Deny and Be Damned

DENIAL IS WHAT LINKS the three wars that rage today, with the world more than ever divided over strategic as well as moral costs. Begin with Vladimir Putin’s denial. Leaning on a history custom-made for an autocrat still floating in memory’s last remains of the imperium, he denies Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent country. He sent tanks and seized territory to correct the errors of post-Soviet division of the empire. It’s a war that he alone can stop but he won’t because it’s denial that powers his resentful nationalism—and out there nobody is seriously working to stop him, despite flashes of statesmanship from a beleaguered Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron. In Denial No 2, Hamas in a genocidal mission crossed the border of a country it recognised only as a cruel anomaly of history on October7, 2023, to inflict on the Jews the biggest horror after the Holocaust, starting off the Israeli war in Gaza. It shows no signs of ending, and it has gone beyond its initial aim to become a huge humanitarian crisis.

The war on Iran, too, is prompted by the politics of denial—or the theology of denial. For the Islamic Republic, its own survival is inseparable from the eradication of an entity that should not have been there in the first place. The idea of the ever-vigilant enemy has always provided the necessary thrust to revolutions. If there was none, they invented one out of paranoia, one that was kept alive by fear. The Great Islamic Revolution needed, in its inversion of history and the promise of pre-modern bliss, in the beginning, the Great Satan that was America as a war cry. Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution was not just a project in the restoration of God after the profanity of the Shah’s reign. It was the deployment of divine rage against the Satanic states, and the most prominent among them is Israel. Iran’s proxies in the Middle East—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—are all involved in the warfare of denial. If Gaza today is a humanitarian hell, its origin could be traced back to the Iranian enterprise in the war of denial, waged by proxies.

The latest Israeli attack on Iran—a series of targeted bombings and high-profile assassinations—is a defence against the Islamic Republic’s lethal denial doctrine. No other country has been engaged in this kind of existential war since its inception, and for Israel, it will end only when the country dismantles the weaponry of denial, which is somewhere deep within the recesses of the mountainous Fordo in Iran. There is no other raison d’être than Israel for Iran’s clandestine nuclear programme, and Tehran has consistently shown that it has no honest intention to reach a deal. A non-nuclear Iran alone will let Israel breathe peacefully. The war on Iran won’t have a logical conclusion without the denuclearisation of a regime that believes, even in these hours of humiliation and devastation, that the Islamic Revolution, sustained at home by repression, needs an extraterritorial enemy, preferably one in mortal fear. When a nation’s identity is reduced to merely someone’s enemy, no matter how this image is multiplied on the streets and campuses of the West, a limited war of defence is its last attempt at peace.

Still, the war of perception is usually won by the victim. The power of victimhood is maintained by the force of storytelling and the history of the so-called imperial conniving. It is the legacy of the much-romanticised Palestinian struggle, a dash of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and Edward Said’s sophistry thrown in, that has allowed Hamas to win the streets beyond Gaza. Add to this the stigma of Islamophobia and any genuine discussion of radical Islam and its terror campaign becomes impossible. At its propagandist best, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was cultural renewal from below, a scriptural rejoinder to the decadence of modernity. It needed more than the Book to keep the flame. Like any other revolution, it too needed the protection of prisons and the silence of conscience to extend its life. It was threatened by imagination and challenged by women and the young. The more the Ayatollah realised that he was sitting on an exhausted revolution, the more desperate he became as a repressive cleric. When revolutions unravel, the supreme leader seeks to mobilise a people with the spectre of endangered nation and the looming enemy. A nuclear arsenal, for such a leader with hardly any emotional relationship with the people, gives the revolution another day in its fight against the enemy, in its perpetuation of the terror of denial. Should the last apostle of a lost revolution be afforded such a luxury?

AmericaAyatollah Ali KhameneigeopoliticsIranian RevolutionIsrael-Iran conflictMahmoud Darwish