Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar. Source: Afshar Publishing. "Iran's Epic and America's Empire" considers the implications of Iran’s national epic, the Shahnameh for the present political tensions that mark Iran's relationship with the West. It offers an explanation of the poem as a national and a cultural icon. Santa Monica, CA -- April 17, 2012 -- The Shahnameh is Iran's national epic. It is a compendium of Iranian myths, legends, and history. Unlike other Indo-European epics, it is not about a war, like the Iliad , or an individual, like the Odyssey , Beowulf , or the Ramayana . The central character of the Shahnameh is Iran, which it glorifies both as subject and hero. Unlike other classical Indo-European epics, the Shahnameh is not in a dead language. It is intelligible to every speaker of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. This book is addressed to Iranians who reside in the West. Following a brief survey of Iranian history from its beginning in the 7th century B.C. to Ferdowsi's time in the 11th century, Mahmoud Omidsalar provides a history of the poem and a biography of its author. "Mahmoud Omidsalar is a world authority on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Very few people anywhere in the world know the Persian epic inside out as well as he does. Omidsalar's Iran's Epic and America's Empire is a bold political manifesto written by a master literary scholar. His steely meditations come at a particularly troubling time when Ferdowsi's birthplace is ruled by chronic autocracy and threatened by military strike. Omidsalar writes with conviction, courage, steadfast determination, and a defiant will to recollect, to remind, and to claim the Iranian posterity." Hamid Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York) “In Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire, Mahmoud Omidsalar the master of Shahnameh Studies, attempts to provide a personal narrative about the substance and meaning of the greatest literary work composed in the Persianate World. Along the way he provides a useful and contentious purview of the pre-modern history of Iran and the life of the composer of the epic, Abol-Ghasem Ferdowsi. Furthermore, Omidsalar not only dispels the common Eurocentric notions about Iran and the Shahnameh, but also takes on the blind nationalism of his own countrymen who at times are blinded by their own chauvinism. He shows how this xenophobic view has kept some from understanding the essence and nature of the Persian epic and Iran’s cultural achievement. Whoever reads this book will be forced to think about her/his own views on the meaning and importance of the Shahnameh”. Touraj Daryaee (Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at the University of California, Irvine) Iran's Epic and America's Empire by Mahmoud Omidsalar. source: Cover of Iranian magazine Mosalas. Donald Trump's election after a comical and combative presidential contest, carried America's politics from the farcical side of the Rubicon to its tragic shore, straight into the arms of the country's Radical Right. Marx's famous dictum that history is repeated first as tragedy, and then as farce, may have been turned right-side-up. Somewhere up there, Hegel must be terribly amused. What is equally amusing is the outrage of Hillary Clinton's supporters and their claim that Russia meddled in America's elections and paved the way for Trump's victory. These claims are hard to prove; but let's assume that they are right and the Russians did meddle in America's internal affairs. If they did, they did no more than what the United States has been doing around the world for a very long time. Russian interference, in other words, is a bit of America's own medicine. American administrations-both Democrat and Republican-have a long history of meddling in other nations' elections. Countries from Latin America to Asia and from Europe to Africa have experienced the bloody side-effects of America's intrusion into their political processes. In her memoirs, Hard Times (2014), Mrs. Clinton acknowledges the U.S.'s interfering with the Iranian elections of 2009, and writes: "Behind the scenes my team at the State Department stayed in constant contact with activists in Iran and made an emergency intervention to prevent Twitter from shutting down for maintenance, which would have deprived protesters of a key communications tool" (p. 423). Instances of America's interference with the domestic affairs of countries throughout the world are too well known to require documentation. These activities have gone far beyond spying on the confidential communications of political parties. According to The Guardian , in Cuba alone, the number of American assassination attempts against Fidel Castro's life exceeded six-hundred. More recently, in Libya, Hillary Clinton promoted the overthrow of the government, which destabilized North Africa and created a serious refugee problem for Europe. Following Qaddafi's capture and murder by a band of rebels who were supported by NATO, she laughingly said in a TV interview: "We came, we saw, he died." In her channeling of Julius Caesar, she failed to mention that Qaddafi's captors gruesomely murdered him, sodomizing their prisoner by a blade, and subsequently posting the photos on the Internet. Qaddafi's grisly execution took place during Obama's "Democratic" administration, when Clinton was his Secretary of State. Therefore, whatever the Russians may have done to Clinton in the recent U.S. elections pales in comparison with the barbarity of what Clinton and the Obama administration facilitated in North Africa and elsewhere. The present chaos in Syria, the bombing of Yemen, and the destabilization of Libya and large regions of North Africa are all Obama's own contribution to the raging bloodshed in these areas. In the two wars that he inherited from George W. Bush, Obama revived U.S. involvement in Iraq and upped the ante in Afghanistan. In fact, in drone warfare and Special Forces operations that usually result in large numbers of civilian casualties, he actually broke George W. Bush's record, even bragging: "I'm really good at killing people," (Washington Times). This brings me to the implications of Donald Trump's election for U.S. policies in Western Asia, especially for Iran. Trump has not been in power long enough to do any real damage beyond what Bush and Obama have already done. It is likely, however, that he will continue the destructive policies of his predecessors because the foreign policy of the United States is not determined by the country's President alone, but by a "foreign policy elite," whose members rotate between government, think tanks, and the academy. This elite operates on two basic assumptions. The first assumption, best known as "American Exceptionalism," posits that the U.S. is a special country that has a responsibility to lead the world, and that the world would be worse off without its leadership. The second is the assumption that America's military might is the main means of resolving foreign policy issues. The first idea, the myth of American Exceptionalism, is deeply rooted in the American psyche. In 1630, drawing on a phrase from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matthew 5:14), John Winthrop (1587-1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said in a sermon of his own: "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us" (Pfaff, The Irony of Manifest Destiny 2010, p.23). This idea of uniqueness of the American experience, as Professor Bacevich points out in his American Empire (2002, p.43), was expressed by one of America's most iconic literary figures, Herman Melville (1819-1891), in the 1850s: More than a hundred and fifty years later, President George W. Bush's advisor Carl Rove was quoted in the New York Times Magazine , expressing similar sentiments: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. We're history's actors . and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do." Of course, this type of arrogance is not limited to Republican politicians. Madeline Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, conveyed the same idea on NBC's Today Show (February 19, 1998). She said: "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future." As recently as January 27, 2017, Richard Haass, the president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and a former special advisor to President Bush, Sr. and to Colin Powell, said in a TV interview that the world is better off with America's leadership and as proof, he pointed to the "Middle East," saying, imagine how terrible the conditions would be without the United States. Apparently Mr. Haass believes that the United States had nothing to do with the destabilization of the region or with the creation of ISIS. However, those of us who live on this side of the proverbial looking glass, have read of America's role in facilitating the creation of terrorist organizations in Western Asia. In an ironic twist of fate, Haass said this on Bill Maher's comedy show. America's foreign policy is not driven by party affiliation.