Is Iran a ticking timebomb?

[blixa442]

'Divine mission' driving Iran's new leader
By Anton La Guardia
(Filed: 14/01/2006)

As Iran rushes towards confrontation with the world over its nuclear programme, the question uppermost in the mind of western leaders is "What is moving its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to such recklessness?"

Political analysts point to the fact that Iran feels strong because of high oil prices, while America has been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq.



But listen carefully to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad - recently described by President George W Bush as an "odd man" - and there is another dimension, a religious messianism that, some suspect, is giving the Iranian leader a dangerous sense of divine mission.

In November, the country was startled by a video showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a cleric that he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.

When an aircraft crashed in Teheran last month, killing 108 people, Mr Ahmadinejad promised an investigation. But he also thanked the dead, saying: "What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow."

The most remarkable aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's piety is his devotion to the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and the president's belief that his government must prepare the country for his return.

One of the first acts of Mr Ahmadinejad's government was to donate about £10 million to the Jamkaran mosque, a popular pilgrimage site where the pious come to drop messages to the Hidden Imam into a holy well.

All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days. A common rumour - denied by the government but widely believed - is that Mr Ahmadinejad and his cabinet have signed a "contract" pledging themselves to work for the return of the Mahdi and sent it to Jamkaran.

Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect believes this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, regarded as the 12th Imam, or righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.

He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the ninth century, at the age of five. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.

This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Hidden Imam is expected to return in the company of Jesus.

Mr Ahmadinejad appears to believe that these events are close at hand and that ordinary mortals can influence the divine timetable.

The prospect of such a man obtaining nuclear weapons is worrying. The unspoken question is this: is Mr Ahmadinejad now tempting a clash with the West because he feels safe in the belief of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam? Worse, might he be trying to provoke chaos in the hope of hastening his reappearance?

The 49-year-old Mr Ahmadinejad, a former top engineering student, member of the Revolutionary Guards and mayor of Teheran, overturned Iranian politics after unexpectedly winning last June's presidential elections.

The main rift is no longer between "reformists" and "hardliners", but between the clerical establishment and Mr Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.

Its most remarkable manifestation came with Mr Ahmadinejad's international debut, his speech to the United Nations.

World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August.

Instead, they heard the president speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote "state terrorism", impose "the logic of the dark ages" and divide the world into "light and dark countries".

The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to "hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace".

In a video distributed by an Iranian web site in November, Mr Ahmadinejad described how one of his Iranian colleagues had claimed to have seen a glow of light around the president as he began his speech to the UN.

"I felt it myself too," Mr Ahmadinejad recounts. "I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It's not an exaggeration, because I was looking.

"They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic."

Western officials said the real reason for any open-eyed stares from delegates was that "they couldn't believe what they were hearing from Ahmadinejad".

Their sneaking suspicion is that Iran's president actually relishes a clash with the West in the conviction that it would rekindle the spirit of the Islamic revolution and - who knows - speed up the arrival of the Hidden Imam.

 

[Mislav]

This guy is a nut - the Holocaust denial doesn't worry me as that just proves he's an idiot. However his desire to "wipe Israel off the map" and organizing "Death to America" chants clearly indicate he has a few screws up in his head loose. It might not be a bad idea to take him and a few of his lieutenants out.

 

[Ed007Toronto]

But listen carefully to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad - recently described by President George W Bush as an "odd man" - and there is another dimension, a religious messianism that, some suspect, is giving the Iranian leader a dangerous sense of divine mission.

In November, the country was startled by a video showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a cleric that he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.

I thought God was on Bush's side. They suit each other.

 

[cacruden]

As far as I am concerned -- we can only wait a maximum of two years before taking action. Unfortunately the United States may still be pre-occupied.

We well be very close to seeing nuclear bombs used in war. Isreal probably will not wait for Iran to go Nuclear before taking pre-emptive action to stop the major threat to their survival.

 

[bizorky]

^I doubt the Isreali's will take that kind of action. The irony is that it will legitimate their own nuclear weapons arsenal.

 

[doady]

Isn't the fact that Iran executes homosexuals reason enough to take action?

 

[dan e 1980]

if he was truly a threat, all it takes is one god damned bullet!

but no, thousands of soldiers are gonna have to die in some stupid war. i don't know where the logic is anymore.

 

[cacruden]

if he was truly a threat, all it takes is one god damned bullet!

Sounds easy -- but not always practical.

The program has been there before, the program will be there afterwords -- you have to get almost all the cleric leadership as well.

Not to mention -- war is legal -- assasination is not :rollin

 

[dan e 1980]

Not to mention -- war is legal -- assasination is not

not all wars are legal. they've broke the law before, one more
more time won't hurt. does the law only apply when the outcome is profitable?

 

[Abeja de Almirante]

Isn't the fact that Iran executes homosexuals reason enough to take action?

Why do I care if they're homosexuals? If they execute anyone who is innocent of serious crimes as deemed by the state (provided the offences are well known, such as murder, rape, incest, etc..) we should take action.

 

[BrianHawkins1]

"If they execute anyone who is innocent of serious crimes as deemed by the state (provided the offences are well known, such as murder, rape, incest, etc..) we should take action."

I assume that China and several dozen more nations are therefore immediately next in line for "action".

Right?

 

[bizorky]

Ah yes, the problem of categorical imperatives raises its ugly head again.

 

[Mislav]

I don't think the US will invade Iran, if anything they'll just bomb the shit out of them sending them back to the stone age. Personally I like the idea of killing him along with his close followers better than starting a war - you take out the nut(s) and avoid thousands of military and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

If the Americans do invade Iran, I can guarantee that it will be much tougher occupying the country than Iraq:
1) Iran has a stronger and more motivated army than that which Saddam Hussein used to have.
2) Iran is mountanous and Iraq is a lot more flat. Hence there will not only be a great deal of urban combat but also up on the mountains and hard to occupy terrains.

 

[doady]

Why do I care if they're homosexuals? If they execute anyone who is innocent of serious crimes as deemed by the state (provided the offences are well known, such as murder, rape, incest, etc..) we should take action.

I am not talking about serious crimes. I am talking about the fact that the penalty for homosexuality in Iran is death. It was not too long ago that two gay Iranian teenagers were sentenced to death by hanging.

 

[BrianHawkins1]

"Ahmadinejad: Not Crazy, Cunning"


by Tom Porteous
January 13, 2006

www.tompaine.com/articles...unning.php

Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst who has worked for the BBC and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office. He recently returned from Iran.
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Why is Iran's new president going out of his way to provoke the United States, Israel and Europe with his brinkmanship over Iran's nuclear program and repeated denial of the Holocaust?

Many commentators have put the international posturing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad down to inexperience and incompetence. But it would be foolish to underrate a man who has survived the hurly-burly of Iran's Islamic revolution and one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past quarter century (the Iran-Iraq war, where Ahmadinejad served as a Revolutionary Guard commander) to emerge in his 40s as post-revolutionary Iran's first non-clerical president.

The signs are that Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, both on Iran's civil nuclear program (which the West fears is a cover for plans to produce nuclear weapons) and on Israel, is deliberate and calculated. Like much of his political maneuvering since he unexpectedly won last year's presidential elections, Ahmadinejad's international gestures are probably designed with one principle aim in mind: to ensure political survival in the power struggle that is now underway at the heart of Iran's fragmented power structure.

It is a power struggle that Ahmadinejad is by no means certain to win. The Iranian presidency is the most important elected office in Iran. But it is only one of several centers of power and not the most powerful one, as Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor in the president's office, Mohammad Khatami, discovered to his cost. The oligarchs who control the unelected institutions of the state and much of Iran's formal and informal economy blocked Khatami's reformist agenda because it threatened their vested interests, and they are likely to block Ahmadinejad's radical Islamist and populist agenda.

Ahmadinejad knows what he is up against and that's why he is pulling out all the stops to secure his position, with populist promises ranging from wealth redistribution and an end to corruption, to the creation of conditions for the return of the Mahdi, Shi'a Islam's last imam who disappeared a little over a thousand years ago and whose return, many Iranians believe, will herald an age of universal justice.

In the power struggle now being played out in Iran, Ahmadinejad may well see international economic sanctions and even military confrontation between Iran and the West as opportunities to consolidate his position within Iran. Given the chance, he would use a showdown with the West to take on the role of Iran's defender against foreign aggression, to wrest control of the economy from the oligarchs, and to undermine rival centers of power in the security forces under the cover of a general military mobilization.

If this is indeed Ahmadinejad's strategy, it is not without risks. But the political calculations that underpin it indicate an astute understanding on the part of Iran 's president of the new political realities in the region in the aftermath of 9/11 and the U.S. military adventures in the Middle East and Central Asia.

With the U.S. and Britain already in trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the West's options for dealing with Iran are limited. Economic sanctions on Iran would do little to damage the Iranian government - indeed they could widen the scope for profiteering among the political elite. As for military action, it is doubtful that the U.S. is capable of launching, let alone winning, the full scale war against Iran that would be necessary to effect regime change. But any military action that stopped short of regime change could well result in the consolidation of the power of the fundamentalists around the Iranian president, and would set back the prospects of political reform in Iran for years.

Another indication that Iran's president is not the political novice he is made out to be by his enemies is that Ahmadinejad has cleverly chosen to pick his fight with the west over two highly emotive issues that not only unite the otherwise fragmented regime, but are also more or less bound to provoke the kind of knee-jerk Western reaction that will play into his hands.

If the U.S. and its allies were not so obsessed about the nexus of "rogue states," terrorism and WMDs, and if their Middle East policies incorporated a more balanced approach towards Israel (the region's unofficially acknowledged nuclear hegemon), then a more sensible and safer Western strategy towards Iran could take shape.

Such a strategy would first accept the inevitability that sooner or later Iran will, if it wishes, acquire nuclear weapons, and secondly work diplomatically and politically to ensure that by the time Iran does acquire such capability the country is led by a reforming government that neither feels threatened by nor threatens its neighbors.

If Iran were left alone, the checks and balances of Iranian politics - Iran is no dictatorship - would probably lead to the marginalization of Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary revivalism and a resurgence of the now blocked political reformism of the Khatami era.

As things stand, however, the countdown to confrontation between the West and Iran has already started. And such a confrontation may well backfire on the West, assisting the consolidation of radical Islamist politics in Iran and providing Tehran with incentives not only to develop nukes, but to use them.


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"Letter From Ground Zero: Madmen"


by JONATHAN SCHELL
June 2, 2003

www.thenation.com/doc/20030602/schell


During the cold war, nuclear strategic doctrine was riven by a fundamental contradiction. Governments thought it sensible to threaten nuclear war--the better to "deter" a foe from doing something unwanted--yet it obviously made no sense actually to wage nuclear war, for this led to the famous "mutual assured destruction." But if carrying out the threats was senseless, then how could it be frightening? What use were they? Wouldn't the foe, supposing that no country would be demented enough to "assure" its own destruction, disbelieve the threats and do what it pleased in spite of them?

The high strategists of nuclear defense scratched their heads and came up with answers. One was to take technical and other steps that deliberately put your nation on what the strategist Thomas Schelling called a "slippery slope." That is, if you visibly arranged to make yourself a little bit out of control, the foe would no longer be able to imagine that you might desist from nuclear war in a last-minute fit of sanity. They'd think that you might plunge into the abyss in spite of yourself. And so they would fear you, as hoped. (The inexorable mobilization schedules of World War I acted thus, once diplomacy had broken down, to assure the start of a war that was in no one's interest.) Another solution, also pioneered by Schelling, among others, was the deliberate cultivation of a reputation of irrationality. Schelling called this policy the "rationality of irrationality." In this policy, the foe would believe in your self-destructive threats not because it thought you might slip on a banana peel, so to speak, at the brink but because it believed you just might be lunatic enough to go over the edge deliberately.

Richard Nixon was one practitioner of this strategy. When he came to office, he planned to end the Vietnam War on terms favorable to the United States by frightening North Vietnam and the Soviet Union into compliance. He hoped, by persuading them that he was just a little bit off his rocker, to scare them into submission. He called the strategy the "madman theory." In practice, however, it failed. The Russians and the North Vietnamese ignored the threat and went on to win the war.

When the cold war ended, most people probably bid an unfond farewell to these blood-freezing paradoxes, along with the Soviet-American nuclear arms race that had given rise to them. They may be surprised, therefore, to find them returning in the new context of what many call the second nuclear age (the first having consisted of the cold war). Recently, the United States--the world's "only superpower," or "hyperpower," as the French say--has found itself in a nuclear stalemate with tiny, poverty-stricken but (probably) nuclear-armed North Korea. North Korea has rediscovered the madman theory with a vengeance. It cannot be in the interest of North Korea, to state what is sickeningly obvious, to get into a nuclear war with the United States. At the moment, North Korea is incapable of striking American soil with a nuclear-armed missile. At the most, it can fire a few nuclear weapons at South Korea or Japan. The United States, of course, has more than 10,000 fully deliverable nuclear bombs. And yet North Korea's Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, has been bellowing nuclear destruction at the United States. His country possesses, his spokesmen have said, a "powerful deterrent" that can turn South Korea--and the American bases in South Korea--into a "sea of fire" (a phrase the North Koreans seem almost to have copyrighted). Just recently, North Korea declared its promise to South Korea not to build nuclear arms "nullified"--owing to America's threats to destroy the regime.

Kim is well suited to the role of madman. This leader (with his accidentally fashionable spiky, two-inch-tall hair) of a regime that has starved millions of its people and is perhaps the most regimented on earth, does not have to strain to convince the world that he might be capable of irrational acts. And yet it's also true that those acts display--shades of Thomas Schelling--the "rationality of irrationality" more clearly than anyone has done before, since the United States has indeed been deterred (at least so far) by his threats.

Yet there is no need to go halfway around the world to find the resurrection of the madman theory. We only have to look at our own government. The Bush Administration has been puzzling again over the paradox that a threat is no good if it appears crazy to carry it out. Linton Brooks, the acting administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, has said to the New York Times, "We need to make sure our weapons will in fact be seen by other countries as a deterrent. One element of that is usability. If nobody believes there is any circumstance where you will use the weapon, it is not a deterrent." Therefore the Administration has proposed that a legislative ban established in 1993 against low-yield nuclear weapons (less than five kilotons of explosive power) be rescinded, and the Senate Armed Services Committee, voting largely on party lines, has just concurred. The change is in keeping with a broader revival of nuclear threats by the Administration, which also revived the production of the plutonium pits that are at the core of nuclear bombs, which wants to shorten the time necessary to resume testing and which seeks funds to study a new nuclear weapon called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. (It's hard to know when this Administration is merely tone-deaf to the overtones of its jargon and when it is deliberately trying to provoke its opposition with outrageous nomenclature.)

However, the trouble, once again, is that if you establish usability, you may get use. And is the first use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki what the United States now seeks? And can the United States succeed in persuading other nations not to acquire nuclear weapons when it insists not only on possessing them but on using them, and what is more, using them first? Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, comments, "This just undermines our whole argument. We're driving recklessly down a road that we're telling other people not to walk down." And what if, as you cultivate your own new version of the madman theory, your adversary does the same, as Kim Jong Il now is doing? One madman leaves the hope that the adversary may be sane. Two could push us all into the sea of fire.