by ahmad al sarraf “we may spend a lifetime believing that we are defending our thoughts, and then we discover that we were, in fact, defending the ideas that others planted in our minds,” says the great british thinker bertrand russell. it is dangerous for societies to live in ignorance and backwardness, but it is more dangerous to treat their ignorance as holy!”
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my relationship with iran is confusing and tangled, and i was almost imprisoned for years on the issue of state security because of the charge of attacking ayatollah khomeini.
i adore many things in iran, but for reasons that are too big, i had severed my relationship with ‘them’ decades ago before the islamic revolution, and the voluntary boycott deepened after the revolution when the religious authority came to power. therefore, i did not visit iran for half a century except once for the purpose of recovering a debt from one of its banks.
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it was possible, even under the rule of administratively modestly capable mullahs, that iran could become an economic power and command respect from near and far, and that this power could contribute to the progress and prosperity of the iranian people, but none of this happened because of two things – the iranian leadership believed in the importance of exporting the revolution, and saddam believed he will be the first victim of that call.
this is not because of the shiite majority among his people but the fragility of his dictatorial regime and oppression of the people. therefore, he found the only solution was none other than launching a war through which the regime of ‘ayatollahs’ could be overthrown.
he ignored all the facts on the ground contrary to his belief that it is possible to occupy a country that is more powerful than its size and number and the extreme stupidity was the title of a war that had exhausted the two countries for decades, and one of the results was saddam’s decision, the stupid one, to occupy kuwait and that ‘dethroned’ him and handed over the ‘democratic’ iraq’s holdings to the shiite majority, followed by iranian penetration, through them, to iraq to open its appetite.
after that, intervened in syria, before lebanon, and then yemen, and the leaders of iran and the imams from its mosques boasted and were proud to proclaim that their existence has reached more than four arab capitals.
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things accelerated in a strange manner following the assassination of qassem soleimani (an iranian major general in the islamic revolutionary guard corps and, from 1998 until his death in 2020, commander of its quds force, a division primarily responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operations) and iran’s decision to take revenge for his death, albeit in a tragic manner, as a result, hundreds of people were killed and injured during the funeral of soleimani, and all aboard the ukrainian plane and crew were killed by an iranian missile, and other losses and the rulers in iran finally confessed to bringing it down, the wrong way.
devoting efforts to building modern iran and persuading the finest iranian minds who chose to emigrate to return and build the homeland, is more important and useful, and of course, it is much more difficult than caring about the requirements of occupying other countries of the world.
perhaps the iranian leadership believed that it was, and still is, directly concerned with the situation of the shiites in the world, particularly in lebanon, yemen, syria, and iraq, but what about the shiites in iran itself? are the iranian people satisfied with everything, so that their leadership has devoted itself to raising the level of shiites in other countries of the world?
if i were the leader of iran, and i will not be, i would find in the recent disasters that afflicted the state, a way out of the deteriorating economic and political situation, through a gradual and calm withdrawal, politically or militarily, from all interference in the affairs of other countries of the world.
in addition to the impossibility of occupying or controlling the fate of others forever, what the iranian people need is what is forbidden to them. it really needs everything from which it is deprived of for forty years, except for speeches, slogans, marches, and rituals!