[NYTr] Juan Cole: Turning Ahmadinejad into Public Enemy No.1

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Salon via Info Clearing House - Sep 24, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/09/24/ahmadinejad/print.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18453.htm

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem
controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another
war.

By Juan Cole

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address
the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the
controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak
at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit
Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should
have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed
sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and
Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and
other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida,
and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the
United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself
little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements
about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse.
He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews,
even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces,
has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has
never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's
20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now
raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality,
penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly
serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock
of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another,
deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and
its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason
his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the
United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore
being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been
at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this
assertion is absurd. In the '80s, the Reagan administration sold
substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war
drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were
middlemen in the Reagan administration's unconstitutional weapons sales
to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the
United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is
apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by
Iran's ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated
sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen.
Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on
the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons
smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of
choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are
increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied
with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United
Nations for impeding Tehran's nuclear energy research program. While
the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a
bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy
purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United
Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of
Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to
create a "coalition of the willing" of Iran boycotters outside the U.N.
framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible
evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian
television this week, "Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate
threat for the international community." He stressed that no evidence
had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive
substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N.
Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran's
nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war.
Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran,
but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial
speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice
President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran.
Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly
concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now
decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that
Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are
perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead
willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East
affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an
Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having
Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the
Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent
and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed
that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an
"Iran war rollout" by the Cheneyites this fall.

It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps
and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight
with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are
a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S.
troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been
attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S.
troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran
of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government -- a
government Iran actually supports -- could lay the groundwork for a
war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the
Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident
spinning out of control.

The Iranians have responded to all this bellicosity with some
chest-thumping of their own, right up to the final hours before
Ahmadinejad's American visit. The Iranian government declared "National
Defense Week" on Saturday, kicking it off with a big military parade
that showed off Iran's new Qadr-1 missiles, with a range of 1,100
miles. Before he left Iran for New York on Sunday morning, Ahmadinejad
inspected three types of Iranian-manufactured jet fighters, noting that
it was the anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980 (which the
Iranian press attributed to American urging, though that is unlikely).

The display of this military equipment was accompanied by a raft of
assurances on the part of the Iranian ayatollahs, politicians and
generals that they were entirely prepared to deploy the missiles and
planes if they were attacked. A top military advisor to Supreme
Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei told the Mehr News Agency on Saturday,
"Today, the United States must know that their 200,000 soldiers in Iraq
and Afghanistan are within the reach of Iran's fire. When the Americans
were beyond our shores, they were not within our reach, but today it is
very easy for us to deal them blows." Khamenei, the actual commander in
chief of the armed forces, weighed in as well, reiterating that Iran
would never attack first but pledging: "Those who make threats should
know that attack on Iran in the form of hit and run will not be
possible, and if any country invades Iran it will face its very serious
consequences."

The threat to target U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the
unveiling of the Qadr-1 were not aggressive in intent, but designed to
make the point that Iran could also play by Richard M. Nixon's "madman"
strategy, whereby you act so wildly as to convince your enemy you are
capable of anything. Ordinarily a poor non-nuclear third-world country
might be expected to be supine before an attack by a superpower. But as
Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Iranian deputy speaker of Parliament,
warned: "Any military attack against Iran will send the region up in
flames."

In the end, this is hardly the kind of conflagration the United States
should be enabling. If a spark catches, it will not advance any of
America's four interests in the Middle East: petroleum, markets, Israel
and hegemony.

The Middle East has two-thirds of the world's proven petroleum reserves
and nearly half its natural gas, and its fields are much deeper than
elsewhere in the world, so that its importance will grow for the United
States and its allies. Petro-dollars and other wealth make the region
an important market for U.S. industry, especially the arms industry.
Israel is important both for reasons of domestic politics and because
it is a proxy for U.S. power in the region. By "hegemony," I mean the
desire of Washington to dominate political and economic outcomes in the
region and to forestall rivals such as China from making it their
sphere of influence.

The Iranian government (in which Ahmadinejad has a weak role, analogous
to that of U.S. vice presidents before Dick Cheney) poses a challenge
to the U.S. program in the Middle East. Iran is, unlike most Middle
Eastern countries, large. It is geographically four times the size of
France, and it has a population of 70 million (more than France or the
United Kingdom). As an oil state, it has done very well from the high
petroleum prices of recent years. It has been negotiating long-term
energy deals with China and India, much to the dismay of Washington. It
provides financial support to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese
Shiites who vote for the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. By overthrowing
the Afghanistan and Iraq governments and throwing both countries into
chaos, the United States has inadvertently enabled Iran to emerge as a
potential regional power, which could challenge Israel and Saudi Arabia
and project both soft and hard power in the strategic Persian Gulf and
the Levant.

And now the American war party, undeterred by the quagmire in Iraq,
convinced that their model of New Empire is working, is eager to go on
the offensive again. They may yet find a pretext to plunge the United
States into another war. Ahmadinejad's visit to New York this year will
not include his visit to Ground Zero, because that is hallowed ground
for American patriotism and he is being depicted as not just a critic
of the United States but as the leader of an enemy state. His visit
may, however, be ground zero for the next big military struggle of the
United States in the Middle East, one that really will make Iraq look
like a cakewalk.