Before drifting off to sleep, I listen to the BBC on an old shortwave radio, which connects me to the world but annoys my wife, who prefers to sleep without hearing the static chimes of the World Service. Nevertheless, as happens in marriages, I persist. About a week ago I went to sleep with the news that the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had mailed to the U.S. President, George W. Bush, a 16-page letter, which was delivered in Farsi with what diplomats call a “free translation” (that was 18 pages). The American and Iranian presidents struck me as unlikely pen pals, and I approached Nod wondering what the Bush White House would make of a 16-page letter, in any language, let alone Farsi. But I did not lose sleep speculating.
Nor apparently did Ahmadinejad’s words interrupt much sleep at the White House, which by the time I awoke and had switched on the BBC (my wife hates that, too) had denounced the letter for being devoid of substance and sidestepping the confrontational issue of Iran’s nuclear armament ambitions. On one of her diplomatic package tours (“Travel to the ancient capitals of Europe and, from the comfort of our air-conditioned limousines, harangue the leaders of the European Union…”), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed the letter by saying it “isn’t addressing the issues we’re dealing with a concrete way.” So too did the apparently early-rising President Bush, who said: “It looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking, and that is, ‘When will you get rid of your nuclear program?’” Both the Secretary of State and the President reacted as if they had opened a solicitation from the Reader’s Digest (“You may have already won some atomic weapons…”) instead of a serious diplomatic cable.
Believing that the United States and Iran are headed toward the precipice of nuclear confrontation, I decided to spend more time with President Ahmadinejad’s letter than perhaps did the Bush administration. (Using the phrase “it looks like…” makes me think President Bush left the actual reading of the letter to his deputies.) Posted on the Web site of the French newspaper, Le Monde, the Internet version in English only runs to four densely printed pages. (Were the 16 pages in Farsi hand-written?) Moreover, the quality of the ‘free translation’ tells me that Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs may have purged anyone competent in writing grammatical English. The Iranian letter has some of the oddest punctuation and uses of capital letters this side of a high school German exam. Ahmadinejad’s preferred style is Joycean stream-of-consciousness as opposed to careful Bismarckian diplomacy. But on the larger questions as to why it was written or to whom it was addressed, neither the letter nor subsequent newspaper articles make clear.
One possibility that might explain this letter is that in a fit of either fatigue or inspiration, the Iranian president called in his secretary, dictated a 16-page monologue, and mailed it off before either the mullahs on the Supreme Revolutionary Council or the foreign minister had a chance to ask the president to “sleep on it” or “take another look at it in the morning.” Granted, most presidential letters are the work of vast bureaucracies, and thus they tend to read like UN resolutions. Hence it is somewhat refreshing that any president, especially that of Inquisitional Iran, should take it upon himself to fire off a letter that raises spiritual concerns. But as an instrument of statecraft, the letter only serves to reinforce the impression that Iran is in its 27th year of a hostage crisis in which the government holds its citizenry captive with a mixture of invectives and secret police.
Oddly, once the Bush administration had denounced the Iranian letter as lacking “substance” on the matter of nuclear disarmament, it was consigned, diplomatically anyway, to the circular file. I read a few accounts that equated the letter to the ravings of a lunatic. Even the New York Times account had the headline: “Iranian Letter: Using Religion to Lecture Bush.” Indeed, the essence of the letter is to ask President Bush how, as a Christian, he can explain the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, prison torture, and an embargo of funds for the government dominated by Hamas. The letter ends with the conclusion that, as liberal democracies are riddled with violent contradictions, why doesn’t the U.S. president embrace theocracy as the true path to salvation, both electoral and eternal? Who knows, maybe the Iranians think President Bush has the potential to make it as a mullah?
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As best as I can determine, the Iranian president’s letter is addressed to Islamic students, be they in Tehran or elsewhere in the Arab world. Ahmadinejad is best understood as a student radical (although he describes himself to Bush as “a teacher”). The points raised in the letter read like those you might find in a madrassa-newspaper editorial. Indeed the specter of student uprisings are a subtext in the letter, beginning with the opening sentence: “For sometime now I have been thinking,” Ahmadinejad writes, “how can one justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena——which are being constantly debated, specially in political forums and amongst university students.” Later he returns to this theme: “My students ask me how can these actions be reconciled with the values outlined at the beginning of this letter and duty to the tradition of Jesus Christ (Peace Be Upon Him), the Messenger of peace and forgiveness.” In many ways, the letter appears to be trying to convince the undergraduates at Oral Roberts University to make common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for the specific political points raised in the first part of the letter, many could well be lifted from the speech of a liberal Democratic U.S. senator. Ahmadinejad condemns the cost of the war in Iraq (“hundreds of billions of dollars”), extends sympathy to those detained in Guantanamo Bay (“No one knows if they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals…”), reminds his reader of secret prisons in Europe (“I do not correlate the abduction of a person…with the provisions of any judicial system…”), and despairs that the U.S. should have cut off aid to the Palestinians, on account of the Hamas election (“Unbelievingly, they have put the elected government [Hamas] under pressure and have advised it to recognize the Israeli regime, abandon the struggle and follow the programs of the previous government. If the current Palestinian government had run on the above platform, would the Palestinian people have voted for it?”). He mourns the victims of September 11th (“a horrendous incident”), but then extends this grief to excuse Iran’s nuclear preparations (“All governments have a duty to protect the lives, property and good standing of their citizens.”). He thinks the Western press shoddy for publishing the fiction about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (“This was repeated incessantly —for the public to, finally, believe — and the ground was set for an attack on Iraq”) and sounds like Senator Edward Kennedy when he describes how the Iraqi war is bleeding American resources (“Many thousands are homeless and unemployment is a huge problem”).
Until his election as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, and no doubt he has delivered many stump speeches about the Great Satan. In this letter, as well, he sings the refrain of past US transgressions against Iran: the 1953 coup, the use of the American embassy to plot against the Khomeini revolution, support for Saddam in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the freezing of Iranian assets, and the shooting down of an Iran Air passenger plan. But all of these points could easily be found in an editorial in the “Nation” or “New Statesman”. Where the Iranian president retreats to his hard line is on the subject of Israel, which, in most of its public statements, Tehran refers to as the “Zionist regime.” Here it is called the “phenomenon of Israel” (“I think establishment of a new country with a new people, is a new phenomenon that is exclusive to our times”), a country that sprang from European war guilt. On other occasions, Ahmadinejad has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map” and joined the ignominious ranks of Holocaust deniers. (In Austria, the historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in jail for such opinions. Might the Austrians put Ahmadinejad on trial?) In this case, writing to the American President, he softens his rhetoric on the Holocaust (“Again let us assume that these events are true”) but then asks why the Middle East had to absorb a Jewish state so that Europe could expiate its war guilt—hinting that one reason it was moved to Palestine was because of continental anti-Semitism. He raises the construct of Israel as a colonial invention of Balfour’s Declaration but overlooks than many countries and borders in the Middle East—notably Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—sprang from the same disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The Bush administration is correct in saying that the letter “isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way.” In a few passages the letter makes allusions to atomic research (“Is not scientific R&D one of the basic rights of nations?”), and equates megatons with the rights of man. But mostly the nuclear references come in apocalyptic allusions (“The day will come when all humans will congregate before the court of the Almighty, so that their deeds are examined.”). But the reason the letter is dismissed as irrelevant to the nuclear standoff is because it does not end with a proposal for an international conference or mediation from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Instead the Iranian president delivers what, on paper anyway, reads like the script of a Baptist revival meeting (“The Almighty God sent His prophets with miracles and clear signs…And he sent the Book…because we must be answerable to our nations and all others….”). Classical political traditions are denounced (“Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed.”), and theocracy is proclaimed The Way (“…that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of man, belief in the Last Day, we can overcome the present problems of the world…”). Hence the only proposal put on the table is whether the born-again George W. Bush wants to go door-to-door with Ahmadinejad to explain the missionary position (“Undoubtedly through faith in Good and the teachings of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question for you is: Do you not want to join them?”) Little did Karl Rove know that when he was unbuckling the Bible belt for Bush-Cheney in the 2000 election, he would find so many converts among the Revolutionary Council in Iran.
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It is useless for me to speculate whether Ahmadinejad wrote his soliloquy from a position of strength or weakness. I assume intelligence officers, better versed in Iranian politics than I am, can explain whether the Iranian president has expansionist dreams around the Middle East or whether the mullahs are rallying the faithful with a nuclear jihad as a way to keep oil profits from corrupting the society with iPods and tight-fitting jeans. In terms of political genealogy, my sense of the Iranian president is that he is a keeper of the Khomeini faith, someone who views confrontations with the West as a way impose fundamentalist doctrine on a nation, part of which anyway, would not mind spending weekends at the mall or trying out jet skis at the beach. But anyone interviewing Ahmadinejad for a job (“I see here that you spent some time with the Revolutionary Guards. Is that a non-profit?”) would note that his résumé is full of what personnel officers call blank spaces. And these lapses are not to cover up unemployment so much as odd jobs of violence.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fourth of seven children, was born in Garmsar, a desert town outside Tehran. When he was a year old in 1957, his father, a blacksmith, moved the family to the capital, where, according to one account, the president grew up in “the rough neighborhoods of south Tehran, where a cocktail of poverty, frustration and xenophobia in the heydays of the Shah’s elitist regime provided fertile grounds for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.” In 1975, as opposition to the Iranian Shah was growing, he enrolled at Elm-o-Sanaat University, a technical and scientific college, although by all accounts Ahmadinejad majored in student unrest. He was a founder of the Islamic Students Association and then represented his university on what was called the Office for Strengthening Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries. That group later became known as the OSU, which, in turn, played an important role in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy and the American hostages.
By many accounts Ahmadinejad was among those who plotted the capture of the US diplomats, and he is associated, in some reports, as having advocated the takeover of the Soviet embassy in Tehran. He believed then and now that the US embassy was actively promoting counter-revolution against the Ayatollah. When he became president in 2005, several Americans, who had been held hostage in Tehran, claimed that Ahmadinejad had been among their captors. A photograph circulating on the Internet shows a hostage being led blindfold down a Tehran back street, and the speculation is that one of the captors leading his quarry is the current president. Ahmadinejad denies the allegation that he actually held American prisoners, and of late the US government has let the speculation drop. But in the 1980s Ahmadinejad was notorious as a member of the Revolutionary Guard Council with responsibilities in sections dealing with “internal security.” In that role, he purged professors and students on the familiar charges of revolutionary heresy, and he may even have done time as an executioner in Evin Prison, which by all accounts makes Abu Ghraib look like a pajama party. He may not have all the qualities of a latter-day Hitler—Iran has fewer territorial designs on its neighbors—but any leader with a CV of violent purges who threatens six million Israelis with nuclear extinction must be viewed as a man inclined toward Final Solutions.
According to one account of his life, admittedly circulated by the political opposition, “in 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. Ramazan Garrison was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ ‘extra-territorial operations’, a euphemism for terrorists attacks beyond Iran’s borders.” According to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, he may have had connections to Imad Mughniyeh, “a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983.” Ahmadinejad may also have had a hand in the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou in Vienna in 1989. In the 1990s, while he claims to have been teaching, he was actually training a radical group of Islamic vigilantes to “revive the ideals and policies of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.” Support from the Revolutionary Guards, in part, helped elect him mayor of Tehran in 2003, and backing from fundamentalist clerics, plus a divided electorate, gave him the presidency in 2005.
As president, it is hard to tell if his base constituency is strongest among the aging clerics who run Iran under the principles laid down by Ayatollah Khomeini or if he appeals to younger, more fanatical Islamic followers. By one account I read, the current divide in Iran is between “the clerical establishment and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.” Clearly fabulism appeals to the president, who can be seen on an Internet video telling a cleric that “he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.” He places great faith in the return of the so-called “Hidden Imam,” who can be reached in the meantime by dropping messages down an empty well at the Jamkaran mosque—to which the new president gave $20 million in the early days of his administration. One historian writes that Ahmadinejad “preens that unpredictability is the private domain of the fanatical believer,” and that he is someone “who talks into empty wells and uses his powers of hypnosis to ensure his listeners cannot blink.”
Why then did Ahmadinejad write the letter? According to Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, an Iranian professor living in Germany: “Since the 1979 revolution it has become clear than Iranian policy has two faces: a pragmatic one and an apocalyptic one.” He believes that the “letter is intended for the entire Muslim world. Ahmadinejad wants to build an anti-Western coalition and Iran wants to present itself as the leading power in the Muslim world.” He concludes ominously: “Everything that wasn’t true in Iraq, is true in Iran.”
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Another association between Iraq and Iran exists in the mind of the Bush administration, which sees in Tehran’s nuclear jingoism possible redemption for its failing polices in Iraq. This logic may sound like the philosophy of Alice’s Mad Hatter, but ‘if everything that wasn’t true in Iraq is true in Iran, then by going after the Iranians, you can make Iraq come true’. In other words, crush weapons of mass destruction in Iran, and you may get the benefit of the doubt in Iraq.
As described by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, the Bush administration sees one of its places in history defined by the looming confrontation with the Persians. Hersh writes: “A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was ‘absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb’ if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do ‘what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to,’ and ‘that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.’”
According to Hersh, should the current negotiations fail — Does anyone think they have even started? — the US is contemplating, among other more conventional options, using tactical nuclear weapons as a way to snuff out Iran’s nuclear capability. In Vietnam, villages were destroyed so they could be saved. In Iran, nuclear weapons may be used to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
Hersh explains: “The elimination of Natanz [Iran’s uranium enrichment facility deep underground] would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.” He goes on: “The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons.” A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap. ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
At the same time that the Pentagon is war-gaming the elimination of Iran’s enrichment and bomb-making capabilities, the Bush administration is trying to position the confrontation with Ahmadinejad as a multilateral line in the sand. President Bush and his Secretary of State Rice have taken the matter to the members of the UN Security Council, with the hope that a united front of Germany, France, Britain, and maybe even Russia will stare down the mullahs over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. (Russia may be less inclined to play ball after Vice President Cheney lectured Vladimir Putin on the pursuits of happiness and urged the Kazakhs to bypass Russia when shipping its oil to world markets. Thanks, Dick.) More recently the EU, following an earlier Russian proposal, hinted that it would sell light-water reactors to Tehran, as a way to give Iran nuclear power but move it away from its own enrichment of uranium. But Ahmadinejad snapped back: “ They say they want to offer us incentives. We tell them: Keep the incentives as a gift to yourself. We have no hope of anything good from you.”
What is distressing in Hersh’s article is the conclusion that the war lobby in Washington, eager for a showdown with Iran, is a revival of the coalition that dragged the US into the Iraqi invasion. Hersh implies that the US government has its own revolutionary council, beyond the reach of constitutional restraints, as dead set on confrontation and the possible use of nuclear weapons as a similar group of clerics in Tehran. He writes: “Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. ‘It’s always the same guys,’ he said, with a resigned shrug. ‘There’s a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.’”
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One thing we do know from the Ahmadinejad letter is that the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a gambler. He would like to leverage his position as a Council front man into a world leader seen as the equal of the US President. He is also willing to risk sanction and possible attack to stake a claim as the Middle East’s great Islamic voice, someone around whom both the Arab and Persian worlds can rally in their confrontation with the West. He may boast about being a “teacher” and invoke “my students,” or point out that Jesus is “repeatedly praised in the Koran,” but at another level his eye-for-an-eye faith is not above recognizing the street value of having a few hostages bound and gagged on his side of the negotiating table. In this case the list of once and future captives include Iranian progressives, the state of Israel, and perhaps anyone within the zip codes of a few dirty bombs.
Whether the Bush administration has any credibility to confront Ahmadinejad or the mullahs is another question. My sense is that having embroiled the US in an Iraqi civil war is hardly the precedent that will win friends or influence war votes in either the Congress or the Security Council. But that will not stop the administration from making the case, overtly or covertly, to “take out” Iran, especially if the rockets red glare can be color coordinated with the midterm elections.
The basis on which an Iranian blitzkrieg could be fought can be found in a recent column of Victor Davis Hanson, an historian and classicist and (without endorsing his positions here) someone I admire. He has written passionately about the need for classical education (I just bought his book: “Who Killed Homer?’), and not long ago he published an excellent history of the Peloponnesian war (“A War Like No Other”). More eloquently than you will ever hear from the Bush administration, Hanson sets forth the parameters of the American gambit in any strike against Iran: “Moreover who knows what a successful strike against Iranian nuclear facilities might portend? We rightly are warned of all the negatives — further Shiite madness in Iraq, an Iranian land invasion into Basra, dirty bombs going off in the U.S., smoking tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, Hezbollah on the move in Lebanon, etc.—but rarely of a less probable but still possible scenario: a humiliated Iran is defanged; the Arab world sighs relief, albeit in private; the Europeans chide us privately but pat us on the back privately; and Iranian dissidents are energized, while theocratic militarists, like the Argentine dictators, who were crushed in the Falklands War, lose face. Nothing is worse for the lunatic than when his cheap rhetoric earns abject humiliation for others.”
Even though Hanson is a noted historian, I must question his Argentinean analogy. For British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands may have been a splendid little war (although the writer Jorge Luis Borges likened it to “two bald men fighting over a comb”). At the same time I think taking the measure of Iran and its faithful, who number in the millions, would be a lot harder than routing a company of Argentine conscripts from Goose Green in the Falklands.
The bigger problem of American diplomacy is that in recent years it has always been banking on the military quick fix: by bombing Belgrade, by sending the Marines to Somalia or Beirut, by lodging a few armored divisions in downtown Baghdad, by dropping cluster bombs on the Tora Bora. Maybe taking out the Natanz uranium enrichment facility with cruise missiles will humiliate the mullahs, drive Ahmadinejad from power, and restore the Shah’s family or some liberal democrat to power in Persepolis or Tehran. Somehow, however, I doubt it, and then the US can add Iran to the company of Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has taken up the white man’s burden to fight savage wars of peace—an odd standoff between cruise missiles and car bombs. Here it is worth recalling an observation of Winston Churchill, who had responsibility after World War I for the British mandates in the Middle East: “In Africa, the population is docile and the country is fruitful; in Mesopotamia the country is arid and the population is ferocious. A little money goes a long way in Africa and a lot of money goes a very little way in Arabia.”
To be fair to the Bush administration, I don’t think Ahmadinejad’s letter was the occasion to respond with its own 16-page chain letter and thus hope to get relations between the two countries on a better footing. Whatever its meaning, the Iranian letter did not suggest negotiation so much as pinpoint the co-ordinates of eternity—hardly what you want to hear from someone enriching uranium in underground bunkers or from someone who may reminisce about the glory days when he was holding the Great Satan’s diplomats as hostages. But I fear little can reconcile the gap between one nation, fanatically embracing theocracy and Armageddon, and another country threatening unilaterally, without even a resolution from its elected Congress, to respond with tactical nuclear weapons to the enrichment of uranium, something it has tolerated in the nearby states of Israel, Pakistan, India, and China? It would seem that between the United States and Iran, each has found the ideal enemy and, as Pogo noted, “it is us.”
Nor does it sound, from reading Hersh anyway, that diplomacy is much of an option. He writes: “A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, ‘there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it.’” Another source quoted in Hersh says the fundamentalists in Washington would be “unhappy if we found a [peaceful] solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change.” The same might also be the great hope of the mullahs, although they would do well to recall Napoleon’s observation that “a letter not answered in two weeks answers itself.”
