From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Mon Feb 24 2003 - 09:26:35 MST
Factor out the biases acccording to your own. Grist for the mill.
IRANIANS EAGER FOR HUSSEIN TO BE OUSTED
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-streets23feb23004421
,1,2721560.story?coll=la-news-a_section
By Azadeh Moaveni, Times Staff Writer
TEHRAN -- Iran would seem to be an unlikely corner of the Middle East to
find support for Washington's plans to unseat Saddam Hussein. But despite
decades of poor relations with the U.S. and their pique at being labeled
part of an "axis of evil," most Iranians are eager to see the Iraqi
dictator's demise.
Those who fought in Iran's war with Iraq in the 1980s and those for whom
that war is little more than a childhood memory equally want to see
Hussein's regime toppled. Few doubt that he is dangerous, armed with
terrible weapons and a bane to the region.
"The day Saddam Hussein is arrested, killed or exiled, Iranians will pass
out sweets in the streets," said Mehdi Ansari, a newspaper vendor. His
clapboard kiosk on Vali Asr, Tehran's main boulevard, does brisker business
these days as Iranians follow the latest twists in the U.N. inspection
effort that they expect will eventually lead to war.
This enthusiasm for a campaign against Hussein is rare in the Middle East,
where the prevailing belief holds that the U.S. is targeting Iraq to control
its oil and ensure Israel's security. America's Arab allies, such as Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, fear that war with Baghdad will further radicalize their
already deeply anti-American populations. Iraq has historically been Iran's
most serious rival for regional influence. Eight years of war drained Iran's
economy and left deep wounds that still have not healed. The slaughter of
tens of thousands of young Iranian men by Hussein's forces produced a grim
culture of martyrdom that the country is still trying to shake.
At least 300,000 Iranians were killed in the war, and more than half a
million were wounded.
However, the depth of Iranian antipathy for Hussein predates both the war
and the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s.
Iranians and Arabs are ethnically and culturally distinct, and a prejudice
against Arabs has run through Iranian history for centuries. After the
Iranian national soccer team lost a game to Iraq in 1977, the shah wept
openly before fans at Tehran's Azadi Stadium.
Because Iranians speak Persian instead of Arabic and identify with a culture
that predates Islam, most of them do not have the emotional ties to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict that reinforce the anger Arabs feel toward the
United States, which they see as Israel's sponsor. Iranians do not sleep and
rise with televised images of Palestinian suffering, as Arabs throughout the
region do.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iranians watched with satisfaction as a
U.S.-led coalition routed Hussein from Kuwait. Where there is ambivalence
about a new U.S.-led war against Iraq among ordinary Iranians, it often
stems from a revulsion at the potential human cost rather than animosity
toward the United States.
Azzam Rahimi, a 45-year-old homemaker, lost her son in the Iran-Iraq War and
comes to Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery every week to visit his grave.
"Look at all these dead young men," she said, nodding down a seemingly
endless stretch of slender gravestones of soldiers killed in the war.
"They're all here because of war. If there had been no war, so many young
men wouldn't be lying under the dirt."
But Iranians are also well aware of the implications of a new war for
themselves. If Washington moved to disarm Hussein by force, the result would
be the third war the U.S. has fought on Iran's borders in 12 years.
Some Iranians, particularly the young, say they would actually welcome a
U.S. presence in Iraq because it would increase pressure on both their
country's conservative Islamic regime and the fractured reformers who oppose
it. The regime's efforts to portray the U.S. as the "Great Satan" have
failed to sway young people, who are a clear majority of Iranians. About 70%
of the country's 70 million people are younger than 30.
Young people in particular associate the U.S. with the opportunities and
freedoms that Iran, with its sluggish economy and stern moral code, lacks.
They believe that better relations with the U.S. would revitalize Iranian
life and help the country shed its pariah status.
According to a poll conducted in September, 75% of Iranians support dialogue
with the U.S., and some believe that a long-term U.S. military presence next
door could accelerate the process of change in Iran.
Others, who despair of the clerical regime's capacity for reform, even hope
that after Iraq, the U.S. will take on Iran.
The fantasy that the U.S. could swoop in and remove Iran's hard-line regime,
as it did the Taliban in Afghanistan and threatens to do to Hussein,
bespeaks the depth of frustration at the pace of internal reforms.
When newspaper headlines suggest that Washington's resolve may be wavering,
anxiety sets in.
"Are they changing their mind?" Goli Afshar, a 23-year-old student, asked as
she alternately tightened and loosened her grip on a mug at a cafe on Gandhi
Street. "Can they hurry up with Iraq already, so they can get on with
attacking us?"
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