Page 2 of 2 Ahmadinejad and Bush:
Mirror men By Stephen Zunes
ordering an attack on Israel even if Iran had the means to do so. Though the
clerics certainly take hardline positions on a number of policy areas,
collective leadership normally mitigates impulsive actions such as launching a
war of aggression. Indeed, bold and risky policies rarely come out of
committees.
It should also be noted that while Ahmadinejad is certainly very anti-Israel,
his views are not as extreme as they have been depicted. For example,
Ahmadinejad never actually threatened to
"wipe Israel off the map" nor has he demonstrated a newly hostile Iranian
posture toward the Jewish state. Not only was this oft-quoted statement a
mistranslation – the idiom does not exist in Farsi and the reference was to the
dissolution of the regime, not the physical destruction of the nation –the
Iranian president was quoting from a statement by ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
from over 20 years earlier. In addition, he explicitly told our group on
September 26 that there was "no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict" and that it was "not Iran's intention to destroy Israel".
The Saddam niche
The emphasis and even exaggeration of Ahmadinejad's more bizarre and
provocative statements makes it easier to ignore his more sensible
observations, such as: "Arrogant power seekers and militarists betray God's
will." It also makes it politically easier for the United States to refuse to
engage in dialogue or enter into negotiations, such as those that led to an end
of Libya's nuclear program in 2003. Ahmadinejad has welcomed American religious
delegations to Iran, but the United States has denied visas to Iranian
religious delegations to this country. The Bush administration has also blocked
cultural and scholarly exchanges.
The disproportionate media coverage of Ahmadinejad's UN visit also suggests
that Ahmadinejad fills a certain niche in the American psyche formerly filled
by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi as the Middle
Eastern leader we most love to hate. It gives us a sense of righteous
superiority to compare ourselves to these seemingly irrational and fanatical
foreign despots. If these despots can be inflated into far greater threats than
they actually are, these threats can justify the enormous financial and human
costs of maintaining American armed forces in that volatile region to protect
ourselves and our allies and even to make war against far-off nations in
"self-defense".
Such inflated threats also have the added bonus of silencing critics of
America's overly-militarized Middle East policy, since anyone who dares to
challenge the hyperbole and exaggerated claims regarding these leaders'
misdeeds or to provide a more balanced and realistic assessment of the actual
threat they represent can then be depicted as naive apologists for dangerous
fanatics who threaten our national security.
Furthermore, focusing on Ahmadinejad's transparent double-standards and
hypocrisy makes it easier to ignore similar tendencies by the US president.
Ahmadinejad's speech at the UN on September 25 was widely criticized for its
emphasis on human rights abuses by Israel and the United States while avoiding
mention of his own country's poor human rights record. It helps distract
attention from Bush's speech that same day, in which he criticized human rights
abuses by dictatorial governments in Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Myanmar
and Cuba, but avoided mentioning human rights abuses by Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Equatorial Guinea, Oman, Pakistan, Cameroon and Chad, or any other dictatorship
allied with the United States.
The outreach by Christian clergy to Ahmadinejad, whom The New York Times
described as "the religious president of a religious nation who relishes
speaking on a religious plane", came out of a belief in the importance of
dialogue and reconciliation. Our group emphasized that we were critical of the
US government's threats but also raised concerns on such issues as Iranian
human rights abuses and Ahmadinejad's hostility toward Israel and denial of the
Holocaust. Virtually all our questions, however, were thrown back in criticisms
toward the United States. "Who are the ones that are filling their arsenals
with nuclear weapons?" he said. "The United States has developed a fifth
generation of atomic bombs and missiles that could hit Iran. Who is the real
danger here?"
Indeed, it must seem odd to most people in the Middle East that the United
States, which is 10,000 miles away from the longest-range weapon the Iranians
can currently muster and possesses by far the most powerful militarily
apparatus the world has ever seen, is depicting Iran as the biggest threat to
its national security. As Ahmadinejad put it to our group that morning, "The
United States has many thousands of troops on our borders and threatens to
attack us. Why is it, then, that Iran is seen as a threat?" And though most
Iranians, Arabs, and other Muslims recognize Ahmadinejad as an extremist, he is
unfortunately correct in accusing the United States of unfairly singling out
Iran, an issue that has real resonance in that part of the world.
Indeed, the United States is obsessed with Iran's nuclear program - still many
years away from producing an atomic bomb - while we support the neighboring
states of Pakistan, India and Israel, which have already developed nuclear
weapons and which are also in violation of UN Security Council resolutions
regarding their nuclear programs.
We blame Iran for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, yet 95% of US
casualties are from anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents. We focus on Iranian human
rights abuses while we continue to support the even more oppressive and
theocratic Islamic regime in Saudi Arabia. We attack the Iranian president's
denial of the genocide of European Jews while remaining silent in the face of
Turkish leaders' denial of the genocide of Armenians. One of the most important
principles of most faith traditions is moral consistency. Few receive greater
wrath in most holy texts than hypocrites.
Americans have many legitimate concerns regarding Iranian policies in general
and the statements of Ahmadinejad in particular. However, as long as US policy
appears to be based on such opportunistic double standards rather than
consistent principles, Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric will continue to
find an audience.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San
Francisco, Middle East editor of Foreign Policy In Focus, and the author of
Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage
Press.
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