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The Iran nuclear deal has brought out the ‘borderline’ personality disorder of Saudi Arabia and I$raHell.Amal Saad-Ghorayeb is a Lebanese academic, political analyst and blogger. She is the author of Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, published by Pluto Press.
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![]() Despite repeated US assurances, Israel is increasing its rhetoric against the Obama administration’s deal with Iran [Reuters]
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For far too long now, members of the Resistance Axis (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas) have been the objects of the West’s psychopathologising gaze, as I have documented on my blog, ASG’s Counter-Hegemony Unit. While the Syrian government has been pathologised as “delusional” and “detached from reality”, Iran has similarly been anthromorphised and classified as an “irrational” actor whose foreign policy behaviour closely resembles a person suffering from Anti-Social Personality disorder.Dubbed a “rogue state” by successive US administrations, official statements and political analyses of Iran’s political behaviour have drawn extensively from criteria and symptomology contained in the various editions of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), US’ psychiatry bible. Thus for example, Iran’s refusal to “join the community of nations” corresponds with the Anti-Social deviant’s “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours”; its failure to “fulfil its international obligations” is typical of his “consistent irresponsibility” to “honour…obligations”; its repeated attempts to “deceive the international community” about its nuclear ambitions mirrors his “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying”; its “sponsorship of terror” is symptomatic of his “irritability and aggressiveness”, and so on. It wasn’t until today after reading this piece by Robert Worth in the New York Times, that I was suddenly inspired to deflect some of that psychopathologising gaze back to its source, specifically, to the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the US and its Israeli and Saudi allies, in the context of the nuclear talks with Iran. Worth’s references to Saudi’s “deep fear of abandonment”, and the “[Saudi] wave of anxious, defeatist comments about being abandoned by the United States” on Twitter, were just begging for a Borderline Personality Disorder classification, as such fears are a hallmark of BPD.
US narcissism
And yet despite all this, Saudi threats of a “major shift” in relations with the US have been met with little more than John Kerry’s glib reassurances of Saudi’s “indispensability” punctuated by unremorseful, self-congratulatory pats on the back: “Nobody else in the world at this moment – and I don’t say this with any arrogance; I say it with pride and I say it as a matter of reality – no one else comes close to what we are able to do to keep the peace or what we do to try to manage and tampen down old animosities and keep them at bay.” |