SOURCE: Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center
10-1-07

Barry Rubin: In Search of Ahmadinejad

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://gloria.idc.ac.il and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://meria.idc.ac.il . His latest books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).]

A massive controversy has erupted in the United States, and across the world, around Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York, where he spoke at the United Nations and Columbia University.

Who is this man and what does he want? Is he a new Hitler or a leader with understandable grievances who should be engaged in dialogue? Apart from the passion provoked and naïveté too often shown toward this leader, how can we accurately assess him?

Ahmadinejad is a demagogue on a lot of issues for three distinct reasons:

First, he is trying to use his radical stance—extremist even on the already extreme Iranian political spectrum—to gain control of the country. As head of a faction and due to personal ambition he is trying to displace other groups. Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei remains the single most powerful person in Iran and Ahmadinejad real rival within the country.

Second, Ahmadinejad is pursuing the Iranian Islamist revolution’s long-term goal—but one not always given top priority by the regime—of spreading Islamist revolution throughout the region and emerging as the most powerful force in the Middle East. In terms of promoting Iran’s primacy, there is an inherent nationalist as well as Islamist element in his policy.

Third, Ahmadinejad seems to be a true believer in the Iranian Islamist ideology which sees international politics as a struggle between the true followers of the deity and the allies of Satan.

Ahmadinejad’s goals, then, are his control over Iran, Iran’s control over the Persian Gulf area (especially Iraq), Israel’s destruction, Iranian leadership over the Middle East, the expulsion of Western (and especially American) influence from the region, and even world domination, in roughly that order.

Basically, Ahmadinejad is not a unique phenomenon in modern Middle East history. The role to be filled is that of the leader of the Arabs and Muslims as well as prime enemy of America, Israel, and the West. In this respect, he is comparable to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s; Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1970s and 1980s; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and 1990s; and Usama bin Ladin during the period before and especially after September 11, 2001. Yet Ahmadinejad has also become a symbol for the radical Islamist challenge to everyone else in the world

What makes Ahmadinejad different? The key element here, and one due to his own words and behavior, is that he seems not to be held back by caution, a rational calculation of the balance of forces, even if judged by the standard of his predecessors aside from bin Ladin of course. In other words, Ahmadinejad seems capable of anything and consequently far more dangerous. This conclusion is not just a matter of Western projection. I’ll bet that at times he scares even Khamenei.

Here are some elements in that set of problems:

--Ahmadinejad makes statements implying his belief that the end of the world is at hand and the Shia messiah is on the way. Thus, provoking war with Israel or the United States is not so much to be seen as risking the destruction of Iran’s Islamist regime as fulfilling its divine mission.

--For a number of reasons, Ahmadinejad thinks that his side is winning and the West is weak and in retreat. That could provoke him to even more extreme adventurism.

--While other Iranian leaders have spoken about Israel’s destruction, he is putting it higher on his agenda and is more likely to do something to try to implement this objective.

--The way things are going he will one day have nuclear weapons to play with in fulfilling his goals. Two important points should be noted here. First, the bombs and missiles would be held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, his close ally and the main liaison between Iran and terrorist groups, itself raising the prospect of their being used. Second, even if Iran never used nuclear weapons the effect on the region would be devastating. Arab governments would rush to appease Iran; large numbers of Arabs would rush to join radical Islamist groups believing that this movement is the wave of the future.

--In Iraq, Iran has gone into a virtual state of war against the United States trying to project Tehran’s influence and killing American soldiers.

--Ahmadinejad has also become, for all practical purposes, the leader in promoting hatred of the United States and not only of Israel but of Jews in general.

What undercuts the dangers posed by Ahmadinejad? He still does not have full control over Iran and may never achieve this goal. Since he is a Shia Muslim and is not an Arab it is more difficult for him to play a leadership role over the largely Sunni Muslim Arabic-speaking world. Not impossible, as these barriers have been partly overcome, but harder nonetheless.

Thus, Ahmadinejad has not yet achieved the status of being equivalent to Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin as the world’s leading threat to peace and freedom but he is certainly trying to rise to this level.

It should be rather obvious that this is not a problem caused by lack of communication and that engagement with him will not have any moderating effect. He must be opposed and his regime pressured. Aside from the problems posed by the Iranian government in general, taking a tough stand against Ahmadinejad is necessary to convince his colleague-rivals that they must get rid of this guy and tone down their country’s behavior in order to ensure their own survival and that of their regime.

Read entire article at Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center

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Peter,

Mr. Rubin might write a book on the topic. But what we have above is a short article and such articles do not cover every imaginable topic.

You appear to agree with the gist of what he writes. You criticize him for saying the obvious. But, in fact, there are a plethora of people who have no idea what Ahmadinejad and his ilk are about. So, the article provides useful information and perspective. And, it helps educate people to understand how dangerous Iran and its leadership really are. And, Iran really is very dangerous.

I am not a policy maker. I, instead, propose what I think is likely to happen, not what ought to happen, whether or not under Bush or his successor. I, in fact, do not know what ought to be done. I do not think such to be an historians question, for what it is worth, because it requires a different skill set than most historians have to offer.

In any event, I think the US will, in due course, take military action. Whether that is a good approach is another story.

And, I do not think that Clinton or Giuliani will follow a very different path on this than Mr. Bush. In the case of Giuliani, his adviser is Mr. Podhoretz who believes that without setting back the Islamist agenda by military means, the position of the US in the world will suffer a dramatic decline. Mrs. Clinton, who has only somewhat more dovish advisers, is also thought to be a hawk with respect to Iran.

The Europeans, it is to be noted, have also recently noted that soft-power has not had much influence on Iran's behavior. The negotiations have been a complete failure - which, to anyone other than a dope, was obvious before the negotiations began - because Iran will not trade what it views as existentially important for money. Hence, we have European leaders like the socialist foreign minister of France, Kouchner, speaking about the use of military force to stop Iran.

In any event, the choices here are few: either stop Iran by military force or stop Iran by deterrence. The latter approach is, I would think, preferable in theory but the notion that religious lunatics cannot be deterred cannot be ignored. So, this is a real dilemma.

art eckstein - 10/7/2007

As usual, Mr. Clarke version of things is highly inaccurate.

1. Nazism wasn't wildly popular in late 1932 and early 1933; the Nazis got less of the popular vote in Nov. 1932 than in the July elections (where they'd gotten a lot of protest votes; they lost 30 seats in the Reichstag from July), and the NSDAP was far from a majority in the Reichstag. They were the numerically most important single German party in 1932-1933 but did not command a popular vote or Reichstag majority. Sleazy maneuvering led to Hitler's appt as Chancellor, followed by, e.g., the Reichstag Fire and the proclamation of emergency decrees by which the Nazis established their dictatorship. The negative power of intimidation by a ruthless minority, followed by great foreign policy successes, are what established Hitler's popularity by 1936-1937.

This is not to defend the German people, many of whom later became "Hitler's Willing Executioners." (a book of which, however, Clarke has read too much; he should read Jeffrey Herf's review of this inaccurate book in The New Republic.) My point is only that Hitler BECAME very popular. He didn't command a majority in January 1933.

2. The real problem was that the NSDAP and the KDP (German Communist Party) were BOTH out to destroy Weimar democracy in 1932-1933, and together they DID command a majority of the popular vote, vs. the more moderate parties, the SPD and the Catholic Center Party (which became the Christian Democrats after the war). The far left had a large part in the destruction of Weimar democracy.

3. As for Iran, the victory of A-jad was NOT caused by the American invasion of Iran, but by the Religious "Guardian" Council of clerics, which forbade even relatively liberal candidates from running at all in the 2004 parliamentary elections and thus stacked the deck in the 2004 elections against anyone who had supported Khatami. The Religious "Guardian" Council had been following this anti-Khatami policy for fully three years by that point.
Clarke wants to blame everything on the Americans, as usual, and he refuses to allow radical Muslims their own agency and (vicious) motives, as usual. It's always all some sort of reasonable reaction to American action--NOT.

If anything, the Khatami govt was not enraged but rather impressed with the American victory in March-April 2003 and tried to come to an arrangement with Bush. How far the Khatami govt would've been allowed to actually go by the reactionary Guardian Council is very very debatable. But the Bush govt very stupidly and over-confidently refused to engage.
Once A-jad was in "elected" power in 2004, then the Iranian govt--which includes the Religious "Guardian" Council above all--began to support the insurgency and the terrorists 100%, providing them (now increasingly) with very sophisticated weapons, while accelerating the development of the A-bomb. Things might have been very different if a free election had been allowed and Khatami-style candidates allowed to run. But this was prevented-and it is about to be prevented AGAIN by the Guardians, who are above all--ABOVE ALL-- concerned with the imposition and maintenance of "proper islam" on Iran and the iranian people. However unpopular the Guardians are, and this is actually uncertain (is it really so overwhelming?), they have great physical power of coercion, including with the ruthless Army of the Guardians of the Revolution, i.e., the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) thugs of whom A-jad was a leader.

But the Religious "Guardian" Council had been appalled all along by Khatami's relative liberalization policies, and had backed the A-jad style Pasdaran thugs against the university students in spring and summer 2001. This was the crushing of "the Tehran Spring." NOTE, Clarke, that this crucial event in Iranian political history occurred BEFORE 9/11, and long LONG before the invasion of Iraq. Most things in Iran flow from these crucial events. Khatami should've sided with the students, in which case we'd have a liberal Iran. But instead he went along with the Guardians, severely his own influence with everyone on both sides. This crucial event had literally nothing to do with the U.S.

N. Friedman - 10/6/2007

I do not think I disagree with much of anything in the article. Very, very good.