By Stephen Zunes
This past Wednesday, I was among a group of American religious
leaders and scholars who met with Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad in New York. In what was billed as an inter-faith
dialogue, we frankly shared our strong opposition to certain Iranian
government policies and provocative statements made by the Iranian
president. At the same time, we avoided the insulting language
employed by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger before a
public audience two days earlier.
The Iranian president was quite unimpressive. Indeed, with his
ramblings and the superficiality of his analysis, he came across as
more pathetic than evil.
The more respectful posture of our group that morning led to a more
open exchange of views. Before an audience largely composed of
Christian clergy, he reminded us that we worship the same God, have
been inspired by many of the same prophets, and share similar values
of peace, justice and reconciliation. The Iranian president impressed
me as someone sincerely devout in his religious faith, yet rather
superficial in his understanding and inclined to twist his faith
tradition in ways to correspond with his pre-conceived ideological
positions. He was rather evasive when it came to specific questions
and was not terribly coherent, relying more on platitudes than
analysis, and would tend to get his facts wrong. In short, he
reminded me in many respects of President George W Bush.
Both Ahmadinejad and Bush have used their fundamentalist
interpretations of their faith traditions to place the world in a
Manichean perspective of good versus evil. The certitude of their
positions regardless of evidence to the contrary, their sense that
they are part of a divine mission, and their largely successful
manipulation of their devoutly religious constituents have put these
two nations on a dangerous confrontational course.
Ahmadinejad can get away with it because he is president of a
theocratic political system that allows very limited freedoms and
opportunities for public debate. We have no such excuse here in the
United States, however, for the strong bipartisan support for Bush's
righteous anti-Iranian crusade, most recently illustrated by a series
of provocative anti-Iranian measures recently passed by an
overwhelming margin of the Democratic-controlled Congress.
There are many differences between the two men, of course. Perhaps
the most significant is that, unlike Bush, Ahmadinejad has very
little political power, particularly in the areas of military and
foreign policy. So why, given Ahmadinejad's lack of real political
power, was so much made of his annual trip to the opening session of
the UN General Assembly?
Ahmadinejad's political weakness
The president of Iran is constitutionally weak. The real power in
Iran lies in the hands of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other
conservative Shi'ite clerics on the Council of Guardians. Just as
they were able to stifle the reformist agenda of Ahmadinejad's
immediate predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, they have similarly thwarted
the radical agenda of the current president, whom they view as
something of a loose cannon.
Furthermore, Ahmadinejad's influence is waning. The new head of the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ali Jafari, is from a conservative
sub-faction opposed to the more radical elements allied with
Ahmadinejad. He replaced the former guard head, Yahya Rahim-Safavi,
who was apparently seen as too openly sympathetic to the president.
In addition, former president and Ahmadinejad rival, Ayatollah
Hashemi Rafsanjani was recently elected to head the powerful Experts'
Assembly, defeating Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who was backed by
Ahmadinejad supporters and other hardliners.
Ahmadinejad's election in 2005 was not evidence of a turn to the
right by the Iranian electorate. The clerical leadership's
restrictions on who could run made it nearly impossible for any real
reformist to emerge as a presidential contender. Ahmadinejad's
opponent in the runoff election was the 70-year-old Rafsanjani, who
was seen as a corrupt representative of the political establishment.
The fact that he had become a millionaire while in government
overshadowed his modest reform agenda. By contrast, Ahmadinejad, the
relatively young Tehran mayor, focused on the plight of the poor and
cleaning up corruption.
As a result, Iranian voters were forced to choose between two flawed
candidates. The relatively liberal contender came across as an out-of-
touch elitist, and his ultraconservative opponent was able to
assemble a coalition of rural, less-educated and fundamentalist
voters to conduct a pseudo-populist campaign based on promoting
morality and value-centered leadership. In short, it bore some
resemblance to the presidential election in the United States one
year earlier.
Under Ahmadinejad's leadership, the level of corruption and the
economic situation for most Iranians has actually worsened. As a
result, in addition to losing the backing of the clerical leadership,
he has lost much of his base and his popularity has plummeted. In
municipal elections last December, Ahmadinejad's slates lost heavily
to moderate conservatives and reformers. Why, then, is all this
attention being given to a relatively powerless lame duck president
of a Third World country?
Part of the reason may be that highlighting Ahmadinejad's extremist
views and questioning his mental stability helps convince millions of
Americans that if Iran develops an atomic bomb, it will immediately
use it against the United States or an ally such as Israel. With more
than 200 nuclear weapons and advanced missile capabilities, Israel
has more than enough deterrent capability to prevent an Iranian
attack. Obviously, American deterrent capabilities are even greater.
However, if you depict Iran's leader as crazy, it puts nuclear
deterrence in question and helps create an excuse for the United
States or Israel to launch a preventive war prior to Iran developing
a nuclear weapons capability.
In reality, though, the Iranian president is not commander-in-chief
of the armed forces, so Ahmadinejad would be incapable of ordering
an attack on Israel even if Iran had the means to do so. Though the
clerics certainly take hardline positions on a number of policy
areas, collective leadership normally mitigates impulsive actions
such as launching a war of aggression. Indeed, bold and risky
policies rarely come out of committees.
It should also be noted that while Ahmadinejad is certainly very anti-
Israel, his views are not as extreme as they have been depicted. For
example, Ahmadinejad never actually threatened to "wipe Israel off
the map" nor has he demonstrated a newly hostile Iranian posture
toward the Jewish state. Not only was this oft-quoted statement a
mistranslation - the idiom does not exist in Farsi and the reference
was to the dissolution of the regime, not the physical destruction of
the nation -the Iranian president was quoting from a statement by
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from over 20 years earlier. In addition,
he explicitly told our group on September 26 that there was "no
military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and that it
was "not Iran's intention to destroy Israel".
The Saddam niche
The emphasis and even exaggeration of Ahmadinejad's more bizarre and
provocative statements makes it easier to ignore his more sensible
observations, such as: "Arrogant power seekers and militarists betray
God's will." It also makes it politically easier for the United
States to refuse to engage in dialogue or enter into negotiations,
such as those that led to an end of Libya's nuclear program in 2003.
Ahmadinejad has welcomed American religious delegations to Iran, but
the United States has denied visas to Iranian religious delegations
to this country. The Bush administration has also blocked cultural
and scholarly exchanges.
The disproportionate media coverage of Ahmadinejad's UN visit also
suggests that Ahmadinejad fills a certain niche in the American
psyche formerly filled by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Libya's
Muammar Gaddafi as the Middle Eastern leader we most love to hate. It
gives us a sense of righteous superiority to compare ourselves to
these seemingly irrational and fanatical foreign despots. If these
despots can be inflated into far greater threats than they actually
are, these threats can justify the enormous financial and human costs
of maintaining American armed forces in that volatile region to
protect ourselves and our allies and even to make war against far-off
nations in "self-defense".
Such inflated threats also have the added bonus of silencing critics
of America's overly-militarized Middle East policy, since anyone who
dares to challenge the hyperbole and exaggerated claims regarding
these leaders' misdeeds or to provide a more balanced and realistic
assessment of the actual threat they represent can then be depicted
as naive apologists for dangerous fanatics who threaten our national
security.
Furthermore, focusing on Ahmadinejad's transparent double-standards
and hypocrisy makes it easier to ignore similar tendencies by the US
president. Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN on September 25 was widely
criticized for its emphasis on human rights abuses by Israel and the
United States while avoiding mention of his own country's poor human
rights record. It helps distract attention from Bush's speech that
same day, in which he criticized human rights abuses by dictatorial
governments in Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Myanmar and Cuba,
but avoided mentioning human rights abuses by Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Equatorial Guinea, Oman, Pakistan, Cameroon and Chad, or any other
dictatorship allied with the United States.
The outreach by Christian clergy to Ahmadinejad, whom The New York
Times described as "the religious president of a religious nation who
relishes speaking on a religious plane", came out of a belief in the
importance of dialogue and reconciliation. Our group emphasized that
we were critical of the US government's threats but also raised
concerns on such issues as Iranian human rights abuses and
Ahmadinejad's hostility toward Israel and denial of the Holocaust.
Virtually all our questions, however, were thrown back in criticisms
toward the United States. "Who are the ones that are filling their
arsenals with nuclear weapons?" he said. "The United States has
developed a fifth generation of atomic bombs and missiles that could
hit Iran. Who is the real danger here?"
Indeed, it must seem odd to most people in the Middle East that the
United States, which is 10,000 miles away from the longest-range
weapon the Iranians can currently muster and possesses by far the
most powerful militarily apparatus the world has ever seen, is
depicting Iran as the biggest threat to its national security. As
Ahmadinejad put it to our group that morning, "The United States has
many thousands of troops on our borders and threatens to attack us.
Why is it, then, that Iran is seen as a threat?" And though most
Iranians, Arabs, and other Muslims recognize Ahmadinejad as an
extremist, he is unfortunately correct in accusing the United States
of unfairly singling out Iran, an issue that has real resonance in
that part of the world.
Indeed, the United States is obsessed with Iran's nuclear program -
still many years away from producing an atomic bomb - while we
support the neighboring states of Pakistan, India and Israel, which
have already developed nuclear weapons and which are also in
violation of UN Security Council resolutions regarding their nuclear
programs.
We blame Iran for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, yet 95% of
US casualties are from anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents. We focus on
Iranian human rights abuses while we continue to support the even
more oppressive and theocratic Islamic regime in Saudi Arabia. We
attack the Iranian president's denial of the genocide of European
Jews while remaining silent in the face of Turkish leaders' denial of
the genocide of Armenians. One of the most important principles of
most faith traditions is moral consistency. Few receive greater wrath
in most holy texts than hypocrites.
Americans have many legitimate concerns regarding Iranian policies in
general and the statements of Ahmadinejad in particular. However, as
long as US policy appears to be based on such opportunistic double
standards rather than consistent principles, Ahmadinejad's
inflammatory rhetoric will continue to find an audience.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San
Francisco, Middle East editor of Foreign Policy In Focus, and the
author of Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
(Common Courage Press.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
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