By Pepe Escobar
January 20,
2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The US targeted
assassination, via drone strike, of Maj.
Gen. Qassem Soleimani, apart from a torrent
of crucial geopolitical ramifications, once
again propels to center stage a quite
inconvenient truth: the congenital
incapacity of so-called US elites to even
attempt to understand Shi’ism – thus 24/7
demonization, demeaning not only Shi’as by
also Shi’a-led governments.
Washington had been
deploying a Long War even before the concept
was popularized by the Pentagon in 2001,
immediately after 9/11: it’s a Long War
against Iran. It started via the coup
against the democratically elected
government of Mosaddegh in 1953, replaced by
the Shah’s dictatorship. The whole process
was turbo-charged over 40 years ago when the
Islamic Revolution smashed those good old
Cold War days when the Shah reigned as the
privileged American “gendarme of the
(Persian) Gulf”.
Yet this extends far
beyond geopolitics. There is absolutely no
way whatsoever for anyone to be capable of
grasping the complexities and popular appeal
of Shi’ism without some serious academic
research, complemented with visits to
selected sacred sites across Southwest Asia:
Najaf, Karbala, Mashhad, Qom and the Sayyida
Zeinab shrine near Damascus. Personally, I
have traveled this road of knowledge since
the late 1990s – and I still remain just a
humble student.
In the spirit of a
first approach – to start an informed
East-West debate on a crucial cultural issue
totally sidelined in the West or drowned by
tsunamis of propaganda, I initially asked
three outstanding scholars for their first
impressions.
