G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Poddy's Crazy Prayer: Bomb Iran, for Israel and America!
By Gary Leupp
Created Jun 7 2007 - 8:34am
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine and (with Irving
Kristol) one of the grandfathers of the neoconservative movement, recently
published an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal that literally
constitutes a prayer for President Bush to attack Iraq. Unsubtly titled "The
Case for Bombing Iran: I hope and pray that President Bush will do it [1],"
it is a work of eloquently simplistic and hysterical propaganda, truly a
model of the genre. I recommend it as a seminal document of the Bush era,
prior to what may well be its crowning disaster. It's lengthy but worth
reading closely as a concentrated statement of the argument we will probably
hear in ever shriller pitch in the coming months.
Iran, Podhoretz declares, betraying no trace of self-doubt, wants to acquire
nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel. Iran's president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally" announced Iran's intention to
"wipe Israel off the map." Not only that, Podhoretz avers (perhaps to
deflect any suggestion that he's narrowly concerned with Israel):
Ahmadinejad cherishes "a larger dream of extending the power and influence
of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing
on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war."
"Islamization," analogous to Finlandization, is already well-advanced in
Europe. This will only get worse, Podhoretz charges (citing fellow neocon
John Bolton) with "Iranian nuclear blackmail." Moreover, Ahmadinejad wants a
"world without America." Thus the Iranian president and regime and nuclear
program must be eliminated through the deployment of U.S. power.
Podhoretz has faith that this will happen, predicting that Bush will "within
the next 21 months. . . order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear
facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby. .
.." Since Podhoretz has the ear of very powerful people, this prophesy should
set off alarm bells. (Notice how the day after Podhoretz's piece appeared,
International Atomic Energy Agency director IAEA chief and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Mohamed ElBaradei referred to "new crazies who say 'let's go and
bomb Iran,'" adding that he did not want to see another war like the one in
Iraq.) But the attack supplicant confesses some uncertainty on the point,
expressing concern that "the respectable tool of diplomacy" (which he
equates with craven appeasement) might win out over the bombing option he
urges. Sanctions alone, he emphasizes, will not bring down the Iranian
regime, and in any case, "there is simply no chance of getting Russia and
China, or the Europeans for that matter, to agree to the kind of sanctions
that are the necessary precondition" for regime change
He suggests hopefully however (quoting yet another fellow neocon, Robert
Kagan) that in his less bellicose approaches to Iran Bush is merely "giving
futility its chance." (Several recent reports suggest that Cheney is
contemptuous of the limited diplomatic process favored by Condi Rice and
strongly backs a plan now in effect to disseminate propaganda and
disinformation about Iran, and sabotage some of its currency and
international financial transactions, preparatory to the bombing plan the
neocons have long favored and which remains on track.)
In the background of Podhoretz's discussion is an elegantly misleading
periodization of recent history, borrowed from Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins
professor of Strategic Studies, who has been called "the most influential
neoconservative in academe." (Ominously, Cohen was recently appointed by
Condoleezza Rice as the new Counselor of the State Department.) Over the
last century there have been four world wars. In World War II the U.S.
fought against fascism. In World War III (the term some neocons use for the
Cold War) the U.S. fought against communism. We are now in World War IV,
fighting against "Islamofascism." (Podhoretz does not define the "ism" at
issue during World War I, which might affect the model. I'd say it was
imperialism on both sides, neither of them worth supporting, and that
imperialism's been at the root of all these wars. )
Islamofascism, Podheretz proclaims, is "yet another mutation of the
totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism
and then in the shape of communism." Podhoretz does not identify the
historical norm that became diseased and generated these pathologies, but
presumably it is the bourgeois democracy that some see as the "end of
History" to which all humankind, cured of these diseases, will ultimately
gravitate.
The term "Islamofascism" has been around for a few decades, and no doubt has
some degree of analytical utility in some contexts. But the neocons, and
occasionally President Bush, have used it to refer to Muslim targets as
varied as the Syrian and Iraqi secular Baathist states, the Iranian Shiite
mullocracy, al-Qaeda cells, Palestinian militias---few of which offer a good
match for any mainstream academic definition of fascism. The term is merely
applied as an epithet, to conflate disparate phenomena, and to validate the
"war on terrorism" as something analogous to World War II.
This historical model seems to me a parody of the worst sort of crudely
stage-ist "Marxist" historiography. It abandons attention to historical
detail and suspends any requirement of logical analysis in favor of a
triumphantalist vision of the world as it will and must be: in this case, a
world led by America, arm-in-arm with an Israel finally freed of its foes
through a "final conflict." Organically linked evil "isms" follow one after
another, and drawing upon historical experience, "we" gloriously defeat
them. Podhoretz (born in 1930) wants to link the war on "Islamofascism" to
the Good War of his childhood (in its anti-fascist moral purity) and to the
Cold War (in its expected multigenerational duration).
But one must really torture the facts to fit them into this paradigm and
requisite system of historical analogies. The neocon project requires
"regime change" throughout Southwest Asia, hence the vilification of leaders
of Muslim nations as contemporary avatars of the twentieth century figure
most universally regarded as both frightening and evil. While Podhoretz's
son John worked as a speechwriter for the first President Bush, the latter
depicted Saddam Hussein as "a new Hitler." It was a preposterous analogy.
Adolf Hitler had ruled one of the world's most powerful nations, which had
been a world leader in science and industry from the 1880s and won and lost
a colonial empire from Tanganyika to Samoa. Saddam ruled a Third World
country dependent on foreign capital. Bushes I and II elevated this puny
historical footnote to unwarranted epic status.
There was no comparison, but the first Bush administration insisted on
conflating the two, deploying the emotions of the past (or at least the
confused historical memories of the masses) to build the case for the first
war on Iraq. This is a hallmark of the neocons, who boast that they are
"more interested in history than economics or sociology"! What actually most
interests them about the historical record is the possibility of raiding it
to procure these false analogies that serve their objectives in the present.
"Deception is the norm in political life," Abram Shulsky (former Office of
Special Plans operative, now heading the "Iran Directorate" at the Pentagon)
wrote in 1999 in an essay entitled, "Leo Strauss and the World of
Intelligence," "and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of
establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
Today's biggest deceptive analogy is between Hitler and Ahmadinejad, and
between the Munich Pact (signed between British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938 following the German annexation of the
Sudetenland) and the possibility of western acceptance of Iran's nuclear
power program. Ahmadinejad, declares Podhoretz, "like Hitler"
". . .is 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. Like Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions,
although--again like Hitler--he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing
more than his country's just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this
pretense took the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if
sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to
Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming
that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not
for the production of bombs."
One needs to repeat over and over again in the face of the latter assertion
that the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence for an
Iranian nuclear weapons program. The September 2005 vote of the IAEA
representatives labeling Iran in "non-compliance" with the Nonproliferation
Treaty itself found no evidence of a military program but rather accused
Iran of having concealed some nuclear activities. Of the 35 nations then
serving on the IAEA board, 13 voted against the September report or
abstained from voting The latter included highly significant countries like
China, Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Pakistan,
Vietnam. The resolution promoted by the bullying neocon U.S. UN Ambassador
John Bolton passed because the NATO nations voted as a bloc.
Since that vote, the U.S.---Vice President Cheney and the neocons in
particular---have relentlessly sought UN validation for an attack on Iran.
They have now obtained UNSC resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching
uranium---something that the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran (unlike
nuclear Israel) is a signatory, guarantees as a right to all signatory
states. Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment operations gives the attack
advocates their rationale for answering Podhoretz's prayer by the end of
Bush's term in office.
To demonstrate that Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally" announced
Iran's intention to "wipe Israel off the map," and is "entirely open about
his intentions," Podhoretz can do no better than to recite the old tired
canard about a speech the newly-elected Iranian president gave [2] on
October 25th, 2005 in a conference hall in Tehran. He quoted the Ayatollah
Khomeini (who died in 1989): "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem
must vanish from the page of time. . .[Just as] the Soviet Union
disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be
liberated." There was never any mention of a "map." The statement was
mistranslated and although it has been correctly translated many times, by
Juan Cole and others, people who want to believe that it called for the
destruction of Israel continue to misconstrue it. Recall how this story was
preceded by false reports in June and July 2005 about Ahmadinejad being
among the students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. It was
followed in May 2006 by the story planted in Canada's National Post about a
plan by the Iranian Parliament to badge all Iranian Jews---an obvious effort
to depict the Iranian regime as a collection of latter-day Nazis. It was
entirely false---but this is the sort of deception that Shulsky might regard
as normative in political life.
What of the argument that even if Iran had the bomb, and wanted to wipe out
the Jewish state, it would be constrained from doing so by "mutually assured
destruction"? Podhoretz scornfully rejects this, citing at length a
statement by Bernard Lewis, whom he calls "the greatest authority of our
time on the Islamic world," and whom others consider "perhaps the most
significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq."
The late great Edward Said described Lewis's writings on Muslim history as
"ppropaganda against his subject material," adding that his work is
"aggressively ideological" and constitutes a "project to debunk, to whittle
down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam. . ." especially before
"conservative segments of the Jewish reading public, and anyone else who
cares to listen. . ."
MAD, writes Lewis as cited by Podheretz
". . . will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him,
mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know
already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own
people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final
scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers
of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a
quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."
I expect that choice little quote will circulate widely in the coming
months, along with the broader argument that Muslims are indifferent to
human life, including their own. (Recall Gen. Westmoreland's comment at the
height of Vietnam War savagery: "Orientals don't place the same value on
human life as we do," and former Attorney General Ashcroft's remark,
"Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you, [while
Islam is] a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for
him.")
What is the evidence for this judgment on the Iranian mentality? The
following statement by former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with
the arms Israel has in [its] possession . . . application of an atomic bomb
would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce
damages in the Muslim world." "In other words," Podhoretz comments, "Israel
would be destroyed in a nuclear exchange, but Iran would survive."
(Podhoretz by the way mentions nothing of the nuclear arsenal with which
Muslim Pakistan is already duly equipped.)
It seems to me however that Rafsanjani's matter-of-fact observation is of
the sort any of us could make, perhaps in the context of arguing that Israel
would not likely use its nukes against a Muslim target if it feared its own
destruction. (Of course, someone might in response want to talk about the
"Masada complex," impute it to Jewish or Israeli leaders generally and argue
that such people "do not give a damn about killing their own people in great
numbers." But in our society such talk would meet with immediate,
appropriate condemnation. In expressing their assessment of the Iranian
leaders, Lewis and Podhoretz don't seem to fear or expect censure.)
It's no secret that the Iranian regime considers the Jewish state
illegitimate, created by settlers at the expense of the indigenous
Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad apparently believes that it will not exist
forever. (Benjamin Netanyahu for his part has warned out the "demographic
threat" to the Jewish state posed by the high Arab birthrate. Many people
think it likely that some sort of secular multi-cultural state will emerge
within Israel's borders sometime in the future; it's called "the
single-state solution.") Ahmadinejad in the same speech noted how the Soviet
Union, the Shah's regime, and Saddam Hussein's regime had all vanished and
predicted that Israel would too. He did not remotely suggest that Iran
planned to attack Israel to make that happen.
Iran does of course support anti-Israeli Lebanese and Palestinian militias
produced by occupation, and so Podhoretz can depict it as both terrorist and
a threat to Israel. But he might have mentioned that in April or May 2003
Iran sent a diplomatic message to Washington indicating its willingness to
accept the March 2002 "Arab League Beirut declaration," which it also
referred to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach" in exchange for
improved relations with the United States. (Cheney and the neocons treated
that overture with contempt! As Cheney has said, "We don't negotiate with
evil. We defeat it.")
Podhoretz makes it clear that not just Israel but the entire world should
fear nefarious Iran. Not skipping a beat, he declares, "Ahmadinejad's
ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to
dominate the greater Middle East Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely
regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and
influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by
playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war."
(This is a repetition of the alarmist charge that some Muslims seek to
reconstitute a Caliphate, extending from Spain to Indonesia, and in these
times enjoy the remotest possibility for doing so.)
Actually Ahmadinejad's foreign "ambitions" are not well-known. He talks
about a global Islamic revolution, rather like Bush talks grandly about
bringing "democracy" to the world. In any case, within the Iranian political
system, he's not the key player in determining a foreign policy that strikes
me as in fact rather pragmatic and cautious. He's the elected president of a
country that has not attacked another in modern times. Does he wish for
greater influence of Islam throughout Europe? That's safe to say; he's a
devout Muslim after all. Don't American Christian fundamentalists, whom the
secularist neocons carefully cultivate, want to evangelize Europe (and
Israel for that matter)? Wouldn't Bush like to extend the power and
influence of his brand of fundamentalism everywhere?
The power of Islam (mostly Sunni Islam) is extending in Europe, to be sure,
for reasons that have little to do with Iran but lots to do with the legacy
of European colonialism, especially in North Africa and South Asia, and the
high birthrate among European Muslims. It has to do with resurgent
religiosity among Muslims in the Balkans, and perhaps financial support for
mosques from Saudi Arabia, the center of global Sunni Islam (and no great
friend of Shiite Iran). Surely it has to do with the intrinsic attraction
some people (unfortunately) feel towards a severely monotheistic patriarchal
faith based on what believers regard as the Word of God, imposing numerous
rules on the faithful and promising Paradise or Hell in the afterlife. In
any case, the spread of Islam in general scares some people, and plainly
Podhoretz would like to exploit their fears.
Ahmadinejad wants "a world without America," writes Podhoretz. That was the
theme of a conference in Iran in 2004, where the deputy chief of the
Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Baqer Zol Qadr, explained, "When we talk
about the 'World Without America,' we mean a world governed by peace and
justice.... Unfortunately, today America is the symbol of these deficiencies
and distortions." No Iranian official to my knowledge has suggested that
Iran wants to blow America off the map. This is more fear-mongering on
Podhoretz's part, a subtler version of the alarmist "mushroom cloud over New
York" imagery that preceded the criminal attack on Iraq.
Podhoretz in accordance with his fascism-communism---Islamofascism framework
compares those who do not share his alarm and bellicosity not only with the
appeasers of Hitler's Germany but with the Cold War-era U.S. "foreign policy
establishment" which was soft on the Soviet Union. He states that during the
Cold War, "some of us feared that the Soviets might seize control of the oil
fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced with a choice between
surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at the risk of a
nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we thought, the
result would be what in those days went by the name of Finlandization."
This is perhaps the most bizarre portion of the op-ed, and makes it clear
why the neocons parted company with the rational "establishment." Of course
in a warfare situation the Soviets might have made a grab for the Middle
Eastern oil fields then controlled by the west, and the west would probably
have put up a fight. But who do these fields belong to anyway, and why
should one have assumed that the petroleum-rich and generally cautious
Soviet Union was just waiting for its opportunity to provoke (real) world
war by an effort to seize them?
"Finlandization" refers to the subservience of a small country to a powerful
neighboring one. One could talk about the Finlandization of Latin American
countries vis-
By Gary Leupp
Created Jun 7 2007 - 8:34am
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary magazine and (with Irving
Kristol) one of the grandfathers of the neoconservative movement, recently
published an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal that literally
constitutes a prayer for President Bush to attack Iraq. Unsubtly titled "The
Case for Bombing Iran: I hope and pray that President Bush will do it [1],"
it is a work of eloquently simplistic and hysterical propaganda, truly a
model of the genre. I recommend it as a seminal document of the Bush era,
prior to what may well be its crowning disaster. It's lengthy but worth
reading closely as a concentrated statement of the argument we will probably
hear in ever shriller pitch in the coming months.
Iran, Podhoretz declares, betraying no trace of self-doubt, wants to acquire
nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel. Iran's president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally" announced Iran's intention to
"wipe Israel off the map." Not only that, Podhoretz avers (perhaps to
deflect any suggestion that he's narrowly concerned with Israel):
Ahmadinejad cherishes "a larger dream of extending the power and influence
of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing
on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war."
"Islamization," analogous to Finlandization, is already well-advanced in
Europe. This will only get worse, Podhoretz charges (citing fellow neocon
John Bolton) with "Iranian nuclear blackmail." Moreover, Ahmadinejad wants a
"world without America." Thus the Iranian president and regime and nuclear
program must be eliminated through the deployment of U.S. power.
Podhoretz has faith that this will happen, predicting that Bush will "within
the next 21 months. . . order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear
facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby. .
.." Since Podhoretz has the ear of very powerful people, this prophesy should
set off alarm bells. (Notice how the day after Podhoretz's piece appeared,
International Atomic Energy Agency director IAEA chief and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Mohamed ElBaradei referred to "new crazies who say 'let's go and
bomb Iran,'" adding that he did not want to see another war like the one in
Iraq.) But the attack supplicant confesses some uncertainty on the point,
expressing concern that "the respectable tool of diplomacy" (which he
equates with craven appeasement) might win out over the bombing option he
urges. Sanctions alone, he emphasizes, will not bring down the Iranian
regime, and in any case, "there is simply no chance of getting Russia and
China, or the Europeans for that matter, to agree to the kind of sanctions
that are the necessary precondition" for regime change
He suggests hopefully however (quoting yet another fellow neocon, Robert
Kagan) that in his less bellicose approaches to Iran Bush is merely "giving
futility its chance." (Several recent reports suggest that Cheney is
contemptuous of the limited diplomatic process favored by Condi Rice and
strongly backs a plan now in effect to disseminate propaganda and
disinformation about Iran, and sabotage some of its currency and
international financial transactions, preparatory to the bombing plan the
neocons have long favored and which remains on track.)
In the background of Podhoretz's discussion is an elegantly misleading
periodization of recent history, borrowed from Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins
professor of Strategic Studies, who has been called "the most influential
neoconservative in academe." (Ominously, Cohen was recently appointed by
Condoleezza Rice as the new Counselor of the State Department.) Over the
last century there have been four world wars. In World War II the U.S.
fought against fascism. In World War III (the term some neocons use for the
Cold War) the U.S. fought against communism. We are now in World War IV,
fighting against "Islamofascism." (Podhoretz does not define the "ism" at
issue during World War I, which might affect the model. I'd say it was
imperialism on both sides, neither of them worth supporting, and that
imperialism's been at the root of all these wars. )
Islamofascism, Podheretz proclaims, is "yet another mutation of the
totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism
and then in the shape of communism." Podhoretz does not identify the
historical norm that became diseased and generated these pathologies, but
presumably it is the bourgeois democracy that some see as the "end of
History" to which all humankind, cured of these diseases, will ultimately
gravitate.
The term "Islamofascism" has been around for a few decades, and no doubt has
some degree of analytical utility in some contexts. But the neocons, and
occasionally President Bush, have used it to refer to Muslim targets as
varied as the Syrian and Iraqi secular Baathist states, the Iranian Shiite
mullocracy, al-Qaeda cells, Palestinian militias---few of which offer a good
match for any mainstream academic definition of fascism. The term is merely
applied as an epithet, to conflate disparate phenomena, and to validate the
"war on terrorism" as something analogous to World War II.
This historical model seems to me a parody of the worst sort of crudely
stage-ist "Marxist" historiography. It abandons attention to historical
detail and suspends any requirement of logical analysis in favor of a
triumphantalist vision of the world as it will and must be: in this case, a
world led by America, arm-in-arm with an Israel finally freed of its foes
through a "final conflict." Organically linked evil "isms" follow one after
another, and drawing upon historical experience, "we" gloriously defeat
them. Podhoretz (born in 1930) wants to link the war on "Islamofascism" to
the Good War of his childhood (in its anti-fascist moral purity) and to the
Cold War (in its expected multigenerational duration).
But one must really torture the facts to fit them into this paradigm and
requisite system of historical analogies. The neocon project requires
"regime change" throughout Southwest Asia, hence the vilification of leaders
of Muslim nations as contemporary avatars of the twentieth century figure
most universally regarded as both frightening and evil. While Podhoretz's
son John worked as a speechwriter for the first President Bush, the latter
depicted Saddam Hussein as "a new Hitler." It was a preposterous analogy.
Adolf Hitler had ruled one of the world's most powerful nations, which had
been a world leader in science and industry from the 1880s and won and lost
a colonial empire from Tanganyika to Samoa. Saddam ruled a Third World
country dependent on foreign capital. Bushes I and II elevated this puny
historical footnote to unwarranted epic status.
There was no comparison, but the first Bush administration insisted on
conflating the two, deploying the emotions of the past (or at least the
confused historical memories of the masses) to build the case for the first
war on Iraq. This is a hallmark of the neocons, who boast that they are
"more interested in history than economics or sociology"! What actually most
interests them about the historical record is the possibility of raiding it
to procure these false analogies that serve their objectives in the present.
"Deception is the norm in political life," Abram Shulsky (former Office of
Special Plans operative, now heading the "Iran Directorate" at the Pentagon)
wrote in 1999 in an essay entitled, "Leo Strauss and the World of
Intelligence," "and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of
establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
Today's biggest deceptive analogy is between Hitler and Ahmadinejad, and
between the Munich Pact (signed between British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938 following the German annexation of the
Sudetenland) and the possibility of western acceptance of Iran's nuclear
power program. Ahmadinejad, declares Podhoretz, "like Hitler"
". . .is 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. Like Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions,
although--again like Hitler--he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing
more than his country's just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this
pretense took the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if
sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia to
Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of claiming
that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes and not
for the production of bombs."
One needs to repeat over and over again in the face of the latter assertion
that the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence for an
Iranian nuclear weapons program. The September 2005 vote of the IAEA
representatives labeling Iran in "non-compliance" with the Nonproliferation
Treaty itself found no evidence of a military program but rather accused
Iran of having concealed some nuclear activities. Of the 35 nations then
serving on the IAEA board, 13 voted against the September report or
abstained from voting The latter included highly significant countries like
China, Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Pakistan,
Vietnam. The resolution promoted by the bullying neocon U.S. UN Ambassador
John Bolton passed because the NATO nations voted as a bloc.
Since that vote, the U.S.---Vice President Cheney and the neocons in
particular---have relentlessly sought UN validation for an attack on Iran.
They have now obtained UNSC resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching
uranium---something that the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran (unlike
nuclear Israel) is a signatory, guarantees as a right to all signatory
states. Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment operations gives the attack
advocates their rationale for answering Podhoretz's prayer by the end of
Bush's term in office.
To demonstrate that Ahmadinejad has "repeatedly and unequivocally" announced
Iran's intention to "wipe Israel off the map," and is "entirely open about
his intentions," Podhoretz can do no better than to recite the old tired
canard about a speech the newly-elected Iranian president gave [2] on
October 25th, 2005 in a conference hall in Tehran. He quoted the Ayatollah
Khomeini (who died in 1989): "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem
must vanish from the page of time. . .[Just as] the Soviet Union
disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be
liberated." There was never any mention of a "map." The statement was
mistranslated and although it has been correctly translated many times, by
Juan Cole and others, people who want to believe that it called for the
destruction of Israel continue to misconstrue it. Recall how this story was
preceded by false reports in June and July 2005 about Ahmadinejad being
among the students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. It was
followed in May 2006 by the story planted in Canada's National Post about a
plan by the Iranian Parliament to badge all Iranian Jews---an obvious effort
to depict the Iranian regime as a collection of latter-day Nazis. It was
entirely false---but this is the sort of deception that Shulsky might regard
as normative in political life.
What of the argument that even if Iran had the bomb, and wanted to wipe out
the Jewish state, it would be constrained from doing so by "mutually assured
destruction"? Podhoretz scornfully rejects this, citing at length a
statement by Bernard Lewis, whom he calls "the greatest authority of our
time on the Islamic world," and whom others consider "perhaps the most
significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq."
The late great Edward Said described Lewis's writings on Muslim history as
"ppropaganda against his subject material," adding that his work is
"aggressively ideological" and constitutes a "project to debunk, to whittle
down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam. . ." especially before
"conservative segments of the Jewish reading public, and anyone else who
cares to listen. . ."
MAD, writes Lewis as cited by Podheretz
". . . will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him,
mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know
already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own
people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final
scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers
of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a
quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."
I expect that choice little quote will circulate widely in the coming
months, along with the broader argument that Muslims are indifferent to
human life, including their own. (Recall Gen. Westmoreland's comment at the
height of Vietnam War savagery: "Orientals don't place the same value on
human life as we do," and former Attorney General Ashcroft's remark,
"Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you, [while
Islam is] a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for
him.")
What is the evidence for this judgment on the Iranian mentality? The
following statement by former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with
the arms Israel has in [its] possession . . . application of an atomic bomb
would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce
damages in the Muslim world." "In other words," Podhoretz comments, "Israel
would be destroyed in a nuclear exchange, but Iran would survive."
(Podhoretz by the way mentions nothing of the nuclear arsenal with which
Muslim Pakistan is already duly equipped.)
It seems to me however that Rafsanjani's matter-of-fact observation is of
the sort any of us could make, perhaps in the context of arguing that Israel
would not likely use its nukes against a Muslim target if it feared its own
destruction. (Of course, someone might in response want to talk about the
"Masada complex," impute it to Jewish or Israeli leaders generally and argue
that such people "do not give a damn about killing their own people in great
numbers." But in our society such talk would meet with immediate,
appropriate condemnation. In expressing their assessment of the Iranian
leaders, Lewis and Podhoretz don't seem to fear or expect censure.)
It's no secret that the Iranian regime considers the Jewish state
illegitimate, created by settlers at the expense of the indigenous
Palestinian people. Ahmadinejad apparently believes that it will not exist
forever. (Benjamin Netanyahu for his part has warned out the "demographic
threat" to the Jewish state posed by the high Arab birthrate. Many people
think it likely that some sort of secular multi-cultural state will emerge
within Israel's borders sometime in the future; it's called "the
single-state solution.") Ahmadinejad in the same speech noted how the Soviet
Union, the Shah's regime, and Saddam Hussein's regime had all vanished and
predicted that Israel would too. He did not remotely suggest that Iran
planned to attack Israel to make that happen.
Iran does of course support anti-Israeli Lebanese and Palestinian militias
produced by occupation, and so Podhoretz can depict it as both terrorist and
a threat to Israel. But he might have mentioned that in April or May 2003
Iran sent a diplomatic message to Washington indicating its willingness to
accept the March 2002 "Arab League Beirut declaration," which it also
referred to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach" in exchange for
improved relations with the United States. (Cheney and the neocons treated
that overture with contempt! As Cheney has said, "We don't negotiate with
evil. We defeat it.")
Podhoretz makes it clear that not just Israel but the entire world should
fear nefarious Iran. Not skipping a beat, he declares, "Ahmadinejad's
ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to
dominate the greater Middle East Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely
regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and
influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by
playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war."
(This is a repetition of the alarmist charge that some Muslims seek to
reconstitute a Caliphate, extending from Spain to Indonesia, and in these
times enjoy the remotest possibility for doing so.)
Actually Ahmadinejad's foreign "ambitions" are not well-known. He talks
about a global Islamic revolution, rather like Bush talks grandly about
bringing "democracy" to the world. In any case, within the Iranian political
system, he's not the key player in determining a foreign policy that strikes
me as in fact rather pragmatic and cautious. He's the elected president of a
country that has not attacked another in modern times. Does he wish for
greater influence of Islam throughout Europe? That's safe to say; he's a
devout Muslim after all. Don't American Christian fundamentalists, whom the
secularist neocons carefully cultivate, want to evangelize Europe (and
Israel for that matter)? Wouldn't Bush like to extend the power and
influence of his brand of fundamentalism everywhere?
The power of Islam (mostly Sunni Islam) is extending in Europe, to be sure,
for reasons that have little to do with Iran but lots to do with the legacy
of European colonialism, especially in North Africa and South Asia, and the
high birthrate among European Muslims. It has to do with resurgent
religiosity among Muslims in the Balkans, and perhaps financial support for
mosques from Saudi Arabia, the center of global Sunni Islam (and no great
friend of Shiite Iran). Surely it has to do with the intrinsic attraction
some people (unfortunately) feel towards a severely monotheistic patriarchal
faith based on what believers regard as the Word of God, imposing numerous
rules on the faithful and promising Paradise or Hell in the afterlife. In
any case, the spread of Islam in general scares some people, and plainly
Podhoretz would like to exploit their fears.
Ahmadinejad wants "a world without America," writes Podhoretz. That was the
theme of a conference in Iran in 2004, where the deputy chief of the
Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Baqer Zol Qadr, explained, "When we talk
about the 'World Without America,' we mean a world governed by peace and
justice.... Unfortunately, today America is the symbol of these deficiencies
and distortions." No Iranian official to my knowledge has suggested that
Iran wants to blow America off the map. This is more fear-mongering on
Podhoretz's part, a subtler version of the alarmist "mushroom cloud over New
York" imagery that preceded the criminal attack on Iraq.
Podhoretz in accordance with his fascism-communism---Islamofascism framework
compares those who do not share his alarm and bellicosity not only with the
appeasers of Hitler's Germany but with the Cold War-era U.S. "foreign policy
establishment" which was soft on the Soviet Union. He states that during the
Cold War, "some of us feared that the Soviets might seize control of the oil
fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced with a choice between
surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at the risk of a
nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we thought, the
result would be what in those days went by the name of Finlandization."
This is perhaps the most bizarre portion of the op-ed, and makes it clear
why the neocons parted company with the rational "establishment." Of course
in a warfare situation the Soviets might have made a grab for the Middle
Eastern oil fields then controlled by the west, and the west would probably
have put up a fight. But who do these fields belong to anyway, and why
should one have assumed that the petroleum-rich and generally cautious
Soviet Union was just waiting for its opportunity to provoke (real) world
war by an effort to seize them?
"Finlandization" refers to the subservience of a small country to a powerful
neighboring one. One could talk about the Finlandization of Latin American
countries vis-