Natalie said:
What I don't understand is how Iran doesn't seem to understand the meaning or importance of the word "diplomacy". Something very similar happened in 1979 with the U.S. embassy and how they think this is a good idea is beyond me, its basically equivalent to declaring war on a country. I might be ignorant of the situation and if someone could explain I'd be grateful, but to my knowledge Iran is the only country that seems to have this kind of reaction any time sanctions of any kind are imposed against them. Is it because they feel like Western countries should mind their own business? Is there some kind of sub-culture that embraces invading embassy's? When sanctions were imposed on Austria back in the 90's I didn't see hordes of students invading the embassies of other EU countries...
The circumstances were different in 1979. Back then, Iran was in the middle of a revolution, and the seizure of the US embassy had a very particular background. It was not the Iranian government that instigated the seizure, but a group of fanatical students. The reason is quite simple. The government the Iranian people had just overthrown was regarded to have been imposed on them by the US government, not without reason, if I may add. The seizure was an entirely irrational heat of the moment action by a few armed militia. Whatever official Iranian authorities existed at the time, and that was basically the individual of Ayatollah Khomeini, later approved of it because the seizure had a very strong popular support. Keep in mind also, that the hostage-takers had very clear demands that Khomeini later approved of: Turning over the shah, who had been seeking asylum in western countries, and an apology for imposing him on the Iranian people. When the shah died in the middle of the crisis, the demand for the apology remained, and it still stands, incidentally.
What needs to be taken into account, and this is something people overlooked then, and still overlook now, is that at the time, there was no authoritative Iranian government to speak of. Nobody quite knew where the revolution was taking them. And indeed, government posts rotated like crazy at the time, the only face that existed was Khomeini's... and I am leaning to the point that he was more of a figurehead than an actually capable leader. That is my personal opinion gathered from bits and pieces, you won't find this point in any authoritative source on the revolution. The point I'm trying to make is that there was no "Iran" that seized the US embassy, and no "Iran" that had any capability of coordinating any sort of foreign policy at the time. As it later turned out, the Iranian government that did emerge in the course of the 1980s, needed anti-Americanism for propaganda purposes, but it needed America even more in its war against Iraq. What followed was a classic
ketman policy, in the sense of saying one thing (condemning America and Israel), and doing something else (buying American and Israeli weaponry). That was, mind you, in the eighties... things have changed drastically now.
Be as it may, what stuck with many people at the time was that the seizure was a triumph of the revolution, because the seemingly invincible American juggernaught had been defeated, and all American military and diplomatic personell had been expelled from Iran. The hostage-takers of the time are now officially recognised as heroes. Today's people...don't really care.
This seizure of the British embassy is probably some sort of propaganda coup trying to rehash that glory. The more I think about it, the more I get the feeling that what the government is trying to do is build some sort of emotional bridge to those days of the revolution. Fact is, most Iranians separate the revolution itself from what came afterwards, namely the Islamic Republic. Nobody except the most stubborn monarchists in Paris and LA will say that the revolution in itself was bad - because it was initiated, and carried out, by the Iranian people as a whole (so it wasn't a coup d'état as most political upheavals in the Third World had been). What the government is probably counting on is that people remember the seizure of the US embassy as an act of the revolution, and not of the Islamic Republic.
There is something else to it. There is a very deep emotional, and hence irrational, aversion to the British in Iran. This is deeply rooted in history, because British domination over Iran, however unofficially, began in the course of the 19th century. Hence, the English (the name that is primarily being used), are something like the root of all evil in the collective Iranian mind, whatever that may be. Even the American dominance over Iran that began in the 1950s, is being linked to the English, again not without reason. It is my impression that Iranians who have witnessed the shah and the revolution, and who have been politicised in their country or by their countrymen will, whatever political side they join, blame the English on everything that is wrong in Iran. This may be the loss of their values, to the economic misery the country is enduring currently, to either the terrors the shah imposed on Iran, or the terror the Islamic Republic is imposing, whatever they see fit: It always, somehow, narrows down to the English. I'm not making this up: I have endured many a rant along those lines. One guy actually told me that the clerical comission that made Khomeini Grand Ayatollah, hence making him invulnerable politically, was appointed by the English! So maybe by seizing the British embassy, the government is somehow hoping to capitalise on these emotions. It's quite easy to blame the English at the moment, since all sanctions that have been imposed on Iran are approved both of the US and the UK.
So, to answer my own questions after some pondering, I think this is an attempt by the Iranian government at gaining some popular support, and a quite lame one at that. The idea behind it probably is that the government does not believe the British or their allies will go so far as to attack Iran over this, and when it comes to other consequences, Iran has very little left to lose. The sanctions that are pressing on Iran can hardly be raised substantially. The government just wants to tell the people it's "the English" who are to blame, and not themselves. I think that this is where the government is indeed somewhat detached from reality. The people who are in the government today are all people who witnessed the revolution, and who grew up hating the US and the UK. What they don't realise is that the majority of the population, indeed those who protest against the government on the streets, was born or grew up
after the revolution, thus being significantly more friendly towards the west. The popular revolutionary fibre was burned up in the war against Iraq in the eighties, but this has somehow evaded the current ruling élite.
Forostar said:
Maybe the word hypocrite is a bit on the heavy side (and I don't mean it that negative), let me just say that I am surprised that people suddenly follow Iran more serious, now that one of theirs, or Western allies is involved more directly. Things went wrong for a long time already.
I have long accepted the fact that only few people take a similar interest in global politics the way I do. And let's be fair: Did you follow the events in Afghanistan before Dutch troops were deployed there? Are you currently following the situation in Bolivia or Armenia? It's natural for people to shift their focus from things when they don't affect them.
