Ahmadinejad hits back at
Obama By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In a sharply-worded press conference,
Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad hit back at
Barack Obama, predicting that "a future more
shameful than his predecessor" is awaiting the
United States president, whom he accused of adding
deception to the mix of George W Bush's hegemonic
policies in the Middle East.
At the same
time, instead of an unbounded expression of
hostility toward the US, Ahmadinejad in the same
Tehran press conference on Monday somewhat amended
his view by adding that Iran considered itself a
"friend with all nations and governments against
the Zionist regime". Echoing the president's
statement, Iran's permanent representative to the
United Nations, Mohammad Khazaee, said Iran was
willing to enter into another
round of nuclear talks with
the "Iran Six" nations "without any
preconditions".
By all indications,
Amhadinejad's decision to up the ante against the
US president is a reaction to Obama's recent new
year message, that reached out to youths to revolt
against Iran's leaders (see Obama
fans flames of animosity in Tehran Asia Times
Online, March 22, 2011), thus following the
footsteps of Iran's spiritual leader, who also
lambasted Obama for betraying his promised
sea-change in US foreign behavior.
Ahmadinejad accused the US of being the
motivating force behind the anti-Iran stance of
the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, who in
their latest communique accused Iran of meddling
in Bahrain's affairs. At the same time,
Ahmadinejad accused the US and Israel of
conspiring to "partition Jordan" under the guise
of establishing a Palestinian state. He defended
Tehran's decision to extend an invitation to
Jordan's King Abdullah bin Hussein II and
maintained that Abdullah had postponed the trip,
contrary to reports that Iran had done so.
Regarding the future of the current US
administration, the Iranian president said, "I
believe that [Bush] left the scene of politics
with shame, but his successor will have to leave
the scene of politics with much more shame because
of his resort to both force and deception."
According to a Tehran University political
science professor who spoke with the author on the
condition of anonymity, Ahmadinejad has "no more
illusions about Obama" and may even regret that he
had sent two (hitherto unanswered) letters to
Obama. Coinciding with Ahmadinejad's press
conference was the ominous news as far as Tehran
is concerned that Germany now refuses to be the
go-between for the India-Iran oil transactions,
thus putting a question mark over the future of
that lucrative trade involving billions of dollars
of foreign exchange for Tehran.
"Perhaps
more than anything else, President Ahmadinejad is
appalled by Obama's hypocrisy of tacitly condoning
Saudi Arabia's military intervention in Bahrain
and ignoring the brutal suppression of Bahraini
Shi'ites," said the Tehran professor, who
predicted US-Iran relations would take a more
antagonistic turn in the near future.
Maybe so, but the two sides should not
allow rhetoric to supplant prudent policies. Even
with respect to Bahrain, the White House is not
completely on the same page with Riyadh and there
are indications that the purpose of Defense
Secretary Robert Gates' trip to Saudi Arabia this
week is to relay some of Obama administration's
unhappiness with Saudis' role in Bahrain.
Not only that, one may even safely
speculate about a margin of policy symbiosis or
coinciding points of views between Washington and
Tehran regarding the current upheavals in the Arab
word, in light of Iran's support for the
democratic transitions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen
and elsewhere in the Middle East.
In other
words, the surface appearance of a zero-sum,
win-lose, competition, as contended by a recent
monograph on "strategic competition" between US
and Iran put out by the Washington, DC,
think-tank, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, doesn't match the facts.
A main flaw of such studies - found
aplenty in the US nowadays - is that they either
completely overlook or underestimate the pool of
shared interests between the US and Iran - in
Iraq, Afghanistan, regarding trafficking in
narcotics, and even the political evolution of the
closed political systems of the Middle East -
although on the latter one can argue that the US
has simply tried to adopt itself to forced
circumstances that has warranted the abandonment
of loyal allies such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
In fact, it is far better to conceptualize
the net of US-Iran relations from the prism of
"mixed motives" and games of strategy, denoting
simultaneous conflict and cooperation, given the
fact that both Tehran and Washington have vested
interests with the current regimes in Baghdad and
Kabul. In such a complex game, it is important to
maintain a healthy equilibrium, instead of
forfeiting one dimension entirely for the sake of
the either.
The US should be careful not
to antagonize Iran any further, or to give the
wrong impression that in order to make Saudi
Arabia happy it has completely ignored Iran's
legitimate interests, such as natural solidarity
with Shi'ites in the region, in which case
Washington should expect to see certain practical
follow-ups from the stern anti-Obama gestures of
Ahmadinejad mentioned above.
In that case,
more rather than less instability in the region
will follow, all the more reason for US
policymakers to heed Ahmadinejad's persistent call
for US-Iran relations based on "justice and mutual
respect" ie, horizontal and non-hegemonic ties.
Hopefully, future history will not prove this to
be a hope against hope.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here.
He is author of Reading
In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his
latest book, Looking
for rights at Harvard, is now available.
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