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2 How under-the-gun Iran plays it
cool By Pepe Escobar
More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh
disclosed in the New Yorker how President George W
Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes
against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize
that country has proceeded in a relentless,
Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques
and semantic contortions that were so familiar in
the period before the Bush administration launched
its invasion of Iraq.
The campaign's
greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs"
are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian
weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq;
Iranian gunboats are provoking US warships in the
Persian Gulf. Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda,
a terror state aimed at the heart of the United
States. It's idle to expect the American
mainstream media to offer any tools that
might put this
orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
Here
are just a few recent instances of the ongoing
campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring
nuclear weapons". Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the
Pentagon is planning for "potential military
courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In
tandem with US commander in Iraq General David
Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly
lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he
claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on
Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he
has "no smoking gun which could prove that the
highest leadership [of Iran] is involved".
But keep in mind one thing the Great
Saddam take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking
gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week,
the US is ominously floating a second aircraft
carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.
But what of Iran itself under the blizzard
of charges and threats? What to make of it? What
does the world look like from Tehran? Here are
five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to
better decode the Iranian chessboard.
1. Don't underestimate the power of
Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of the
world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf.
Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is
Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological - and
revolutionary - religion, fueled by a passionate
mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much
as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam,
some Westerners should feel a certain empathy for
intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea
towards the vacuous material world.
For
more than 1,000 years, Shi'ite Islam has, in fact,
been a galaxy of Shi'isms - a kind of Fourth World
of its own, always cursed by political exclusion
and implacable economic marginalization, always
carrying an immensely dramatic view of history
with it.
It's impossible to understand
Iran without grasping the contradiction that the
Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling,
however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds
of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of
the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion,
because it detracts from the umma, the
global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they
see it, is but a way-station on the road to the
final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam.
To venture beyond the present stage of
history, however, they also recognize the
necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that
offers Shi'ism a sanctuary - and that, of course,
happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs,
the concept of nation-state - a heritage, in any
case, of the West - will disappear, replaced by a
community organized according to the will of
Prophet Mohammad.
In the right context,
this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly
became a mashti - a pilgrim visiting a
privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy
shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of
the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only
foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black
chadors and white turbans occupying every
square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a
tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a
believer, just a simple infidel.
2.
Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the
holy city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in
Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms,
that, as far as the major ayatollahs are
concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the
rest of Islam to the original purity and
revolutionary power of Shi'ism - a religion
invariably critical of the established social and
political order.
Even a Shi'ite leader in
Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching
and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to
be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of
the Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Indian worlds. It
is the key transit point of the Middle East, the
Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the
Indian sub-continent. It lies between three seas
(the Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the sea of
Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of
Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the
ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the
country's third-largest city, is roughly
equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder US
Vice President Dick Cheney, checking out Iran,
"salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock
'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).
Members of the Iranian upper middle
classes in north Tehran might spin dreams of Iran
recapturing the expansive range of influence once
held by the Persian empire; but the silky,
Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they
really dream of is an Iran respected as a major
regional power.
To this end, they have
little choice, faced with the enmity of the
globe's "sole superpower", but to employ a
sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy.
After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by
post-September 11 American military bases in
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq and the Gulf
states. It faces the US military on its Afghan,
Iraqi, Pakistani and Persian Gulf borders, and
lives with ever-tightening US economic sanctions,
as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush
administration threats involving possible air
assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other)
facilities.
The Iranian counter-response
to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or
pariah state has been to develop a "Look East"
foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to
American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy
has been conducted with great skill by Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in
Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy
deals with China, India and Pakistan, it looks as
well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of
American neo-cons, an intercontinental "axis of
evil" air link already exists - a weekly
commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.
Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is
now striking. When I was in Bolivia this year, I
learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela
had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo
Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales
"everything he wanted" to offset the influence of
"American imperialism".
Meanwhile, a
fierce energy competition is developing among the
Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Americans -
all placing their bets on which future trade
routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural
gas flow out of Central Asia.
As a player,
Iran is trying to position itself as the
unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled
new Silk Road - the backbone of a new Asian energy
security grid. That's how it could recover some of
the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of
Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main
reason why US neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons,
armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are
throwing such a collective - and threatening -
fit.
3. What is Ahmadinejad up
to?: Ever since the days when former
Iranian president Mohammed Khatami suggested a
"dialogue of civilizations", Iranian diplomats
have endlessly repeated the official position on
Iran's nuclear program: it's peaceful; the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has
found no proof of the military development of
nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes
atomic weapons; and Iran - unlike the US - has not
invaded or attacked any nation for the past
quarter millennium.
Think of George W Bush
and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as the
new Blues Brothers: both believe they are on a
mission from God. Both are religious
fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in
the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite
messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden
since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently
in a coming end and the return of Jesus Christ.
But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and
constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from
the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad
is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new
Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad is relentlessly
depicted as an angry, totally irrational,
Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who
wants to "wipe Israel off the map". That infamous
quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context,
comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure
anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad
really said, in a literal translation from Farsi,
was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must
vanish from the pages of time". He was actually
quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said it first in
the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so
unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced
by another more equitable one. He was not,
however, threatening to nuke Israel.
In
the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq
war, Khomeini also made it very clear that the
production, possession or use of nuclear weapons
is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa - a religious
injunction - under the same terms. For the
theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear
program is a powerful symbol of independence
vis-a-vis what is still widely considered by
Iranians of all social classes and educational
backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.
Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear
program. It's his bread and butter in terms of
domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq war, he
was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam
Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became
friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the
Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents
have been trained in guerrilla warfare.
Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad,
the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite
division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the
Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of 20
million"), are betting on a US attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's
theocratic regime and their faction of it.
Reformists refer to Russian President
Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October,
when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very
rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve
the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would
halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return
for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development
in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the
IAEA.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator of
that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme
Leader Khamenei, as well as the leader himself let
it be known that the idea would be seriously
considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately
contradicted the
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