Juan Cole: Does Iran want to be a pariah?
Iran's hard-liners are pushing their country into a dangerous and perhaps crippling isolation that could, if Tehran continues on this path, eventually make it another North Korea. Having damaged their legitimacy at home with a stolen election, which is still being actively protested in the streets months later, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are thumbing their noses at the international community. The regime is adamant that it will make no concessions in regard to its nuclear research program, even in the face of a threat of increased United Nations sanctions. And Ahmadinejad, on the cusp of his trip to New York this week to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, has veered even deeper into a David Duke-like rhetoric about the Holocaust and the role of Jews in history.
Iran's inflation rate is still over 20 percent. Oil prices have been down this year. Unemployment and underemployment are alleged by regime critics to be massive. The country lacks refining capacity and imports 40 percent of its gasoline, producing occasional rationing. Oil and gas majors such as Royal Dutch Shell and Total S.A. have been scared off from developing Iran's enormous natural gas fields by the threat of U.S. sanctions. The country has been rocked by massive demonstrations by protesters who insist that the June presidential elections were stolen. On Friday, thousands of protesters came into the streets of the capital and of other cities for yet more anti-Ahmadinejad rallies. Although a recent poll suggests that the president has the support of some 60 percent of Iranians, the poll was conducted from abroad by telephone and likely its results were skewed by fear of reprisals on the part of respondents.
Abroad, the president made himself an international laughingstock with his questioning of the full extent of the Holocaust and his expressed conviction that the "Zionist state" in Israel will collapse (widely misinterpreted in the West as a threat to "wipe Israel off the map"). There is increasingly severe talk by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of ratcheting up sanctions, over Iran's insufficient cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, especially with regard to its missile development programs.
Given its economic woes and the box in which the international community has placed its development prospects, you would think the Iranian government would be eager for the direct talks with the United States that are being proffered for the first time in years by the Obama administration, and would go into them trying to make a good impression. Instead, Ahmadinejad gave a major speech on Friday, Jerusalem Day, an annual event devoted to Palestinian solidarity, in which he ventured still deeper into Holocaust denial and further harmed his government's credibility. He called the Holocaust, which he characterized as a mere pretext for Zionist expropriation of Palestine and expulsion of the Palestinians, a "lie" and a "fable."...
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Iran's inflation rate is still over 20 percent. Oil prices have been down this year. Unemployment and underemployment are alleged by regime critics to be massive. The country lacks refining capacity and imports 40 percent of its gasoline, producing occasional rationing. Oil and gas majors such as Royal Dutch Shell and Total S.A. have been scared off from developing Iran's enormous natural gas fields by the threat of U.S. sanctions. The country has been rocked by massive demonstrations by protesters who insist that the June presidential elections were stolen. On Friday, thousands of protesters came into the streets of the capital and of other cities for yet more anti-Ahmadinejad rallies. Although a recent poll suggests that the president has the support of some 60 percent of Iranians, the poll was conducted from abroad by telephone and likely its results were skewed by fear of reprisals on the part of respondents.
Abroad, the president made himself an international laughingstock with his questioning of the full extent of the Holocaust and his expressed conviction that the "Zionist state" in Israel will collapse (widely misinterpreted in the West as a threat to "wipe Israel off the map"). There is increasingly severe talk by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of ratcheting up sanctions, over Iran's insufficient cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, especially with regard to its missile development programs.
Given its economic woes and the box in which the international community has placed its development prospects, you would think the Iranian government would be eager for the direct talks with the United States that are being proffered for the first time in years by the Obama administration, and would go into them trying to make a good impression. Instead, Ahmadinejad gave a major speech on Friday, Jerusalem Day, an annual event devoted to Palestinian solidarity, in which he ventured still deeper into Holocaust denial and further harmed his government's credibility. He called the Holocaust, which he characterized as a mere pretext for Zionist expropriation of Palestine and expulsion of the Palestinians, a "lie" and a "fable."...