Finally someone with a clue. Paul Sheehan of The Sydney Morning Herald nails it:
With the welcome news that David Hicks will soon be back in Australia and free by the end of the year, it is a good time to reassess the gravitational force that engulfed him, a force that is spreading wider and growing stronger. Nobody saw it coming. The revolution was unforseen and unheralded.
As usual, the Central Intelligence Agency did not see it coming. Nor did the secret services of the Middle East. Or the academic community, or the media. Not even those who espoused the revolution saw it coming until the day it arrived.
That day was January 16, 1979. There was no election, no war, no coup.
Suddenly, the most loyal client of the US in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, left the country his military and vast secret service could no longer control. He was soon replaced as national leader, by the sheer weight of popular will, by an old man living in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The great majority rejoiced at the fall of the shah. Even the revolutionary leftists who dominated dissent. Few in the intelligensia took these primitives seriously. Anti-American imperialism trumped everything.
The first sign of what was to come arrived within days of the mullahs and their followers taking control of government. Women were "invited" to wear the veil. Those who declined found themselves beaten and abused by the gangs of self-appointed revolutionary guards who roamed the streets.
The revolution reserved its most brutal behaviour for the universities.
Leftist students activists were murdered. Faculties were purged. Students expelled. Books banned. Women were constrained at every turn. They were penalised for talking to members of the opposite sex, for running in the corridors, for laughing, or wearing rouge, or allowing strands of hair to show, or wearing bright colours.
As for the revolutionary left, it was liquidated. "Criminals should not be tried," Khomeini declared when human rights organisations decried the wave of executions. "Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known they were criminals."
When the US embassy was spontaneously invaded and occupied by Islamic fundamentalists on November 1, 1979, it was soon adorned with the slogans that spoke the larger truth of the revolution, such as "This is not a struggle between the US and Iran, it is a struggle between Islam and blasphemy" and "The more we die, the stronger we become".
The Islamic Republic has never lost sight of the big picture. It has waged war against the Sunni in Iraq. For four years, it has been at war with the US via its proxies in Iraq. Last year it attacked Israel via its surrogates in Lebanon. It has helped destabilise Afghanistan. And it is acquiring nuclear capability.
The Islamic Republic does not lack certainty, constancy or confidence.
"The more we die, the stronger we become." Units of the Revolutionary Guards captured 15 British sailors and marines last week. When the British Government released satellite data showing the capture had taken place in Iraqi waters, the Iranians changed their version of events and have been broadcasting propaganda images of captured personnel on television.
The Government of Iran is a government of jihad. The revolution is ongoing, subsidised by oil revenue, even as the economy stagnates and disillusionment is widespread. A continuum of violent instability, centred on Iran, has spread through Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region of 300 million people, mostly Muslim. Within a decade, every one of the countries could have governments controlled by Islamic fundamentalists, and two of them, Pakistan and Iran, would have nuclear weapons.
The absolutist worldview of "Islam versus blasphemy" has proved seductive to millions of young Muslims on both sides of the Shiite-Sunni divide, as the governments of France, Britain, Germany, Holland, Spain and Denmark - home to 15 million Muslims - have discovered to their cost. What could not have been imagined before 1979 - that nations would revert to medievalism - came to pass in Iran, then Afghanistan, where the Taliban still controls part of the country.
And this is what the Taliban stands for: after taking power in 1996 it forbade women to work outside the home, or attend school, or have jobs, or leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. In public, they were to be covered in a full burqa with only a mesh opening for the eyes.
Women were not permitted to wear white - the colour of the Taliban flag - or white shoes, or shoes that made a noise as they walked. Buildings in public view had to have their windows painted over if females were present. Adultery was a capital offence. Music was banned. Beards were made compulsory and men were expected to wear them a certain length - the length of a clenched fist.
This was the regime that David Hicks embraced. He paid a high price.
The whole process of his incarceration and trial has been tainted by the failure of due process. Again and again, the Administration of President George Bush has managed to turn victory into defeat. While anger at insular US imperialism may be understandable, the fetish with US failures as the greatest of all problems echoes the complacency and moral relativism that the left has had about the Islamic revolution ever since it began in 1979. It proved fatal in Iran.
The seeds of this revolution do not lie in the excesses of US foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. These have been symptoms not causes. The roots of the revolution are far deeper and older than the events of the past 50 years, which is why it is proving both durable and implacable.
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ABF, for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran
