There is a new leader: a conservative fundamentalist who has faked a populist image to take advantage of poor and uneducated people who are, ultimately, going against their own best interests by voting for him. I'm not describing our own 2004 presidential election; I am describing the recent election in Iran.
Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the ultraconservative president-elect of Iran, managed to defeat his moderate opponent, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, in part by portraying himself as a champion of the poor while portraying Rafsanjani as an elitist. But there is something else, too.
"Tell Bush that each ballot cast in favor of Ahmadinejad was a ballot cast in his eye," Tehran resident Muhammad Abdullah told New York Times reporter Michael Slackman. Maybe that's why there was such a huge turnout in favor of an extremist: The people of Iran are angry at us -- not necessarily the American people, but the United States itself. Though the chants of "Death to America" during the hostage crisis still resonate today, it seems that the Bush Administration's hostility toward Iran is what is currently peeving the people there.
What happened in Iran points to a lesson we have yet to learn. Fifty-two years ago, we decided to tell the Iranians how things should be done by engineering the overthrow of their democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and replacing his socialist government with the brutal dictatorship of the Shah. What resulted from that was general disgruntlement that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
From my own experience, people in China feel the same way as the Iranians. While generally liking Americans, most people there don't really appreciate it when we start criticizing their government and their political system. This is not to say that they don't want democratic reforms and increased civil liberties, or that they are oblivious to problems in their country. They just don't like it when we start telling them that their system is wrong, as though we are somehow the arbiters of democracy for the rest of the world.
To this day, however, we still are unable to foresee the prices of imperialist arrogance or recognize problems we helped to create for what they are. President Bush honestly believed that we would simply walk into Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein and watch the oil flow while the people lived in democratic bliss. Even according to the Downing Street Memo, however, he didn't bother to consider that Iraq would instead become a virtual holiday destination for terrorists.
According to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, Europeans and even Canadians disproportionately view China with more favor than the United States. What this, along with the Iranian elections, demonstrates is that we are experiencing a backlash. Rather than being viewed as a beacon of democracy, we are viewed abroad as an arrogant playground bully arbitrarily deciding who gets to keep their sovereignty and who doesn't.
Contrary to Bush's asinine claim that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks happened because the terrorists "hate our freedom," it happened because the people who join organizations such as al-Qaeda are tired of our arrogance with regard to the rest of the world -- and the Middle East, in particular.
As long as we keep attempting to dictate policy to the rest of the world, whether at gunpoint or on the floor of the U.N. Security Council, the rest of the world will continue to view us with contempt.
Perhaps America should stop meddling with other countries' affairs; that's something to consider before lighting off your fireworks on Monday.
Write to Alaric at
ajdearment@bsu.edu
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