The US Administration pushes Iran to become a second Nazi Germany. The incubator effect is the main reason behind the Nazis’ rise to power. The Entente powers humiliated Germany, closed it off, but didn’t destroy its economy entirely. The offended, enterprising, cultured, ideologically motivated Germans developed the worst political strain: economically efficient, politically aggressive, and ideologically charged. A similar situation is observed in today’s Iran. Its people are relatively educated, civilized, business-minded, technically savvy, and ideologized. They even subscribe to the very ideology of Nazis: Aryanism. Persian Iranians believe in their racial supremacy just like the Nazis did. The West closed Iran politically, humiliated it with sanctions but allows huge money inflows from oil sales, and thus created the incubator for viable political radicalism. US administrations ignored the Iranian attempts at rapprochement: from offering major oil concessions to American companies to the 2003 offer of peace talks with Israel and abandoning the Iranian support to Hamas to the very sympathetic 2007 Iranian TV series on the Holocaust.
There are major differences between Iranians and Germans. Iranians are tolerant, specifically tolerant to Jews whose community in Iran is the only significant Jewish community in the Muslim world (there’s a small number of Jews in Morocco and negligible numbers elsewhere). Except for the isolated incidents, Iranian Jews never suffered persecution. There is no institutional anti-Semitism of the German type in Iran. Still, Iranians proved themselves fairly militant and suicidally minded in the recent war in Iraq; for example, Iran marched its teenage soldiers through minefields to clean them on the cheap. Unlike the pre-WWII Germany, Iran is past the ideological peak which brought the ayatollahs to power, and actually disenchanted with them. Bulging young population, however, supports nationalist radicalism of Ahmadinejad’s – the mildly religious – type. Besieged by the US, Sunni separatists, Kurds, and Saudi Arabia, Iranians fall back into xenophobia and fearful militancy.
The majority of Iranians are skeptical of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear weapons project, but its completion will boost his popularity. Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear facility would also rally the nation around Ahmadinejad. The toothless sanctions, easily circumvented by local businessmen, make them okay with Ahmadinejad’s policies; the initial irritation from minor business disruptions gave way to contentment.
It is too late to discuss the Iranian nuclear program; bombing the installations is the only proper solution. Iran, however, need not be demonized: the Iranian nuclear threat is non-existent, certainly negligible when compared to the Pakistan’s threat. And talking to Iran is a must. And talking a lot.
