Exporting tulips to Europe
Who do you want to win? And do you know why?
The World Cup is always an event that brings even non-football-fans out in their droves. Here in Belgium, folk festoon their cars with tridents and little devils (we are the Red Devils) and many a house in our suburban street is flying the Belgian national flag. People will buy in a crate of Jupiler beer, huddle down in front of the box and cheer on the Reds. Most of them probably took but scant interest in the initial rounds of this tournament and, when the Cup is over and done, they’ll likely forget the whole thing ever happened.
So, who are you egging on to win? The United States? What do you mean, they’re out? I’m not talking about football now. I’m talking about the war. You want America and Israel to win? Or Iran? Or perhaps your own country? How will you know that your country won, regardless of who wins this conflict? How will we even know that anyone won anyway?
Just like with the football, most of us will somewhere have a gut reaction: rooting for Iran, or rooting for Israel or for the States. Maybe you work in oil and want to be able to get back to Dubai. Maybe you’re horrified at the price of gasoline in your own home town. Maybe you just wish all the killing could stop. Perhaps you really don’t care, and, if you don’t, then that’s fine. Horses to water, and all that, but this conflict may yet be one to which we are all drawn as to water, and at which we will all ultimately need to drink.
Suppose you’re against Israel, because it is conducting a genocide against Palestine; or suppose you’re against Iran, because you know they do not respect women’s or gay rights; or suppose you’re anti-Trump and want to see him lapping up a goodly serving of humble pie. Who do you root for? Are you confused now that the fighting has re-started owing to sneaky manoeuvres by the U.S. navy in cahoots with, of all people, the Omanis, with whom Iran was supposed to be arranging joint hegemony over the Strait of Hormuz? Did the Sultan switch sides? He certainly got put under pressure. Did the silver tongue Trump deployed so effectively with Gianni Infantino also lick the ear of bin Tariq? The Omani cooperation does have a relevance akin to that of Balogun’s red card, to some extent. I wonder whether Oman’s switched favours will backfire as spectacularly as the red card caper did?
Whoever wins this World Cup will hoist the trophy high, having been proffered it by Donald Trump himself. I get the feeling that Mr Trump would really rather be the one hoisting it on high: he has such a penchant for victory. But he may yet get a trophy of his own if he vanquishes Iran, who knows? One difference is that the consequences for the beer-swilling TV-addicts of the world tuning in for a little surrogate excitement will, the next day, return to their daily jobs and routines. I wonder if everyone realises that the consequences of victory in the Persian Gulf can less easily be packed away for the next four years: depending on whose victory it is, the consequences could be with us for a very long time yet to come. So, while you may not particularly have studied the form of the 1,200-odd footballers taking part in the World Cup, it would do you no harm to gen up on the somewhat fewer personalities who have a major say in the conduct of the Persian Gulf War. And to reflect a little on what the conflict actually means beyond the petrol pump.
Here is some background reading material, and further down below I link in a video of Alastair Crooke, an expert on the Middle East, in conversation with Iranian commentator Nima Alkhorshid.
https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Islamist-Revolution-Alastair-Crooke/dp/0745328857
https://assets.carnegieendowment.org/static/files/files__sadjadpour_iran_final2.pdf
There are a number of things to mull over when one tries to get a handle on the Iranian republic. Republic itself is a contentious word, when we realise that Iran has had but three supreme leaders since 1979, and Karim Sadjapour’s pamphlet, above, gives an interesting angle on what he sees Iran as really being in terms of autocracy/democracy. What I personally have found in reading Crooke’s book is that thinking about Iran doesn’t, as one might assume, entail reading information about it, and assimilating stories from history, to then reach some conclusion based on the armchair from which I never moved whilst reading those materials. Iran requires you to rise from your armchair and seek out another seat from which to view the room. The room itself does not change, but we are creatures of habit, and we always gravitate to the same easy chair when we enter it. We must now uproot our ways of thinking and our attitudes to the trite notions we trot out so easily: democracy, autocracy, control, patriarchy, freedom, rights, obligations, duty, commitment, loyalty, oppression (did I say “freedom”?), redistribution, richness (not wealth) restraint, self-discipline, love, and the rest—the meaning of life must be in there somewhere. For example, is it justifiable for a government, be it in Tehran or in London, to sacrifice some of its citizens’ lives for the sake of entrenching a nationalism and a social paradigm that is vaunted as desirable? Does admitting one or another system of government is flawed, but nevertheless vaunting its positive aspects, reduce simply to apologetics? What difference is there between vaunting positive traits and then qualifying them with reservations, and damning a system’s negative traits, only then to balance that with the positive ones? Rhetorical technique is the one difference I can discern, but aside from that, there is none.
With football, all that even the most-versed of pundits can do is to look on from the sidelines and cheer when the positive aspects are displayed for all to see, and grumble at the missed chances, and the hand-of-God flukes. But, in the changes that are going to start sweeping the world in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and its Strait of Hormuz Conflict, we ourselves will be no less passive observers. Root and egg all you will, your ability to change matters in and on the field will remain zero. So what of it? What difference does it make. What difference does either make?
The difference it makes is that the Iranian Revolution was not a political revolution, for all it removed an emperor and imposed a supreme leader. In nearly half a century, the west has hardly been able to get its mind around that simple fact. If Iran wins this war, regardless of what winning will look like in your eyes, it will not—at least not entirely—have been a political victory. The good thing about political victories is that they don’t really concern us. What concerns us politically is Nigel Farage’s sleaze, or proportional representation, or whether Switzerland has more than 10 million inhabitants. Those are matters of political importance.
The Russo-Ukrainian War is of political importance. It will determine whether my country goes to war in the next twenty years. With Russia. I’m learning Russian in case it does. If Russia had won its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I think I can say with certainty that hundreds of thousands of people, civilians and combatants alike, who are now dead would still be alive. What I cannot say with anything like that certainty is whether life today in Ukraine would be any different if the Russians had already taken it over. But victory in the Persian Gulf will not be simply a political victory. It will be a spiritual victory, the same way that the Iranian Revolution wasn’t political, but spiritual. And that means it will affect us. Or rather it will have the potential to affect us to the degree that we accord it welcome into our hearts and minds. Because the state into which the world of the aggressor parties to the Persian Gulf War are inexorably dragging us is one to which a good many of us are starting to cast our eyes about us in search of a remedy. Of course, if labels entrance you and if you are one of those who never leave home without a pin of allegiance in their lapel, or who fly the Belgian tricouleur on World Cup match days, and rally behind slogans and the divisions they create, then a spiritual enlightenment is likely to pass you by unnoticed, because you will resist it. I do not castigate you for that. There is security and certainty in pigeonholes. For pigeons, at least, there is. But, then again, there is only one view of the world from the inside of a dovecot.
What difference did it make whether Adam bit into Eve’s apple or not? Even supposing it occurred, the tumultuous effects that that first bite in that first apple have had over many hundreds of thousands of years are still being felt today. And there are those who see the redrawing of the map of the Middle East as being of like titanic importance.
Different from the World Cup, but in some way similar to Adam and Eve, is how we as observers regard the Persian Gulf War. It is not a conflict in which we will see a clear-cut result that can be noted and filed away as we return to our normal routines. That much is different from football. But it is a conflict that will throw up notions and ideas and changes of seating in the room, which we can either benefit from by reading that room, and understanding the changes that are taking place, and understanding why they are taking place, and understanding how we can embrace them; and that will need us to take another view of them, just as comprehending Adam and Eve means looking beyond a simple bite into an apple.
I recommend the following exchange between Crooke and Alkhorshid. Crooke occasionally needs to search for his words and syntax, so I generally play these films at 1.25 speed, and you may like to as well. That said, Crooke’s words are well worth the listening-to, and in this conversation he touches on a number of the issues I wanted to raise here: on the spiritual effects that Iran is having on the Middle East as a region, and indeed on people across the world who are seeking moral leadership in times that are proving bereft of it. That part is to be found from the very start of the video. And, at 41’30”, Crooke mentions China’s potential role in reframing the Iranian economy to produce what people need. And that is an idea that attracts me like no other with its childlike simplicity in our modern age. And not, as he bluntly puts it, “Exporting tulips to Europe.”
Whatever you know and think about football, and whoever you’re wanting to win this World Cup, remember: the victor in the Persian Gulf will ultimately have a far greater effect on your gas bill, and may even change the very nature of how you view life in its global entirety.
Did you know that the Amish in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County play the parlour game musical chairs without any music? Changing perspectives doesn’t always mean changing the result. Like a film director who goes for the overhead shot instead of the close-up. The scene is the same; it’s just the viewing angle that changes, and changing a viewing angle makes us see a scene in a different light, or understand it differently. Here’s a story you’ve maybe heard before.
A rich businessman happens to pass by a pier down at the quayside, where he sees a fisherman lying in a deck chair on the dock, sunning himself and taking a snooze. The businessman kicks the leg of the fisherman’s chair and gruffly asks him, “Here, you. Why are you not working, my good man?” The fisherman squints up at the businessman from beneath the peak of his cap and replies, “Because I have caught enough fish for today.” “Yes,” replies the businessman, “but if you pushed your boat out again, you still have time to catch some more.” “What would I do with them?” asks the fisherman. “Why, you would sell them on the market and make money, so that you could buy a bigger boat and employ other men to help you trawl the seas for greater and greater quantities of fish. You could accumulate great stocks of wealth, make vast amounts of money, catch huge numbers of fish!”
“And then what would I do?” asks the fisherman.
A flush of conceit crosses the businessman’s face as he hooks his thumbs into the watch pockets of his waistcoat: “Then, you could sit back … and enjoy life!”
The fisherman jams the peak of his cap a little lower over his forehead, settles himself back into his deck chair, and replies, “What do you think I am doing now?”