What Should We Make of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s “Letter to the Noble Americans”

On November 29, 2006 the dubiously-elected President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, had published in his name an epistle to the people of the United States.  Herewith is an analysis of, and commentary upon, this letter1 (with relevant quotations of Ahmadinezhad’s reproduced): 

Right after opening with the bismillah, invoking Allah the Merciful and Compassionate, Ahmadinezhad prays that God will “bestow upon humanity the perfect human being promised…and make us among his followers.”  This perfect human being is none other than the Awaited Mahdi, usually called the Twelfth Imam in Iranian Shi`ism.  The Mahdi is “the rightly-guided one” who will, according to both Sunni and Shi`i traditions, come before the end of time to create a just global caliphate.  (The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will.)  Ahmadinezhad uttered the same prayer twice, back in his September, 2006 address before the U.N. General Assembly. 

Iran’s president then quickly moves from the sublime to the ridiculous, where he firmly stays for most of the rest of his letter.  Much of it reads as if penned by Howard Dean — well, if the religious convictions were extracted, that is. Of course “the pretext of [the] existence of weapons of mass destruction…[was] just a lie and deception” for the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.   No doubt Ahmadinezhad has a “Bush Lied, People Died” sticker on his mahdimobile.  He even plays the Cindy Sheehan card: “mothers and relatives” of U.S. soldiers there “have, on numerous occasions, displayed their discontent….” 

Iran’s president does not explain how he knows that “American soldiers often wonder why they have been sent to Iraq;” perhaps the Hidden Imam is supplying him with this information, gathered mystically or telepathically.  Seemingly having been briefed on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,  Ahmadinezhad fulminates that “the US Administration is kidnapping its presumed opponents from across the globe and arbitrarily holding them without trial…in horrendous prisons….”  The prime examples of American “illegal and immoral behavior” are of course “the sad stories of Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib prisons.”  The Iranian president’s main source of information on the American domestic scene would seem to be moveon.org (or perhaps network news), for according to him not only are “private phones tapped [and] suspects arbitrarily arrested,” but Americans are also “sometimes beaten in the streets, or even shot to death.”  Ahmadinezhad seems unable to differentiate plain old American street violence, or football victory celebration, from political repression.  And regarding shootings, maybe he was referring to water cannons, in which case Representative John Lewis (D-GA) would no doubt agree (although no one’s seen one here in Atlanta for decades, even during fires). 

However, lest the DNC and the new Democrat majority in Congress get too uppity,  Ahmadinezhad has a warning for them, too: “if the approach remains the same, it would not be unexpected that the American people would similarly reject the new electoral winners….”  Hear that, Independents?  The President of Iran feels your pain.  McCain/Mahmoud 2008? 

Another of Ahmadinezhad’s favorite themes is condemning Israel and shedding crocodile tears for the Palestinians.2 Iran’s president cannot even bring himself to refer to Israel by name: rather, he terms it the “Zionist regime” (which, admittedly, is less hyperbolic than the Arabic al-`adu, “the enemy,” the usual term applied to Israel in the Arab media).  This “regime” — which, one might note, is a product of true democracy and not merely the democratic patina overlaying a theocratic dictatorship which produced Ahmadinezhad — “has driven millions of the inhabitants of Palestine out of their homes,” “many of [whom] have died in the Diaspora and refugees camps.”  Ahmadinezhad conveniently ignores the fact that front-line Arab states have for decades kept Palestinians in those very camps, opting to exploit them against “the Jews” rather than help them assimilate into their own societies. 

Of course “the Zionists” perpetrate “persistent aggressions” — presumably like the Hizbullah-created war of this past summer?  Granted, one can question Israel’s airstrikes on Beirut and other non-Hizbullah areas, but there is no doubt who started that war, and it was not Israel.  Ahmadinezhad wonders why there is this “blind support for the Zionists,” and “what have the Zionists done for the American people that the US administration considers itself obliged to blindly support these infamous aggressors?”  Well, he then answers his own question with the standard Iranian anti-Jewish conspiracy theory: “because they have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors.”

And of course there’s Iraq. Not only is the U.S. responsible for the death, maiming and displacement of “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,” but it has done “nothing…to rebuild the ruins, to restore the infrastructure or to alleviate poverty.”  Nothing?  Of course, that probably passes for fact in a country where the state-run media produces TV specials which claim that Pepsi stands for “Place Every Penny to Save Israel.”  But Ahmadinezhad certainly knows how to play the American media; in fact,  Usama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri could take lessons from him on  doing so.  There were probably multiple cases of whiplash from vigorous head-nodding at the New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN when editors read “would it not be more beneficial to bring the U.S. officers and soldiers home and to spend the astronomical US military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and prosperity of the American people? As you know very well, many victims of Katrina continue to suffer….”  Nagin/Mahmoud 2008? 

There is one theme in this letter that sounds a more hopeful note for American-Iranian relations, even under this theocratic regime: several times Ahmadinezhad refers to the American people as “God-fearing,” and once as “followers of Divine religion.”  This flies totally in the face of Sunni jihadist ideology, a la Bin Ladin, which maintains that Americans are nothing more than “infidels” and “Crusaders.”  If, as many suspect, Ahmadinezhad takes his marching orders from the ayatollahs (primarily Khamanei), this may indicate a more accommodationist strain toward the American Christian imperium in institutional Iranian Shi`ism than in hardline Sunnism.  Or it may simply indicate another aspect of the attempt by the Iranian leadership to further drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the American electorate and the current administration.  For that reason, President Bush should probably keep Teheran at arm’s length for the time being.

But how long can the U.S. afford to refuse diplomatic relations with one of the key nations in the Middle East?  The hostage crisis is long past, Khomeini is long dead and we do have ambassadors in capitals of countries every bit as unsavory as Iran (Beijing comes to mind).  If, as Ahmadinezhad claims, both the American and Iranian people “embrace…compassion, empathy, respect for the rights of human beings, securing justice and equity and defending the innocent and weak,” then having a Farsi-speaking ambassador in Teheran to question the persecution of, say, Baha’is would, if nothing else, point out the hypocrisy of such self-righteous epistles as this.