we could call him an
ineffective Gorbechev. What I wonder is can enough people in positions of
power in Iran be educated, and if so can they be educated quickly enough.
By quickly I mean before they get the bomb.
I think Qhadaffi at one point resembled Kojeve's description of a Master.
He had the same sort of power that Saddam had, but in his war with the U.S.
he blinked. Saddam didn't. But Libya has a population of about 6,000,000,
much smaller than Iraq's 27,000,000. Perhaps Qhadaffi could more clearly
see his need of blinking. Can the present Iranian regime with 69,000,000 be
encouraged to blink?
Aside from Mike Strangelove, I don't hear anyone saying they would love it
if Iran got the bomb.
John McCreery is tending toward Mike's position but is putting his faith in
the acumen of Madelein Albright about whom Gerecht says "tried in 2000 to
apologize their [hers and Clinton's] way into getting President Khatami to
engage Washington and to cooperate with the FBI in its search for the
Iranian culprits behind the deadly Khobar bombing in Saudi Arabia." And
"Brezhinksi" about whom Gerecht says engaged in "the single dumbest American
approach to the mullahs since 1979. The hapless, not-so-secret negotiating
efforts of Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski with the
provisional Iranian government in 1979 - which was a major factor behind the
U.S. embassy's seizure and the collapse of the moderate government of prime
minister Mehdi Bazargain . . ."
Lawrence
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