Last week, the head of
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed
ElBaradei, reiterated his agency's conclusive
finding that there is no evidence that Iran is
proliferating nuclear weapons, but you would not
know that if you watched a much-publicized
documentary on Iran, Showdown with Iran,
aired on the Public Broadcasting Corporation's
Frontline program the night before the
White House announced tough new sanctions on Iran.
This documentary faithfully recycles the official
US line on Iran's
nuclear program without ever
questioning it.
The hour-long program
features interviews with various US and Iranian
officials as well as Iran experts, including a
former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who
assures the viewers that the US can weather the
blowback of a military strike on Iran.
Interestingly, the same analyst - Reuel Marc
Gerecht - formerly writing under the pseudonym
Edward Shirley, is on record during the 1990s, eg,
in the influential Foreign Affairs, predicting the
imminent "melt down" of the Islamic Republic and
advising the White House not to waste time with
Iran's moderates.
Probing the root causes
of moderates' loss in Iran and the resurgence of
hardliners, the documentary rehashes what is
already well known: that the first Bush
administration missed a golden opportunity to
reach a breakthrough with Iran, which cooperated
on Afghanistan and was rewarded by being branded
as a part of "axis of evil", and that Iran has
been using the US's quagmire in Iraq basically as
an insurance policy.
One of those
interviewed is Hillary Mann, formerly directing
the Iran policy at the National Security Council,
who states categorically that if the US were
successful in Iraq, then Iran would have been
next. Another is former deputy secretary of state
Richard Armitage, who flatly disputes the claim by
another Iran expert at the National Security
Council, Flynt Leverett, that the White House made
a grave error by ignoring a two-page fax from Iran
in 2003 that proposed a "grand bargain".
Recently, Leverett and others have made
much of that fax, sent by Iran's former ambassador
to France, Sadegh Kharazi, reportedly with the
blessing of higher-ups in Tehran, but that is
simplistic and overlooks the logic of conflict
rooted in the post-September 11, 2001, collision
course between the intrusive Western superpower
and the assertive Iranian power.
The
documentary relies on the statements of a former
Iranian presidential chief of staff, Mohammad Ali
Abtahi, to press the point about George W Bush's
role in the moderates' marginalization in today's
Iran, but that is giving Abtahi, a gentle fellow
with little or no input in national security
matters, undue attention.
The documentary
manages some light on Iran's national security
mindset by interviewing a former Foreign Ministry
spokesperson, Faramarz Assefi, now a senior
diplomat, and Mohammad Jafari, a member of the
Supreme National Security Council, identified as a
commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
Corps' Quds Force. Jafari refuses to answer
questions about Iran's role in Iraq and, yet,
makes the important point that the majority of
suicide bombers in Iraq come from countries
friendly with the United States.
One of
the more interesting aspects of this documentary
is its interview with the controversial editor of
the onservative daily Kayhan, identified as the
voice of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, yet that is questionable since the
leader is equally identified with another Tehran
daily, Etelaat, that typically stays above the
political fray.
Be that as it may,
Kayhan's editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, is shown
beaming with optimism about the "new Middle East",
promising that it will not be the one envisioned
by the US, but rather by "Islam". Shariatmadari's
confidence is clearly shared by the members of the
Mahmud Ahmadinejad administration, who regard
Israel's failure last summer to dislodge Hezbollah
in Lebanon as a great victory for the noble cause.
With respect to the central question of a
US-Iran showdown, the documentary's opinion
sampling of average Iranians reveals a strong
nationalist sentiment that transcends the
religious-secular divide and will likely grow
exponentially more powerful in the event the US
commits the grave error of provoking an assault on
Iran.
Turning to Iranian "dissidents", the
documentary shows one, Jaafarzadeh, setting up
shop in Washington on behalf of the Iraq-based
opposition group, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, and
expressing pride in his group's role in providing
vital intelligence for US forces in Iraq. A sore
point in the US-Iran rounds of dialog in Iraq, the
issue of armed Iranian oppositions harbored by the
US in Iraq is touched on by the documentary as
particularly disturbing to the Iranian regime. The
producers may have as well touched on other
US-backed anti-Tehran groups, such as Jundallah,
operating out of Pakistan and reportedly trained
and financed by the US Central Intelligence
Agency, or the Kurdish group, PJAK (Party of Free
Life of Kurdistan); the conspicuous absence of any
reference to these groups represents one of the
film's numerous flaws.
But, as stated
above, Showdown's biggest defect is with
respect to Iran's nuclear program. Throughout the
program, the only point of view heard on this is
that of the US government, with the voice-over of
Bush repeatedly hammering the point about Iran's
quest for nuclear weapons casting the shadow of
"nuclear holocaust" over the Middle East.
Curiously absent is any direct or indirect
rebuttal of that point of view, either by an
Iranian official, former official, or, for that
matter, any of the several "experts" used on the
show.
As a result, Showdown with
Iran merely recycles what has been adopted as
an article of faith in the US media, without
showing the slightest sign of digressing from this
"regime of truth" dictated from Washington. But,
had the producer bothered to interview any IAEA
official, then the audience would have learnt that
after some 2,200 days of inspection of Iran's
nuclear facilities since 2003, there is no
evidence of any military diversion.
Given
the above, the film deserves at best a "C" grade,
because in the final analysis it perpetuates the
artificial sense of crisis generated in
Washington, as a prelude for a confrontation with
Iran, largely as a proxy war on behalf of Israel.
[1]
Yet, regarding the latter, the program
naively mirrors the point of view of a former
Israeli intelligence official without an iota of
critical reflection, ie, that Israel's self-made
dead end in peace talks with the Palestinians and
Arabs may have something to do with why its
leaders are working overtime to convince
Washington to drop bombs on Iran.
After
all, a prominent Israeli pundit, Martin Van
Crevled, has openly admitted that the Israeli
leaders know there is no imminent threat from Iran
and yet refuse to say so publicly because of all
the "weapons we receive from the US".
It
is noteworthy that Iraq's National Security
Advisor Muwaffak al-Rubaie, in his recent visit to
the US, warned against any US military action
against Iran, calling it a "mistake of Chernobyl
magnitude", referring to the civilian nuclear
accident in the Soviet Union in 1986. While
criticizing Iran's "meddling" in Iraq, Rubaie has
nonetheless placed the primary blame on the Bush
administration for not being "serious about
engagement with Iran" and having "no immediate
vested interests in the stability of Iraq".
Another flaw of the program is its
uncritical endorsement of its "Iran experts", such
as Vali Nasr - who has theorized (to Washington's
delight) the primacy of the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict
over the anti-occupation insurgency, without ever
bothering to delve into the complex interplay of
the two. And Hooshang Amirahmadi, the head of the
American-Iranian Council, who implies that
Ahmadinejad invites a confrontation with the US
and has no qualms about death and destruction
because in the end the winner would be "Islam".
Ahmadinejad spent much of his time in his
recent visit to New York to debunk precisely this
false image of him, propagated by the pro-Israel
pundits such as Michael Ledeen and Bernard Lewis,
that raise the specter of "Islamo-fascism" by
projecting a distorted image of Shi'ite
eschatology and apocalypticism as inherently
violent. [2]
In conclusion, Showdown
with Iran represents a half-satisfactory,
largely unconvincing, albeit occasionally
refreshing, attempt to get to the bottom of the
mounting threats of war between US and Iran.
Unfortunately, due to its serious shortcomings
cited above, its main contribution is to add fresh
logs to the US's public relations fire against
Iran.
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.
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