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Soft Europe
BY LEON DE WINTERAfter two years of disastrous dialogue, and more of the same in recent days, we can conclude that no diplomatic initiative can stop Iran from getting the bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency meets again this week to discuss the mullahs' nuclear ambitions, while Russia floats a plan to get Iran to enrich uranium on its soil. But before we got to this point, we had the Europeans in the starring role. The foreign ministers of the leading European Union countries--Britain, France and Germany--did try for years to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, most recently at Friday's meeting in Vienna that ended up in yet another failure. But Iran knew all along that this threesome, formally the "Troika," had no real negotiating authority and would never resort to serious measures. And yet Britain's Jack Straw, France's Philippe Douste-Blazy (and his predecessor, Dominique de Villepin) and Germany's Joschka Fischer (and his successor, Frank-Walter Steinmeier) talked on, clinging to a postmodern European belief in a world where any conflict can be resolved with enough reason and mutual understanding. The Troika offered the mullahs economic carrots and alternative sources of nuclear power--as if energy had anything to do with it--while Iran did what any football team does when it's ahead: It played for time. This it used very well to push ahead with its clandestine nuclear program. Did the Troika know that Iran knew that Europe was weak? Of course. Europe's posturing was empty from the start. The only weapon that the EU was willing to consider, as a last result, was an economic boycott that would harm Europe's commercial interests more than Iran's. The mullahs also knew that the Troika couldn't back up its threat of an economic boycott with the threat of military action. If the EU couldn't muster the will to fight in its own backyard in the Balkans without America leading the way, it surely wouldn't put any lives at risk beyond the frontiers of the Continent. By contrast, Iran, ostensibly a democracy but in reality a religious tyranny, possesses a character trait that is almost nonexistent in modern Europe: Iranians, almost exclusively Shiite, are willing to suffer. This quality is deeply rooted in their religion. Ashura, one of the central Shiite rituals that marks the death of Imam Hussain at the Battle of Karbala in 680, celebrates flagellation, blood, pain. As Steven Vincent, the remarkable American journalist who tragically was murdered last August in Iraq, observed in his book "In the Red Zone": "Eight-foot long white silk flags depicting crossed sword, the blades oozing with blood . . . pictures of severed hands, severed heads, . . a fountain in front of Meshed Ali spraying geysers of blood-red liquid. . . . bloody swords flashing over the heads of milling crowds . . . men with blood-soaked bandages wrapped around their heads to stanch the bleeding from self-inflicted wounds . . . endless posters of the slaughtered innocents. This is an orgy of death imagery, I thought." Can Europe grasp this commitment to voluntary suffering? For casualties to be acceptable on the battlefield, people need collective ideals and values that transform their society into a sacred entity. In European eyes, Shiites have ritualized this to the point of absurdity, with most Westerners finding it bizarre. Rest at link. Posted by: ed 2006-03-07 |
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