The Handwriting on the Wall Says "Iran"

By Gary Leupp
Created Jan 17 2007 - 9:00am

In the Bible story, the Babylonian king Belshazzar is feasting with his
courtiers at a banquet, using the sacred golden goblets plundered from
Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem as wine cups. Suddenly, out of nowhere a hand
appears; it writes a cryptic message on the chamber wall. The king's
counselors are unable to decipher it, so Daniel is called in to interpret
its meaning. (Daniel is a Jew of the exile and a very wise man. Many years
ago he had interpreted the dreams of the king's father Nebuchadnezzar.)

The handwriting on the wall, Daniel tells King Belshazzar, consists of the
Aramaic words mene mene tekel upharsin (literally "numbered, numbered,
weighed, divided"), a message which decoded means: "God has numbered the
days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the
scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided . . . " The last word
upharsin sounds like "Persia" in Aramaic, so Daniel adds that the divided
kingdom of Babylonia will be "given to the Medes and Persians" (New Oxford
Annotated Bible translation). It's among the most famous Bible puns.

Belshazzar's tenure in office was in fact short, according to Babylonian
records; after three years on the throne he was toppled by Cyrus the
Persian. Cyrus captured his capital, Babylon (between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers south of today's Baghdad) in 530 BCE.

I think of this story when reading the warnings appearing in the US press
addressed to Iraq's puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. This is a man
plainly uncomfortable on his throne, who's openly acknowledged a desire to
step down. He's in a difficult position. Condi Rice warns him darkly that
his government exists "on borrowed time," because America's "patience isn't
unlimited" and "the Iraqi government needs to start to show results." Zalmay
Khalilzad, US ambassador and kingmaker in occupied Iraq has just passed
along to al-Maliki "a very good strong message" from President Bush "that
the patience of the American people is running out."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells Congress that al-Maliki "has to face
. . . the possibility that he'll lose his job." Most importantly, Bush
announced in his speech last Wednesday that he's "made it clear to the Prime
Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not
open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises,
it will lose the support of the American people." Translation: We enthroned
you, we can depose you. Meanwhile a bipartisan consensus has emerged in
Congress that the Iraqi people haven't responded appropriately to the benign
American invasion, but are rather causing needless pain to the invaders.
They will therefore, if the invaders decide to (or have to) pull out, bear
full responsibility for those invaders' failure to liberate them.

How would you feel, if you were President Nouri al-Maliki getting this
message? The man's being weighed in the imperialists' balance and found
wanting. His country is already divided between the Kurds and the Arab
Shiites and the Sunnis. The Shiites are divided between the
popularly-supported militias (including Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army) and
the forces that work closely with the occupiers and rely more heavily on
them. Even the latter are riddled with militia members acting as fifth
column agents and spies. Al-Maliki relies upon al-Sadr for conditional
political support, but the US demands that al-Maliki cooperate in a massive
effort aided by 17,500 new US troops to suppress Baghdad's Shiite militias.
US journalists, in general, express doubt that al-Maliki can or wants to do
that.

So it looks like his days are indeed numbered. And what will happen after
him? The fundamental problem here is not one of personalities but the fact
that 90%% of Iraqis polled want the US out now. (It's already been a year
since that number indicated they wanted the US out within a year's time.)
These include Sunnis in the Triangle who formed Saddam's and the Baath
Party's social base as well as Shiites in Baghdad and the south who are
happy that Saddam's gone. The Shiite parties have stepped into the power
vacuum created by the occupation to organize basic neighborhood activities
such as trash collection and also to provide security through armed
militias. These militias have been involved in conflicts with one another,
"insurgent" activities, attacks on Shiite or Sunni mosques, maintenance of
torture chambers, and all manner of sectarian horrors. The Americans are
demanding that the Iraqi president crack down on these militias, which are
in fact merely one of the evils emerging from the Pandora's Box that the US
president himself decided to open!

Now George W. Bush publicly lectures the man heading what we're supposed to
believe is a sovereign government, informing him in the name of the American
people, no less, that he will lose the support of those people if he doesn't
follow through on promises to cut off ties with Muqtada al-Sadr (one of the
most popular men in the country). Al-Maliki might say, "Okay, do what you
need to do to disarm Muqtada's boys here in Baghdad. I'll agree to whatever
Iraqi backup you need, so you can say that this is a joint US- Iraqi
operation to restore order." But this would permanently damage his
reputation if not his self-esteem and he'd have to leave office after doing
it.

If, as Gates put it, al-Maliki were to "lose his job" in the near future,
his successor would inherit this problem of meeting US demands for militia
control. But most likely, he'll have his own militia behind him. It's been
reported that a new coalition organized by the Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the
leader of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iran
(SCIRI) might be posed to replace the current administration. SCIRI has its
own militia, the Badr Brigade, which has quarreled with al-Sadr's forces.
SCIRI, founded in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq War and until recently based in
Teheran, retains strong ties to the Iranian government.

Bush met with al-Hakim, whom he described [1] as "one of the distinguished
leaders of a free Iraq" in the White House last month. This was his second
meeting with the Shiite cleric. "We talked about a lot of important issues,"
Bush told reporters. "We talked about the need to give the government of
Iraq more capability, as quickly as possible, so that the elected government
of Iraq can do that which the Iraqi people want, which is to secure their
country from the extremists and murderers."

Presumably the president realizes al-Hakim's Badr militia link. But maybe he
wishes to wean al-Hakim away from his ties to the Iranian mullahs. Even if
he can do that, the confrontation the US wants to provoke with al-Sadr can
only exacerbate intra-Shiite divisions. These in turn can only invite
intervention by neighboring Shiite Iran on one side or the other. The
Iranian mullahs have always been much closer to al-Hakim's group than to
al-Sadr's. On the other hand al-Sadr has vowed to defend Iran in the event
of a US attack. The Shiite political forces (the Dawa Party as well as
SCIRI) that have agreed to work with the US and lend the occupation some
legitimacy are difficult to detach from Iran. The Kurds also have cultivated
friendly ties with Iran. Iran's star does seem to be rising.

Daniel is regarded by most Christians as a prophet. I'm not a prophet, but
I'm having a vision. I see the Green Wall surrounding the command center of
the US imperial project in Southwest Asia, an empire which in Bush's dreams
will soon extend from Afghanistan to Syria, rivaling Nebuchadnezzar's. In
glowing graffiti letters on that wall I see upharsin, which again means both
division and Persian. (Persia of course changed its name to Iran in 1935.)

* * *

Rabbinical authorities have not placed Daniel on the prophet list but
recognized him as an "upright man." He does not appear in the Qur'an. He was
in any case probably the fictional creation of a Jewish writer living three
and a half centuries after Balshazzar. Daniel is an historical novelette. I
recommend it as a literary work, detailing how upright Jews during the
Babylonian Captivity escaped terrible punishments due to divine
intervention. For example, Shadrach, Meshach and Adenego, Jewish men to whom
Nebuchadnezzar who for some reason "entrusted the affairs of the province of
Babylon" are thrown into a fiery furnace after refusing to prostrate
themselves before a great golden idol. But they emerge, after singing a long
hymn, without any hairs singed or smell of smoke on their bodies, and the
king continues to "shower favors" on them (Chapter 3). And, of course,
there's the Daniel in the Lion's Den story (Chapter 6 and in a different
version Chapter 14). Here Darius the Mede is forced against his will to
enforce a law requiring that no person in the empire worship anyone but he
himself. Daniel is thrown to the lions but survives; the delighted king has
him released but sends his accusers, their wives and their children into the
pit where the lions immediately seize them and crush their bones to pieces.
The book errs on details: Babylonian sources identity Nabonidus, not
Nebuchadnezzar, as Belshazzar's father. One of Nabonidus' wives was a
daughter of Nebuchadnezzar. This is creative writing, literature, not
history.

Daniel's "prophecies" (about the Persian Empire, the struggles between the
Seleucids and Ptolemies placed in the prophet's mouth) are mostly
descriptions of events known to the work's main author. But in Chapters 11
and 12 there's some pretty powerful "end times" imagery. "At the time of the
end," an angel tells Daniel, there will be "anguish, such as has never
occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time, your
people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book"
(Daniel 12:1). Many fundamentalist Christians integrate this prophecy into
an apocalyptic scenario based on the New Testament Book of Revelation, which
predicts a terrible war around Jerusalem prior to the Second Coming of Jesus
Christ and the onset of the Rapture. Many who have embraced that notion are
inclined to support Bush Middle East policy and Israel as a matter of
course. They are the bedrock of Bush's political base. This is, therefore,
powerful fiction affecting contemporary politics.

Richard Perle has recently declared that he "underestimated the depravity"
of the Iraqis as he cheer-led the march to war. He couldn't have foreseen
the sectarian religious quarrelling, lacking an understanding of the Muslim
past! The abject ignorance of Islam of US politicians generally, so ably
exposed [2] by the Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein, as exploited by the
neocons helped produce the disastrous de-Baathification policy in Iraq (a
big step away from secularism), the Sunni "insurgency," and indeed the whole
criminal enterprise of occupying Iraq itself. The American public is, in
general, not well-informed about Islam, nor the complexity and divisions
within Muslim societies, by the mainstream media. But those with some
background on the relevant basic history (including the intelligence
professionals who opposed the Iraq invasion) were prophesying disaster even
before March 2003. Even Colin Powell, who buckled under neocon pressure and
backed the attack on Iraq, cautioned Bush about the Pottery Barn rule that
"If you break it, you bought it." You might say he prophesied a broken Iraq.
(By the way, since the potter's wheel was invented in Iraq, Iraq must be one
of the first places where pottery was broken.)
_______

About author Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of
Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on
Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu [3].

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson