Tomorrow’s presidential elections in Iran will prompt a predictable chorus of criticism from many officials and lobbying groups throughout the United States.
Tomorrow’s presidential elections in Iran will prompt a predictable chorus of criticism from many officials and lobby groups throughout the United States. The elections, they will point out, are a sham intended to give a cloak of respectability to what we all know is just a tyranny. What the Iranian people need, their argument will continue, is a change of regime, sponsored by the United States, that will bring them democracy and open a new chapter on human rights.
But to argue that the United States should try to destabilize the present order in Iran and help introduce new democratic rule reveals a curious irony that reveals much about contemporary values. For while there are numerous voiced urging the Bush administration to institute regime change in Iran, there are no comparable calls demanding regime change in another part of the world where it could be much more easily be executed, and where there is a much stronger humanitarian case for doing so. That part of the world is Africa.
‘Regime change’ in Iran would be formidably difficult to carry out. Military attacks could prompt massive retaliation, particularly by the Shia population in Iraq, while any campaign of political destabilization is rendered near impossible by the almost complete absence of any organized opposition within the country and the strength of the Iranian security services. And while there is of course a strong humanitarian case for introducing accountable, democratic rule, there is no suffering on the massive, genocidal scale that is often said to have justified foreign intervention in, say, Rwanda or — more contentiously — Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Contrast Africa. Millions are starving to death because of the rule of corrupt and often cruel dictatorships that know much more about torture and brutality than anything about good government. Western aid has created millionaires while leaving ordinary people starving, and the deep, underlying problems behind such suffering — such as massive, unsustainable population growth — wholly untouched. It is no coincidence that the most economically successful African country — Botswana — is also the most democratic, its governors held to account by the people should they squander the country’s resources.
Regime change can also be much more easily instituted in Africa than Iran. While the Iranian mullahs are reaping handsome rewards borne of the hitch in oil prices, African dictators have long been dependent on Western aid. So instead of just writing off their debt, why not make its elimination conditional upon political reform? Such a simple step would give ordinary Africans a longer-term future, instead of just the short-term fix granted by a simple waiving of debts.
How ironic, then, that no one seems to be calling for regime change in Africa but clamoring for it in Iran. Why the difference?
The obvious difference is that African countries are not developing nuclear weapons that are said to pose an “imminent danger” to our own safety. But this is not a convincing answer because a nuclear threat isn’t the only reason why people call for ‘regime change:’ the case for toppling Milosevic, for example, was made on humanitarian grounds.
Others might point out that Iran has oil. Vast amounts of it. Change the regime in Tehran and the United States gains control. But again this is not a convincing reason why so many people are calling for regime change in Iran, but so few for Africa. Most African countries, after all, have vast natural resources, and many of those who genuinely care about the fate of the starving African millions would in any case genuinely abhor the idea of plundering them.
The real reason is rather different. The truth is that it is politically unacceptable for many people to even consider interfering in the domestic affairs of black Africa: Black Africans are quite capable of ruling themselves, we might almost be saying, and we merely insult their dignity by saying otherwise. Humanitarian disaster in African countries is the West’s fault, not their own, because we have not been generous enough by granting billions of dollars worth of aid and loans. We should be blaming ourselves, not pointing the finger at Africa. This is nothing but the post-colonial guilt complex at work once again.
The Iranians, of course, do not have black skins. So no one feels ashamed by arguing that the outside world can poke its nose in their business and sponsor regime change. There are no racial inhibitions at work there.
During the Angolan civil war, the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi once bemoaned the lack of Western interest in his own struggle and contrasted it with the strength of foreign support for the liberation movement against apartheid in South Africa: the difference, he pointed out, was simply that his own fight was a black African civil war, not a struggle against the white man. Perhaps the Iranians should heed his words and paint their faces black if they want to stifle cries for ‘regime change.’
Roger Howard is the author of Iran in Crisis? Nuclear Ambitions and the American Response.
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