Iran: Khomeini's 'killer poison'
returns By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Former Iranian president Ayatollah Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has published a
confidential letter by the late ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, which has stirred a great deal of
controversy in Iran, in part because the letter
refers to a military commander's call to pursue
nuclear weapons to be deployed against Iran's
hostile neighbor, Iraq.
The letter's
significance, and the critical timing of its
disclosure, cannot be overstated. Until now, there
had been no official voices
in favor of nuclear
proliferation and plenty of opposite
declarations
led by
Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who
has issued a religious decree, a fatwa,
against it.
In his letter to political
leaders, dated 1988, Khomeini does not make any
judgment on the commander's position, which he
mentions in passing in a narrative devoted to
explaining the underlying reasons for his fateful
decision to accept a United Nations resolution
calling for a ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War.
These were the government's financial inability to
persecute the war, failures in the battlefield,
Saddam Hussein's backing by the United States, the
increasing Americanization of the war, etc.
Khomeini's letter sets out the
requirements of military commanders if they are to
continue fighting against Iraq. It mentions more
aircraft, helicopters, men and weapons, and also
quotes the top commander saying that Iran would -
within five years - need laser-guided and atomic
weapons if it were to win the war.
To open
a caveat, this author was once told by a
Revolutionary Guards commander that the war had so
drained the government's purse that in the end
very little on the military's procurement list
could be purchased. "We showed the list to the
Imam and informed him that we had ran out of
money."
"You my dear ones know that this
decision [ceasefire] has been like a killer
poison, but I have endured it in the path of God
and for the sake of dignity of Islam and the
protection of our Islamic Republic," Khomeini's
letter reads in part. The office in charge of
Khomeini's texts has openly objected to
Rafsanjani's publication of the letter without
prior permission by the office. And there has been
a spate of commentaries, both pro and against, in
the nation's dailies and on the Internet.
From the vantage point of Rafsanjani and
his pragmatic moderate camp, Khomeini's letter is
a timely reminder of the 1979 revolution's
founding father's political wisdom in setting a
precedent for principled compromises and
flexibilities for the sake of what Khomeini and
other religious leaders such as Jamal al-din
Assadabadi called hobbe vatan, love of the
country.
Does the same principle now call
for a similar compromise with regard to the
nuclear crisis? Rafsanjani and his circle of
policymakers, which includes the former chief
nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, appear to
think so, as they have been openly critical of the
hard line adopted by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
and his foreign-policy team. Ahmadinejad defeated
Rafsanjani in the latter's 2005 re-election bid.
In an interview with a Tehran daily,
Rafsanjani has elaborated on the wartime divisions
between the regular army and the Revolutionary
Guards, implicitly criticizing the latter for some
of the setbacks. This was much to the chagrin of
the then-head of the Guards, Mohsen Rezai, who has
pointed the finger back at Rafsanjani, who was the
commander-in-chief of the whole army at the time
of the conflict in the 1980s.
But another
point conveyed in this heated debate deals with
the unprecedented presence of Revolutionary Guards
within the present government, which might hurl
the country back to the unreconstructed radicalism
of the 1980s. For his part, Ahmadinejad has lashed
out at the "mythmakers" who vilify the gains of
the "sacred defense" during the eight-year war
with Iraq. Iran's pluralistic polity has now
seemingly split somewhat equally between sharply
contrasting camps on the nuclear issue, each
trying to draw on the arsenal of Khomeini's legacy
to gain the upper hand.
'Imam's line'
revisited The mere fact that current
leaders have resorted to the emphatic memory of
Khomeini in defense of their nuclear and
foreign-policy positions, as well as his
sanctioning of the moderate and hardline factions
as legitimate factions of the state, is a vivid
reminder of the futility of so many analyses who
have heralded a "post-Khomeini" order in Iran.
To many, Ahmadinejad reminds them of the
crusading militancy of the 1980s, instead of the
"pragmatic" turns of the 1990s. Yet Khomeini's
letter poses the norm-testing question: To what
extent is there a Khomeinist mimetic rationality
at work on the part of Ahmadinejad? Can
Ahmadinejad's stated reverence for the "Imam's
line" reduce itself to a mere attitude of
affirming it as a legitimating device while
degrading its validity as an epistemic device,
above all criteria for nuclear decision-making?
Obviously not, which makes the president's
job of rationalizing his seemingly inflexible
position on the nuclear issue somewhat difficult,
in light of the present reminder to the Iranian
public of the Imam's directives through the
controversy swirling around Khomeini's letter.
No doubt Iran has come a long way since
the guns fell silent at the Iran-Iraq border 18
years ago. For one thing, the threat of Saddam and
his chemical and nuclear weapons has disappeared.
This in turn undermines the rationale suggested by
the commander quoted in Khomeini's letter.
Iran is comparatively much stronger now,
has refurbished its army, has a more sophisticated
network of allies in the region and beyond, has
carefully implemented a sphere of influence
abroad, and enjoys a measure of oil-based
prosperity.
Ahmadinejad's internal
detractors are concerned about a military showdown
with the US in the not too distant future, which
might put the country back several decades, not
unlike Lebanon today.
Certainly, Iran
might still declare victory after survived a
superpower's onslaught, but for a country that has
endured a grueling eight-year war with monumental
sacrifices, the price may simply be too high to
bear. Should Ahmadinejad now drink the "poisonous
chalice" of suspension of uranium-enrichment
activities? That seems to be the real message
intended behind the unexpected publication of the
Imam's letter.
Iran is preparing for a
possible confrontation - and sanctions - with the
US and the United Nations over its persistence not
to give up this right to enrichment under the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in its pursuit of
peaceful nuclear technology.
In the
context of a revolutionary trapping, there is the
perennial problem of selectivity: On what ground
may a foreign policy addressing a specific
national interest stand back from the abstract
rights and ideals? Today, Iran's debate on nuclear
diplomacy does not so much deal with the
"contending foreign-policy orientations" as with
the contrasting interpretation of the revolution's
authenticity.
However, the problem is that
Khomeini's legacy is not pre-packaged with
specific action-issuing guidelines, and the unique
constellation of policy-relevant factors in 1988
cannot be mechanically interpreted for the sake of
today's nuclear crisis. Ahmadinejad's pattern of
self-accelerated change has had certain dividends,
for example with respect to enhancing Iran's power
projection in its immediate regions. And to his
credit he has addressed some of the previous
malaise in Iran's foreign policy that had weakened
the country. The challenge before him now is how
to navigate the ship of Islamic revolution beyond
the turbulent waters of the nuclear crisis,
without exacting too much from the compound net of
Iran's interests.
The Islamic Republic is
in the throes of self-traumatizing over the issue
of how would the Imam decide had he been alive -
would he suspend the enrichment process, and for
how long, and under what terms? Would he favor or
disfavor nuclear proliferation in the
post-September 11, 2001, era marked with the
demise of Saddam and the US occupation of two of
Iran's neighbors?
The compass of
Khomeini's legacy is a firm criterion for deciding
in favor of preferences based on Iran-centered
needs, which Khomeini cherished - as his late
tactical concession to the governmental aspects of
national interests clearly showed.
Relearning from Khomeini and following the
Imam's "line" might after all prove a timely
antidote to the growing political impasse over the
nuclear issue, reflected in the rapidity of
oscillations with respect to the international
incentives package offered by the UN's permanent
five plus Germany for Iran to stop enrichment
activities. Without doubt, the long-term
policy ramifications of Iran's acceptance of a
ceasefire in August 1988 have not run out of
steam, and they have now complicated the tough
stance of Iran's president. The crux of the
problem with his presidency may turn out to be how
to avoid the impression of ideological fixity
while professing his loyalty and fidelity to the
Imam's line.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's
Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs,
Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review,
and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
