An English Misunderstanding of Iran
by Amir Taheri, Gatestone Institute:
The English Job
Understanding Iran and Why It Distrusts Britain
By Jack Straw
390 pages; published by Biteback Books, London 2019.
The subtitle of Jack Straw’s new book promises to help the reader in “understanding Iran”.
However, what one gets in 390 pages may best be described as a misunderstanding of Iran today — a misunderstanding that has prevented Britain, along with other Western powers, from developing a realistic Iran policy and has helped prolong the crisis caused by the Islamic Republic’s unorthodox behavior in the international arena.
Straw’s misunderstanding, perhaps caused by his “absolute infatuation” with his imaginary Iran, has three aspects.
The first is that he thinks that because Iran, as he reminds the reader, is an ancient civilization — and has produced great poets, weaves exquisite carpets and offers one of the world’s hautes cuisines — it deserves indulgence for its weird activities in other domains such as hostage-taking, hate-mongering, human rights violations and the export of terror in the name of revolution. It is like granting Stalin indulgence because one appreciates Pushkin and Tchaikovsky and enjoys a dish of borscht with a glass of “little water” on the side. In another register, what would you say if we gave Hitler a pass because we like Schiller, Beethoven and potato salad? That Cyrus the Great was a great king and, arguably, even the founder of human rights, as Straw suggests, does not justify, to cite just one example, the mass murder of Syrians by a mercenary army led by the Iranian mullahs.
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