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October 29, 2007
Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?
Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of
history's greatest mass murderers..
At a meeting with reporters
last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding
World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing
[Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."
These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician
looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking
the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed
to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."
For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides
not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an
annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country
since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times
larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and
every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied
against Iran.
And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to
overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist
order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in
Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead.
Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military
and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger
is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and
won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which
point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while
the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran
can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality,"
he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao – who casually ordered the deaths
of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions,
and starved whole regions that opposed them–were rational folk. But
not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists
of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly
charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North
Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any
contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of
his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he
imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology
to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of
rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international
relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with
a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has
had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have
barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no
contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole
to us – just as Iraq had become in 2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days
of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in
the country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins,
says that "the Iranians were very professional, straightforward,
reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded
the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for."
Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with
the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no
reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to
cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting
in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his
papers." No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother?
They're mad.
Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
