Iran - wars of narratives, the Great Satan, the Evil Empire, Angels and Demons.
Dividing the world into the Goodies and the Baddies defines Geopolitical Manichean thinking. When it comes to inter-state competition, Manichaeism is the state religion of the West. Dark and violent though things are at the moment (Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Palestine), we have a collective responsibility to challenge and change this for the better.
In 2018 I visited a Sasanian fort in the desert of mid-eastern Iran. Still standing after 18 centuries of heat, dust and competing empires, its streets – at least in my mind’s eye – were still bustling with people. I could almost hear the sounds of camel bells as a caravan entered through the gates, see the colourful robes of devotees of the prophet Mani, disciples of the prophet Christ and even Buddhists whose sandaled feet walked the pressed mud alleyways of Sar Yazd.
Manichaeism, founded in the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), merged elements from Zoroastrianism, early Christianity and Buddhism which were all discussed and mingled along the length and breadth of the Silk Road and other trading routes. The prophet Mani believed in a hard dualism – that there was an eternal struggle between Good and Evil – literally a world of light and a world of darkness.
This hard dualism is exactly the way President Reagan described the Soviet Union (‘the Evil Empire’) . In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, he declared that the Soviet Union was not just a rival but "the focus of evil in the modern world". He told his audience they needed to avoid the temptation to "label both sides equally at fault, to remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil". It was a spiritual battle, no less. I note he was speaking to evangelicals and, yes, ‘angel’ and ‘evangelical’ share the exact same root: Greek ἄγγελος (angelos).
At this point it is worth pointing out that under Reagan’s angelic presidency the US ran death squads in Central America that terrorised millions of civilians and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people (70,000 in El Salvador alone, over 100,000 in Guatemala, and 50,000 in Nicaragua's Contra war, according to conservative estimates).
Under Reagan the CIA worked with US ally Saddam Hussein to supply arms and chemicals that were then converted into chemical weapons, including mustard gas, to use in the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war. US satellite tracking identified Iranian troop movements and provided coordinates to the Iraqis in full knowledge that the Iraqis would use banned chemical weapons to attack them.
Foreign Policy did a major story on this in 2013 after uncovering CIA documents. The story quoted Air Force Col. Rick Francona, US military attaché in Baghdad at the time:
“The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew,” he said.
The US was fully aware that the Iraqis were using banned weapons (WMDs), including nerve agents such as sarin, tabun, and VX against the Iranians but Saddam was ‘our guy’ and still years away from being recategorized as ‘another Hitler’, ‘a man who gassed his own people’, and his country moving into the ‘Axis of Evil’ camp.
The Great Satan who fought the Axis of Evil
It was President George W Bush who branded Iran, North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as The Axis of Evil (Music: Darth Vader, please).
In 1996, CBS's Lesley Stahl confronted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the death of possibly hundreds of thousands of children because of US sanctions and blockades imposed on Iraq. "I think that is a very hard choice," Albright answered, "but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
Reading from the same choir book, was Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic in 1979 and was Supreme Leader until his death in 1989. He repeatedly dubbed the United States "the Great Satan." In 1980, as a young man who was about to write his first article, I attended rallies at Tehran University and in the holy city of Qom. President Carter’s name was spat out with tremendous vehemence at these rallies and was one of the few words I could recognize. The revolutionary Iranians at that time were driving the American influence out of their country and they literally portrayed Carter as a demon and the US as a “world-devouring enemy of humanity”.
Hypocrisy and Manichean thinking are two buttocks of the same bum
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen decried the rising death toll in Iran as ‘horrifying’. Fair point, but it begs the question why she didn’t raise even an eyebrow to support the Palestinians in their torment over the past two years – or 50 years, for that matter.
The Israeli crackdown on 2.2 million Gazans, 99% of whom had nothing to do with October 7th, was vastly more brutal and sadistic. Instead of raining down condemnation on the Israeli state, however, the West, particularly the UK, Germany and US, helped the Israelis rain down bombs that killed tens of thousands of babies, children, women, people of all ages. This is why Manichean narratives and hypocrisy are such dangerous bedfellows.
Narratives that act as brain tumours
“Extreme leftists are campaigning in support of one of the most murderous regimes in the world. It’s a leap into genuine madness,” the UK’s Telegraph bloviates, attacking people like me who warn against military attacks on Iran. You can support both human and democratic rights in Iran and oppose foreign intervention that breaches international law and will only cause misery.
This is why, for me, the alternative to Manichaeism isn't moral relativism or paralysis - it's trying to uphold intellectual rigour and ethical consistency. Opposition to Western conduct in the world, in this time of genocide and endless wars, is both valid and a moral imperative.
And BTW, what happened to the rules-based order? Here’s what:
What we are witnessing is the complete abandonment by the US of the United Nations Charter system that they themselves were central to creating in the post-WWII period. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present, it has been a steady undermining of all the foundations of legitimate international conduct.
Renowned political historian Richard Sakwa, Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, gave a master class on this topic in his book “The Lost Peace – How the West failed to prevent a second Cold War”. The US progressively shifted away from the UN Charter system to its own system where they set the rules, decided who was exempt from the rules, and who took the orders.
“The great substitution entailed a linguistic shift from ‘international law’ to the ‘rules-based order’, accentuating the contradiction between the impartiality of the international system and the particularity of US primacy,” Sakwa said.
The US leads what Sakwa calls the liberal international order (currently being replaced as the US transitions into a fully rogue Mafia state). Sakwa astutely sums up its exclusionary dualism/Manichaeism when he writes: “The hermetic character of the liberal international order – the liberal anti-pluralist view – is that there cannot be anything legitimate outside of it – reduces all ‘others’ into potential antagonists or outright adversaries.”
Othering is the Western way. Hated Others get what they deserve, particularly now under a US administration that has trashed international law (for example Article 2(4) of the UN Charter - Prohibition of Force). It has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its President, bombed Iran and Yemen, threatened to seize Greenland and Panama – “the hard way”, if necessary. We are living through headspinning times as the US tosses global trade rules onto the bonfire and replaces them with petulance backed by unilateral sanctions. Diplomacy has been reduced to “I hate Putin” and the kind of servile grovelling that NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte demeans himself with in order to please ‘Daddy’ Trump.
For US allies and our mainstream media, the old Manichean framing of the US as a light on the hill, the indispensable nation, has become harder and harder to peddle. And yet they keep trying …
Complex issues demand analysis that runs deeper and is more intellectually nutritious than the beer and pretzel diet – Us Good, Them Bad – with which the mainstream media starves readers in the Western world. For these and many other reasons, I don’t profess to be on the side of the angels!
Eugene Doyle
