{"id":26110,"date":"2013-02-27T08:26:17","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T04:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=26110"},"modified":"2013-02-27T08:26:38","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T04:26:38","slug":"the-problem-with-argo-an-orientalist-viewpoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/the-problem-with-argo-an-orientalist-viewpoint\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem With ‘Argo’: An Orientalist Viewpoint"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"argo2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The taking of US diplomatic personnel hostage by radical Iranian activists and angry crowds in November of 1979, and then the backing for this action of the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was profoundly illegal. I know some of the former hostages, and deeply sympathize with their trauma. Nothing justifies what was done to them.<\/p>\n

But Ben Affleck\u2019s otherwise fine, Oscar-winning film, \u201cArgo,\u201d about the escape of some US embassy personnel, functions as American propaganda and a sort of neo-Orientalism. That it was based on a memoir of the incident by a former Central Intelligence Agency operative involved in the rescue is part of the problem. That memoir is a primary source and valuable, but good history, and good story-telling about history, weights sources and tries to correct for their biases. \u201cArgo\u201d does not. Some of the\u00a0Iranian objections to the film are equally grounded in propaganda concerns<\/a>, but some are legitimate.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just that the memoir\u00a0slights the massive contribution of the Canadian embassy and Canadian diplomats to the mission and plays up the relatively minor CIA role.<\/a>\u00a0(Virtually every good idea that contributed to the success of the rescue came from Canada, but somehow American movie audiences insist that it all has to be about us.) Nor that\u00a0Britain\u2019s important role is denied and even denigrated<\/a>\u00a0Nor is my main objection that a whole series of exciting events are invented that never occurred. It is that the entire context for these events is virtually absent and the Iranian characters are depicted as full of mindless rage.<\/p>\n

Although the film begins with an info-dump that explains that the\u00a0US screwed over Iran by having the CIA overthrow the elected government in 1953 and then helped impose a royal dictatorship<\/a>\u00a0in the form of the restored shah, that part of the film is emotionally flat. It tells, it doesn\u2019t show. It is tacked on. It does not intersect with the subsequent film in any significant way. It therefore has no emotional weight and does little to contextualize the Iranian characters (none of whose names I think we even learn).<\/p>\n

Former hostage and superb American diplomatic\u00a0John Limbert makes the same point in Foreign Policy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cArgo highlights the negative attitudes that the two countries have held toward each other for decades. Its brief introduction attempts to provide historical context behind the embassy takeover, but the film does not convey the prevailing Iranian sense of grievance \u2014 real or imagined \u2014 that led to the 1979 attack, and to the emotional response in the streets of Tehran . . . More than three decades later, the same atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust, and festering wounds dominates Iranian-American relations.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You could have had Iranian characters angry that the American-backed Shah or king, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, had\u00a0arbitrarily imprisoned them or their friends among the dissidents,\u00a0<\/a>and had subjected both intellectuals and members of openly revolutionary groups to torture and murder in prison. That would not in any way have justified what was done to Foreign Service Officers of the State Department, but it would have humanized the Iranian villains of the piece and made the film more complex and less like a comic book.<\/p>\n

\u201cArgo\u201d could have been a moment when Americans come to terms with their Cold War role as villains in places like Iran. It could have been a film about what intelligence analysts call \u201cblowback,\u201d when a covert operation goes awry. Instead it plays into a \u2018war on terror\u2019 narrative of innocent Americans victimized by essentially deranged foreign mobs.<\/p>\n

Muhammad Sahimi writes<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201d Mehdi Rezaei, an MKO member, was arrested in April 1972 and executed that September at the age of 20, after enduring horrific torture. Ali Asghar Badizadegan, one of the MKO\u2019s founders, was forced into an electric oven according to his comrade Lotfollah Meysami. He was burned so badly that he became paralyzed, and the SAVAK refused to turn over his body after he was executed in May 1972. As Ali Gheissari writes in Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century, under Sabeti the Committee was also \u201cresponsible for the arbitrary detention, interrogation, and torture of many university students during that period.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Shah\u2019s feared secret police, and his entire repressive regime, did not function completely on their own. They had been installed by the US in cooperation with far rightwing Iranian generals and the Iranian equivalent of billionaires, and SAVAK and the regime continued to have close links to the CIA. It is alleged that some of the torture techniques used by the Shah\u2019s SAVAK were taught to them by the CIA. And, it is further\u00a0alleged that the CIA itself had front groups on and was active in spying on Iranian campuses, in parallel to operations such as COINTELPRO in the US<\/a>. The anti-Shah Iranian students piecing together shredded US embassy cables in Tehran weren\u2019t looking for photos of the escaped diplomats, as \u201cArgo\u201d implies. (There was no last-minute identification of them or car chase on the tarmac\u2013 that was all made up). They were looking for evidence of the ways the intelligence officials under cover at the embassy had been monitoring them and their friends and putting them in torture cells.<\/p>\n

Such spying on Iranian dissidents was a very minor part of what US intelligence was doing in Iran at that time\u2013 allegedly only three field officers even knew Persian. Mostly they were using Iran as a listening base to spy on the Soviet Union. But keeping Iran subservient and docile was key for Washington to remaining able to deploy its petroleum for Western economic success versus the Warsaw Pact and Communist China, and to being able to use Iran for monitoring the USSR. Hence, some resources were also devoted to repressing critics of the shah. And while liasing with SAVAK to arrest intellectuals and dissidents may have been a subsidiary effort for the Agency, for those whose lives were ruined by the Shah\u2019s apparatus of repression, it rather bulked large.<\/p>\n

The US embassy personnel taken captive were not responsible for the Shah and what he did to the Iranian people, but the US government did whatever it could to back the Shah and protect him from international criticism.<\/p>\n

The Iranian crowds are depicted in the film as irrational mobs. The Revolutionary Guards at the airport are depicted as angry puritans, worried about\u00a0Marvel artist Jack Kirby\u2019s somewhat salacious storyboards for the proposed \u201cLord of Light\u201d film that the CIA optioned for the operation<\/a>(based on a novel by Roger Zelazny). No Iranian character in the film who has a legitimate grievance against US policy is permitted to be sympathetic or to have any intimate moments that would humanize him or her.<\/p>\n

The film tells but doesn\u2019t show some of the US atrocities in Iran. It\u00a0shows<\/b>\u00a0the plight of the hapless US diplomats. In making that key dramatic decision, and then in Orientalizing the Iranian protagonists as angry and irrational, the film betrays its subject matter and becomes propaganda, lacking true moral or emotional ambiguity. Roger Zelazny\u2019s and Jack Kirby\u2019s \u201cLord of Light\u201d would have been more nuanced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JUAN COLE: The Iranian ‘baddies’ come from a very old school of stock Middle Eastern characters. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to show why they were angry? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":26113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,56,692,482,5,135],"tags":[1209,16744,3182,18306,16521,16740,18286,16742,16741,16743,18302,2736],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26110"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26118,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26110\/revisions\/26118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}