Thomas Erdbrink reports in the New York Times on Iranian presidential candidate Saeed Jalili. Mr. Jalili is a hardliner who is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He has been the chief nuclear negotiator for Iran. A veteran who lost a leg in the Iraq-Iran war, he campaigns under the banner of “the resistance.” This a new concept in the West, but it should inform how we view current events not only in Iran, but in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even the Occupied Territories of Palestine. If you want to know why Iraq and Syria are so embroiled in sectarian conflict and why it is so hard to find reason for hope, you need to understand “the resistance.”
“Welcome, living martyr, Jalili,” the audience shouted in unison, most of them too young to have witnessed the bloody conflict themselves but deeply immersed in the national veneration of its veterans. Waving flags belonging to “the resistance” — the military cooperation among Iran, Syria, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and some Palestinian groups — the crowd roared the candidate’s election slogan: “No compromise. No submission. Only Jalili.”
Iran is a Shia Islam theocracy with a bit of representative democracy thrown in. In the past, Iran has had some decent elections, but Ayatollah Khamenei and the Council of Guardians have been taking increasing control of the process in recent years. They control who can be on the ballot, and in 2009 they seem to have tampered with the actual counting of the vote. Jalili’s path to election was smoothed recently when former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s chosen successor were disqualified.
Jalili’s supporters see themselves as sectarian brawlers in a regional fight against Sunnis, but they frame themselves as champions of the oppressed. That is why they have the support of the Iranian leadership and clergy.
“The best president,” Mr. Khamenei said on Monday, speaking to students at a military academy, “is the one who powerfully resists the enemy and will turn the Islamic republic into an international example for the oppressed people of the world.”
Khameini is officially neutral, but that’s a charade. Jalili will advance his vision.
On Friday, during the campaign event in Tehran, Mr. Jalili chose to explain his policies by citing the first imam of the Shiites, the martyr Ali.
“All across the region we can hear our battle cry, ‘Ya Ali,’ ” said Mr. Jalili, who wrote a dissertation on the Prophet Muhammad’s foreign policy. “We heard it in Lebanon with the victory of Hezbollah. We hear it in our resistance against the Zionist regime. Time and time again we have proved our strength through this slogan.”
As songs played memorializing the battles in the border town of Shalamcheh during the Iran-Iraq war, men punched their fists in the air and shouted, “The blood in our veins belongs to our leader.”
The goal of Iran and its allies, Mr. Jalili said, is to “uproot capitalism, Zionism and Communism, and promote the discourse of pure Islam in the world.”
They talk about capitalism, Zionism, and Communism, but the actual fighting is taking place in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It’s primarily a fight between Sunnis and Shiites, with the Iranian leadership trying to take the moral high ground by framing it as resistance against outside oppressors and anti-Islamic ideologies.
If his supporters harbored worries over what these policies might mean for the Iranian economy, they kept them to themselves. “We are fighting an ideological war — nobody cares about the economy,” said Amir Qoroqchi, 25, a smiling electrical engineering student from the holy city of Qum. “The only thing that matters is resistance.”
Hizbollah is a Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary force that was basically built by the Iranians to resist the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. They humiliated Israel in a 2006 war, gaining them widespread support and admiration throughout the Muslim world. But they have just decided to make a total commitment to saving the Assad regime in Syria. This probably spells the beginning of a new civil war in Lebanon, as the Sunnis there will not sit on their hands.
Complicating matters, many if not most of the Sunni fighters in Syria and Iraq are just as infused with sectarian religious fervor and anti-Western ideology as the Iranian-backed soldiers. Many of them identify with the goals of al-Qaeda.
This is the shape of the mess that Sen. John McCain is so eager for our country to jump into. In Iran, this is seen as one big regional battle. Syria is just one part of it. It’s a fight for one version of Islam over another, and a fight against the West.
It is not a fight that we can enter casually, thinking that it will soon be over and we can come home. Two hundred and sixty years elapsed between the time that Martin Luther published his 95 theses and when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. People can fight over religion for a very long time before they get exhausted.
