On the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, Rafael Epstein embarrassed his co-panellists, Samantha Maiden and Phil Coorey, when he posed a question on the demographic make-up of Iran. They did not know.
As I am able to find relevant Wikipedia pages just like Epstein, I can report that 60 per cent of Iranians are Persians, referred to as Fars. One of the largest ethnic minorities are the Iranian Kurds. Wikipedia may clarify it but anyone who claims expertise on Iran would know of the Kurdish insurrection in Iran weeks after the Islamic Revolution that installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran’s first Supreme Leader.
That bloody episode had a sequel when four Kurdish separatists were assassinated in a restaurant in Berlin in 1992. At least one of the four assassins was a member of Iranian intelligence. All four were convicted and remain incarcerated in German prisons. The trial heard the four had acted on the direct orders of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A day before Epstein’s awkward question, Tucker Carlson shamed Texas senator Ted Cruz for not knowing the population of Iran. In the wake of interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin last year, Carlson was bedazzled by Russian supermarket trolleys, similar to the coin-operated type used here in Australia at your local Aldi. Carlson regarded Russian shopping trolleys as a pinnacle of human achievement, so there’s no accounting for him. If Tucker Carlson is not a Russian asset, he does one hell of an impersonation of one.
With a Trump-imposed ceasefire holding for now, Carlson’s dire predictions of the imminent break out of World War III appear premature at best. How could he be so wrong when he was able to cite the Iranian population so adroitly? To be accurate, Carlson had rounded down and was a million or so out.
Alas, no wannabe expert on Iran can point to the current whereabouts of the country’s present Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. In reports across mainstream media, Iran’s Supreme Leader is said to have suspended all electronic communications, translated into contemporary idiom as “going off the grid”. What? Has Khamenei purchased a tiny house in a secluded lot near the Caspian Sea and now he, his bicycle and his loyal fox terrier are Instagramming their highs and lows to a global audience?
In all probability, the only people who do know where Khamenei is are Mossad agents.
The late, great journalist Mark Colvin was in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. One morning foreign journalists were herded onto buses and taken to a quarry outside the city. On arrival, they were ordered off the buses to survey a scene of human carnage. Thousands of bodies lay strewn on the ground, summarily executed by members of the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards. Colvin was not alone in thinking this would be his last day on Earth. The trigger happy guards held their fire. Instead, they ordered the journalists to record the grisly panorama.
“Take your photographs. Write your stories. Tell the world, this is who we are.”
If more information on the regime is needed, we may look to the work of American journalist Terence Smith who at the height of the Iran-Iraq War in 1984 chronicled Iran’s use of child soldiers. An estimated 550,000 primary and high school-aged kids were dragooned into battle on the promise of post-mortem paradise.
“The young boys were recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent into battle against Iraqi armour,” Smith reported.
“Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the faint-hearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi minefields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-coloured shirts is stencilled the slogan ‘I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven’.”
Smith observed later: “Iran seems a society possessed. Its soldiers at the front and its clerical leaders at home display a kind of zealotry in pursuit of their revolution that is hard for the Western mind to comprehend.”
One does not need any particular expertise on the demographics or ethnic make-up of the Islamic Republic of Iran to appreciate this is one of the worst regimes on the planet and must never have nuclear weapons at their disposal. Yet, many on the left, the usual suspects in our own backyard, opted to support Khamenei.
Greens defence spokesman David Shoebridge described the Australian government as complicit in the “escalation and violence” in the Middle East. He went further, calling for Australia to withdraw from AUKUS.
“At this moment, being silent when a bully like Donald Trump breaks international law and starts the United States’ third war in the region just this century, being silent is complicit.”
Thoughtful silence in a rapidly changing situation shows good judgment. Statements made in haste are bound to look foolish within hours, be they from right-wing isolationists like Carlson or addled-headed leftists like Shoebridge.
Regime change in Iran is desirable but it cannot be delivered by military force. The Pottery Barn rule of Western intervention in the Middle East remains in place. As secretary of state Colin Powell told president George W Bush in 2002: “Once you break it, you are going to own it, and we’re going to be responsible for 26 million people standing there looking at us. And it’s going to suck up a good 40 to 50 per cent of the Army for years. And it’s going to take all the oxygen out of the political environment.
There are 91.5 million people in Iran, by the way.
Finally, it was left to Trump to make sense of it all.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f..k they’re doing. Do you understand that?”
I did, and I think many people do.
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