The Hidden Calculations Behind The Attack On Salman Rushdie

Mixed into the swell of outrage over the heinous knife attack on Salman Rushdie were questions about the alleged attacker. Was he a self-motivated lone fanatic or part of a plan elaborately conceived by dark forces stretching back to Iran. Investigators quickly revealed that he had been in contact with Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy militia in Lebanon. The DaiDAI
ly Mail soon carried an interview with his mother generating, in the usual way, more mystery than clarity. According to her, in 2018 her son had gone to visit his father in Lebanon for a month, disappeared for long periods while there, and returned to the US a changed man. He took to living in the basement, isolated and avoiding contact with his family. He had become ultra-religious but inscrutable and unapproachable. In a recent New York Post interview from jail, the alleged perp very deliberately avoided commenting on Iran or Hezbollah other than to say he admired the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Iran quickly, and rather predictably, denied any immediate link to the attack, though it seems the original Khomeini fatwa against Rushdie for authoring his book The Satanic Verses had been revived at least as recently as 2019. After all, why now? Why would Iran wish to risk screwing up the impending nuclear deal aka the JCPOA, suspended under Donald Trump and revived via the EU under President Biden? And, if so, why would Tehran sabotage it in this indirect fashion? Why even bother to assault Rushdie if you want to scuttle the renewed negotiations? Why not just walk away, fulminating loudly about the West’s diabolical machinations as the Mullahs usually do? Granted they did emit a chorus of defiance pointing the blame back at Rushdie ‘and his supporters’. But that didn’t stop Tehran from responding formally to the EU’s overture in the current nuclear negotiations.

Let us tease away at what we know of present context and past history to see if there’s any path through the fog of confusion – and any brewing geopolitical implications that, as ever, nobody has broached. Here is a meticulous and highly informative report in the invaluable publication New Lines about the fatwa and the factions in Iran for and against its execution. Titled “Iran Fatwa: The Meaning of the Attack on Salman Rushdie” it comes to this conclusion early on: “What is already clear, regardless of the details that will surface in the months to come, is that the Iranian regime is as implicated now as it was in 1989 when the fatwa was issued.” The article’s central point is that, yes, the regime was behind the murder attempt and, yes, the timing was highly intentional exactly because of its self-defeating nature. To sabotage anything that leads to normalization of relations with other countries denotes even greater purity of purpose, a sort national martyrdom, and plus the resulting isolation empowers the regime internally.

All true and persuasive – but ultimately not convincing. Simply because the regime just handed in its negotiating response to the EU’s JCPOA draft proposal. There’s no striving for absolute isolation here. The tactical purpose of the attack and its timing lies elsewhere. Some clues can be found in Russia’s approach to ceasefires and ententes in Ukraine and before that in Syria. Namely before the ink is dry on any agreement, they violate its terms instantly, viciously and publicly. Then they may or may not adhere to it. Witness the deal, brokered by Turkey, to allow Ukrainian grain shipments safe passage out to the world. Moscow immediately proceeded to dash all hopes by bombing the critical port of Odessa. Sure the shipments began to sail out unmolested soon after but the Russians had demonstrated that they can do without it, that they could stop it any time, that they weren’t weakly dependent on it, though of course they were for multiple reasons. Iran and Russia have become increasingly close during the Ukraine debacle, with Putin signing a deal to use Iranian-made drones. Ergo you can be sure strategic advice is being shared on how to make and break treaties like the JCPOA.

The Russians of course don’t want a nuclear armed Iran near their southern borders. They didn’t obstruct the first JCPOA entente. But they did immediately move to block any ensuing springtime in relations with the west – providing arms to help Iran power up in Iraq and Syria, offering to build civilian nuclear power stations and the like. In short, the attack on Rushdie timed, as it was, to coincide with JCPOA negotiations contained a complexity of contexts and messages. Intentionally so. You can add to the above the recent successful elimination in Kabul of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the long-time leader of Al Qaeda. As many observers noted, AQ has been a largely spent force for many years, not least since the advent of ISIS. So why would the US bother with him now? One could argue that it constituted a show of force to create the necessary political capital prior to making a nuke deal with Iran. Whatever the reason, Tehran undoubtedly saw it as a dig at them – because as the world knows and ignores, Iran has provided safe haven to the Bin Laden family and AQ elements generally for many years.

So one could interpret the hit on Rushdie as a copycat incident, with perhaps the same underlying motives – to allow the Mullah regime political capital against its hardliners while making JCPOA concessions.

To be categorically clear, there cannot be any moral equivalency between a monstrous and sanguinary apostle of death like Al-Zawahiri and the supreme champion of free speech, Salman Rushdie. The former’s raison d’etre while alive and legacy going forward is all about fear, punishment, repression and ancient cruelties.