The great sociologist André Béteille, who died recently, once wrote to me saying: “You must meditate a little more on the place of evil in the conduct of human affairs.” He thought that I focused too much on writing about politicians of goodwill, such as Gandhi. But history was made, and unmade, as much — and often even more — by people of malign intentions.
I recalled Professor Béteille’s warning when the present conflict in West Asia broke out. This conflict posits the United States of America and Israel on one side against Iran on the other. But crucial to how the war has unfolded are the personalities of the three men who have led, or are still leading, these countries.
Let us begin with the leader who is no longer alive, the late Ali Khamenei. Khamenei undoubtedly exhibited bravery in refusing to hide when the bombs began to fall, willingly embracing death. The courage he showed in his last days — when juxtaposed with the brute force and perfidy of his enemies — has led some left-wing intellectuals to portray him as an anti-imperialist icon. This seems to me simplistic in the extreme. The manner of his death should not allow us to obscure the manner of his life, and, above all, how he exercised power in Iran when he was alive.
As Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei had three choices. The first was to respond to the democratic aspirations of his people by gradually withdrawing the clergy from the political process and fostering a freer society. This path would — or should—also have emphasised gender equality by removing the oppressive dress codes imposed on Iranian women, and otherwise enabling them to play a full part in the country’s economic, social, and political life.
Like Gulf countries such as Oman, Qatar and (above all) Saudi Arabia, Iran has significant reserves of oil. Unlike them, it has a highly educated population, with a history of entrepreneurship, scientific research and — prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 — an active role of women in the educational and professional sectors. Iran also has a far richer cultural history than the Gulf countries, having produced great philosophers, poets, and musicians down the centuries. Khamenei was fully aware of this history and could have leveraged it to build a prosperous and self-reliant Iran.
Democracy with economic growth was the first path the late Ali Khameini could have fostered in his long years in power. Economic growth without democracy (on the Singapore model) was a second path available to him. Instead, the Iranian regime under his leadership chose a third path, of increased repression at home and reckless expansionism abroad. Its sponsorship of armed groups in Lebanon and Yemen, and its military support to the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, played a critical role in tearing those countries apart. Iran under Khamenei hubristically set itself up as the leader of the Islamic world, displaying a particular animus towards the Jewish State of Israel, which it has regularly attacked through its proxy, Hezbollah. For decades now, the cry of ‘Death to Israel’ has been as common as ‘Death to America’ in pro-regime rallies in Tehran.
Come next to Israel, whose long-time leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is as fanatical an ideologue as Khamenei was, and arguably even more cold-blooded. Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism comes from his family background — his father was a celebrated right-wing Jewish historian, and his brother an army officer who died in 1976 seeking to rescue Israelis held hostage by terrorists in Entebbe airport. In his many years as prime minister, Netanyahu has systematically undermined any prospect of Palestinian statehood by overseeing a massive expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank. His hatred of the Palestinian Authority was so visceral that at one stage he even sponsored Hamas to undermine them. Then, after the terror attack by Hamas in October 2023, he reacted with savage fury, his army devastating the territory of Gaza, killing more than 75,000 civilians and rendering more than a million homeless. For his actions, Netanyahu has been designated a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, and that indeed is how he must be regarded.
Netanyahu and his family have luxurious tastes, and have received many expensive gifts from businessmen. Indeed, Netanyahu’s love of perpetual war may be in part an attempt to ward off the corruption cases against him. Hence his obsession with beginning and sustaining this current conflict with Iran. In his attempts to evade justice and stay in power, Netanyahu has had as his indispensable allies successive presidents of the US who have turned a blind eye to his crimes and his corruption and, especially, to his evisceration of any possibility of a sovereign Palestinian State.
All political leaders desire to acquire and stay in power; else they would not enter politics at all. However, in the case of Khamenei and Netanyahu, ideology also played a critical role in their politics; the ideology of Islamic theocracy in the first case, and of Zionist irredentism in the second. What then of the third major individual actor in this conflict, Donald Trump? He too is certainly animated by power, but whether he has any sort of coherent ideology is hard to say. Trump claims to be a practicing Christian, yet in his personal life he has violated most if not all of the Ten Commandments. A registered Democrat between 2000 and 2009, he then won two presidential elections running as a Republican. Returning to power on an explicitly anti-war platform, Trump has bombed Nigeria and Somalia, attacked Venezuela, and launched two massive military operations against Iran. None of these countries presented any sort of threat to the US.
Trump, then, is not an ideological person at all. Expediency, not belief, is what guides his actions. Apart from power, the forces that animate him most are vanity and greed. It is hard, if not impossible, to find rational, logical, credible reasons as to why America launched this most recent unprovoked assault on Iran. Trump’s public justifications have been varied and inconsistent with one another. What could then be his real motives? Speculations abound. I have heard it said that since Barack Obama’s administration took out Osama bin Laden, he wanted to go one better and take out Khamenei. Others claim that the idea of making a fortune building a ‘Riviera’ in Gaza makes him peculiarly susceptible to following Netanyahu’s lead. A third possibility is the desire to exult in the damage to Iran and Iranians that the deadly arsenal of the world’s most powerful military can cause. A fourth is to capture Iran’s oil infrastructure and hand it over to his cronies. A fifth might be to deflect attention from the Epstein files, in whose currently redacted portions his name is said to figure.
Whether the cause is vanity, greed, voyeurism or self-preservation — or a combination of these factors — Trump’s decision to use missiles and bombs to pound Iran has caused enormous suffering to civilians who support the regime as well as those who do not. With residential localities, shops, offices, and heritage buildings being bombed indiscriminately, thousands of Iranians have been killed, and several million displaced. Meanwhile, the bombing of Lebanese towns and cities by Israel has led to a million people in that country losing and leaving their homes. This enormous human suffering aside, the wider instability in the region and in oil markets has led to what may be the biggest global crisis since the end of the Cold War.
There are, I must underline again, no good men among the parties to this conflict. The leaders of Iran, Israel and the US are all evil, all capable and very willing of using extreme violence to inflict death and suffering. Yet one must not treat them equally, if only because the destructive means that each of these countries commands is not the same. Iran has a far less well-equipped military arsenal than Israel, and America of course has the most powerful military in the history of humankind. Because of its repression within, and especially its meddling abroad, the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be treated as an altogether innocent victim in this conflict. Yet Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s America are guilty in far greater proportions, if only because they have at their command far more powerful means of devastation, as well as the willingness to use them on vulnerable and innocent human beings.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in