View of Tehran is skewed

Iran, and the Middle East as a whole, has always been a target for the West.

Iran under its current government might not meet the Western definition of a democracy, but it cannot be described as authoritarian or totalitarian either. It distributes power neatly between religious and political institutions and this power is not absolute. Nevertheless, the Western media have depicted the government, particularly since this month's disputed elections, as a ruthless dictatorship that commits major crimes against its own people. To justify this claim, the media have resorted to demonising the enemy, reducing the problem to the nature of one person - Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

This approach is by no means limited to Iran or to Khamenei. The Middle East has long been accustomed to treatment of this sort from Western governments and the media. Jamal Abdul Nasser, Yasser Arafat and more recently Saddam Hussain were all cast as merciless foes. Iranians would perhaps most remember their leader Mohammad Mossadeq as a victim of this policy.

The rise of Mossadeq, an ardent anti-British Iranian nationalist, to power in the early 1950s was seen as a very negative development in Western capitals. To discredit the man before the international community, he was demonised by the media, academia and in political circles. He was depicted as an irresponsible and childish lunatic. A key proponent of this argument was Thomas Schelling, a leading Harvard professor, who saw Mossadeq as a child best treated by child psychology. Schelling drew this conclusion by way of developing a theory of deterrence, which required, according to him, two conditions to help make it work. The first requirement is two rational actors capable of communicating their intentions and making a balance of costs and gains. The second is that credible threats must be made that would eventually deter rational actors from taking certain actions.

Schelling wrote: "Recall the trouble we had persuading Mossadeq that he might do his country irreparable damage if he did not become more reasonable. Threats did not get through to him very well. He wore pyjamas, and wept. And when British and American diplomats tried to explain what would happen to his country if he continued to be obstinate & it was apparently uncertain whether he even comprehended what was being said to him. It must have been a little like trying to persuade a new puppy that you will beat him to death if he wets on the floor. If he cannot hear you, or cannot understand you, or cannot control himself, the threat cannot work and you very likely will not even make it".

This opinion was not limited to academic circles but was shared by key policymakers. George McGhee, assistant secretary of state for near Eastern affairs in the Truman administration, dealt with Mossadeq when he was mediating a deal between Britain and Iran over the future of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which Mossadeq had earlier nationalised.

McGhee wrote describing his meeting with the Iranian leader: "Over the hours of our conversation Mossadeq displayed a startling naivety about economics and business generally, not just the oil business. The question of price took an interesting turn, Mossadeq agreed to a small reduction in the sales price for Iranian oil, which was then approximately $1.75 a barrel ... He baulked at the $1.10 a barrel price [secretary of state Dean] Acheson and I proposed & We explained that it was the difference between selling retail and wholesale. He was finally persuaded by Acheson's explanation of the difference between the price he got for beef on the hoof at his Maryland farm and the price in the butcher shop in Baltimore."

Acheson drew much the same conclusion. He wrote: "From the first moment I saw him, Mossadeq became for me the character Lob in James Barrie's play Dear Brutus. He was small and frail with not a shred of hair on his billiard-ball head. His whole manner and appearance was birdlike, marked by quick, nervous movements as he seemed to jump about on a perch & He had, I discovered later, a delightfully childlike way of sitting in a chair with his legs tucked under him, making him more of a Lob character than ever & He was a great actor and a great gambler. Speaking in the Majlis, he would rant, weep real tears, and fall in a faint at his climactic moment."

The current Iranian government was not the first to be demonised by the West - it won't be the last, either.

Dr Marwan Al Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations at the faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.