MULLAH'S PRIDE. posted by Richard Seymour

It is of course highly amusing to see the American right flapping themselves silly about the Iranian struggle against theocracy. Some of us have been supporting this struggle for years.

When Salman Rushdie was targetted by an Islamic theocrat for assassination because he committed the heinous crime of writing a work of fiction, George Bush senior was asked on the day for his thoughts.

He replied that he couldn't see how any American interest was involved. Christopher Hitchens records Susan Sontag as "making the rather clever reply, 'Well, Mr President, we would make ourselves contemptible if we said that Mr Rushdie's wife is an American and she has also had to go into hiding. But perhaps we might say a word or two about the general interest of the West in preventing death threats being issued by theocrats for the writing of fiction'".

Bush could have condemned this assault on freedom. But then the Republican Party, not withstanding the braying of neocons, has a history of back-door friendship with the Mullahs.

That the rhetoric is now moving toward supporting freedom for Iranians is of course welcome. The utterly blinding and shameless hypocrisy over nuclear weapons is not so welcome. The absurdity of America telling another country off for developing nuclear weapons can hardly be missed. This may have been one reason why the US has failed to persuade the International Atomic Energy Authority to censure Iran for its activities. And of course, Iran has learned a valuable lesson from the Iraq war. States which are defenseless can be attacked at will, with the most flimsy pretexts and virtually no international support. Iraq's subjection to years of inspections rendered it defenseless, defanged in the face of an awesome assault by the world's largest super-power. The lesson has been learned. Get nukes, or get a new country.

Naturally, one wants to see the thermonuclear state permanently eradicated, but that has to start at home, with the most egregious offenders.

And the US government will probably not welcome the fact that those protests which they claim now to support began as protests against privatisation - in the case of the students, privatisation of universities and the introduction of tuition fees. We British students (I begin studies again in September) have much in common with the Iranian students on this matter, as it happens.

So, while the American government may look on with some trepidation and hope at radical demonstrators in Iran, pay tribute to the students who in America would probably have been tear-gassed and vilified in the press, and talk tough on nuclear weapons while themselves being in the possession of the most dangerous nuclear arsenal in the world, we on the Left can say without equivocation that we have always supported the pro-democracy movement in Iran and have done so without hypocritical platitudes and without having done deals with Mullahs.

Still, what the Bush policy lacks in lucidity, it more than makes up for in ludicity. It is a game, Brzezinski's grand chess board. The Bush administration's support for these demonstrators resembles nothing if not the white king cheering on the advance of the black pawns, hoping to coopt or obliterate them.

Images are worth a thousand words (well, two hundred of mine), and some of them show that the temporary indulgence of an Empire usually ends in catastrophe .