“a nation which has lost the initiative has lost the war”
--Benito Mussolini
Watching President Bush deliver his awkward remarks about Iraq—yet another Internet video clip of a man being pilloried for his brutal rule in Iraq—I could not help but think: “Where is Saddam now that we need him?” To hear Bush describe the front lines, the United States and its allies are confronting civil war, although here it is defined with words like “sectarian violence” (a phrase that might also have worked for Gettysburg). In other words, the center has not held around Baghdad. The response of the Bush administration, which has invested $359 billion dollars in the concept of a democratic Iraq, is to send in 20,000 more American troops and lure suicide bombers away from their missions with offers of on-the-job training. Sadly, neither embedding American forces in Iraqi patrols nor stuffing ballot boxes in the provinces will alter the reality that to keep Iraq together as one country, you have to adopt Saddam’s methods and brutality. Judging by the 34,000 civilian Iraqi deaths in 2006, it might be concluded that the U.S. is at least giving it a try.
The reason the President has become Saddam’s surrogate is because he believes that Iraq is an important domino in his War on Terror. In his address the President states that, should Iraq fall, “radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” He believes the U.S. is fighting enemies that have “declared their intention to destroy our way of life.” According to the President, the politics of the Middle East constitute “the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” The Great Game between Islam and the West looks and sounds a lot like the old Cold War.
Not since the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon has the domino theory had such an advocate as it now finds in President Bush. By his logic, the war in Iraq—like Vietnam to an earlier generation—is a test case of America’s resolve. Win in Iraq, and you will have broken the will of terrorism. Admit defeat and withdraw, and Iraq will slide into the terrorist camp from which attacks will be launched against the U.S. Cutting and running from Iraq will also embolden Iran to continue with its nuclear research, give al-Qaida access to oil revenue, and strengthen Syria—all at the expense of American interests.
The original pretext for the American-led invasion of Iraq was to dislodge weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam might use on his neighbors, and to remove the Ba’athist regime. (“We’re taking out that fucker,” is how the President summarized his war aims to his then National Security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.) Previously, the front lines in the War on Terror were further east, near the Hindu Kush, where the followers of Osama bin Laden were in mountainous caves hatching plans against the West. In his speech, Mr. Bush tiptoes bravely past that graveyard—“America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan – and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq”—although from all accounts the Taliban has recently made inroads in recapturing large parts of Afghanistan. Nor was there any mention of Osama being wanted ‘dead or alive’. Instead the President is betting the ranch on winning the battle for Baghdad, on the theory that winning in Iraq will make “success in the War on Terror much easier.” He seems unfamiliar with the military maxim, “never reinforce failure.”
Oddly, given the stakes (“our way of life…”) in such a professed global struggle, the President’s tactics fail to rise above the defeatist posture of Vietnamization, President Nixon’s strategy to dump the war in Vietnam on Saigon. In Iraq, President Bush speaks of embedding American forces (as if they were television reporters) in Iraqi brigades and holding the Baghdad government accountable to “benchmarks” (as if it were an illiquid hedge fund). Under this logic, the administration says the U.S. is fighting a mortal enemy, one that threatens American society to the core; in response to this grave threat, our plan is to order American soldiers out on joint patrols with Iraqi police (who may or may not show up for work).
One of the dirty secrets in the War on Terror is that the U.S. is running short of front-line soldiers, which may explain the decision to outsource to the Iraqi police. Despite a Homeland Security and defense budget of nearly half a trillion dollars, for the U.S. to do battle in Iraq it has had to rotate the same Army and Marine Corps divisions in and out of the country. Some regiments of these elite divisions (First Marines, 82nd Airborne) have done five or six tours of duty. In his speech, the President pleads: “We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Maine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century.” At the same time weekend warriors from the National Guard find themselves forgotten in Iraq, stranded at bases scattered around the country as if forming a Muslim Maginot Line.
All the “surge” in American forces accomplishes is to bring up the troop numbers, in country, to what they were in May 2003. It tops up with Americans those soldiers withdrawn from the coalition of the increasingly unwilling. Using the ratio of five supports troops for every soldier in combat, the numbers of those doing the actual fighting in Iraq would be about 30,000. More likely only about 15,000 American soldiers are at the sharp end, in a country geographically larger than France. Even Alexander the Great came to Mesopotamia with more men.
* * *
Another problem in the struggle against terrorism is that President Bush and his administration cannot articulate exactly with whom Americans are at war. In addition to Bush’s presidential address, I also have a copy of the National Security Council’s “Iraq Strategy Review,” the background paper from which President Bush developed his New Way Forward strategy. That power point (available at the White House Web site, as is the Bush speech) makes many references to the “War on Terror” and to how “Iraq remains a central front in the Global War on Terror.” But the only detail as to the face of the enemy is an elliptical statement that “Al-Qaida in Iraq has declared and shown its intentions to establish a caliphate in Iraq.” Not clear is whether the enemy is Al-Qaida or sharia or a combination or both. Nevertheless, to fight against the threat of a caliphate puts the U.S. in the business of religious warfare, not unlike those we profess to be opposing.
Given that terror is a tactic, not a country or a standing army, for the Americans to fight a theocratic War against Terror is to anchor its crusader pennants into something resembling quick sand. Since most resistance movements now embrace the deployment of terror it puts the U.S. at odds with all sorts of groups between Algeria and the Philippines. (On the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, I count 34.) Take Iraq, for example. Prior to the American-led invasion, Saddam’s Ba’athist government (a Sunni minority) dominated a country that has a Shiite majority and a large Kurdish minority. We “took them out,” although Saddam rarely resorted to terrorism, preferring the brute strength of dictatorship to silence his opponents. Now in Iraq, according to President Bush, Iran is supplying weaponry and money to the Shiite majority, and that terrorist threat needs to be opposed (“I have recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region”). But these Shiites, aided and abetted by Iran, are the same Shiites freely elected to run the Maliki government that has brought democracy to Iraq—and thus are our allies, worthy of defense. Only in the Middle East is the enemy of our enemy still our enemy.
Next comes the quandary of Syria and its support of terrorism in Iraq. Although the government of Bashar al-Assad is nominally Ba’athist (a pan Arabist movement) and Sunni, and thus should have been allied to Saddam, in actual fact it supported Iran in the Iraq-Iran war, and it has recently sided with the Iranians in funding the Shiite Party of God in Lebanon (Hezbollah). Domestically in Syria, however, the al-Assad government opposes any kind of fundamentalist movement. In Iraq, according to President Bush, Syria and Iran have the affiliated goal of promoting anarchy (“We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq”). But if, in fact, Syria has provided safe havens to al-Qaida operatives fighting in Anbar Province, then Syria and Iran are on opposite sides of the barricades in Iraq and thus, in principle, one of them should be on our side. (Shia Muslims detest al-Qaida. Hence the reason Iran assisted the U.S. in 2001 when it attacked the Taliban.) If Syria is the Iraqi benefactor of al-Qaida, it should be the enemy of Iran, which, by some logic, then should be an American friend. But in the shadows of the War on Terror, America has only enemies; hence the announced mobilizations against both Damascus and Tehran.
In addition to dispatching Iraqi policemen to the front lines in the global struggle, President Bush has also unfurled the crusader standard of democracy. He says the U.S. is in Iraq to ensure “the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security.” Elsewhere in the address he speaks of “advancing liberty across a troubled region” and suggests that “functioning democracy” is a way to wage a war against all terrorists. But the problem with detonating democratic cluster bombs across the Middle East is that they generally blow up in the face of our friends more than our enemies.
The briefing memo of the National Security Council speaks of supporting moderates around the Middle East and applauds our Christian soldiers marching on their behalf. (“The United States has a national interest in seeing moderates succeed.”) It sounds good on paper, but few, if any of these moderates enjoying our support have democratically elected governments. (Israel and Lebanon are among the few democracies in the Middle East, and they are at war with each other. Countries like Egypt and Syria, while they nominally have elections, are dominated by one-party rule.) The rest of the Middle East, moderate or otherwise, has self-proclaimed royal families or mullahs in the throne rooms. The National Security Council and President Bush may believe that the “decisive ideological struggle of our time” is being waged against the caliphate pretensions of al-Qaida. At the same time they find all sorts of friends among what might be called petroliphates, which no more want to hold elections than they wish to cut the price of oil.
Nor is the U.S. all that happy when it counts the region’s electoral returns. For example, the U.S. refuses to recognize Hamas, despite it having won an election in the West Bank and Gaza. The same can be said about Hezbollah, which has the largest party bloc in the Lebanese parliament, but which was attacked, in part, with American weaponry. In Iraq, the Bush administration now has to two-step around the fact that it has fought a war of liberation for the Shiite majority, which down the road may vote not just for a caliphate but to cede large chunks of southern Iraq to Iran. Ironically, one of the poster boys in the War on Terror, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has won elections both as mayor of Tehran and as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
* * *
After his speech on Iraq, the President admitted to a reporter that he had, after all, watched Saddam Hussein’s You Tube hanging. Previously his spokesmen had maintained that he had been too busy contemplating a positive future for Iraq to linger over something as routine as an execution. Some days later, he did take time to tell a reporter that the Iraqi government had “fumbled” a subsequent session at the gallows, this time when they hung two of Saddam’s relatives who were also members of his government. The football expression was particularly apt, however, as the hangman for Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti got his weight calculations wrong, and the noose decapitated the former chief of Saddam’s secret police. The President’s only general comment on Saddam’s fall from grace was to say that the Maliki government, which presumably diagrammed the end zone celebration, “has still got some maturation to do.” He made it sound like the airing of snuff films is a phase all young democracies have to go through. He did not say, when he looked at the film, whether he had more sympathy for the role played by the trash-talking hangmen or his predecessor as Iraq’s strongman.
Of the many remarks I read about the Saddam execution, the one that best conveys the revulsion of the Muslim world came from a research fellow and Palestinian writer at the University of Exeter, Ghada Karmi, who found the “spectacle…shocking to those of us who respect propriety and human dignity.” Focusing only on Hussein’s last days, not the crimes that brought him to the gallows, she makes the points that he was killed while saying his prayers, that the execution took place on the dawn of Islam’s holy feast of Eid al-adha, that Saddam was held in custody by the U.S. until marched to the gibbet, that his body was flown away in an American helicopter, that his trial had aspects of a farce in which judges were threatened and defense lawyers were killed, and that the court may have frog-marched him to justice before he could explain from a witness box the extent to which he had done the West’s bidding when Iraq invaded Iran. “Yet,” she concludes, “this was billed as an independent decision of a ‘sovereign state’, as if any such thing were possible under occupation.”
Actually one of the few people that might have warmed to the spectacle of his hanging was Saddam Hussein himself, who always had a soft spot both for humiliation and summary execution. Writing his obituary in the Guardian, David Hirst concludes: “The Soviet dictator Stalin was his exemplar…Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind a façade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind—an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.” He killed three men while still in his teens—no doubt as he was “maturing”—and made his first presidential assassination attempt at age 22. When he finally succeeded to power in July 1969, he gathered the cabinet and senior members of the government and explained, with sadness and regret, that 66 of those present were “in the service of Zionism” not to mention “the forces of darkness.” One by one they were marched from the room. Then Saddam proposed to those remaining that they join him in carrying out what he called “democratic executions.” Hence Saddam’s first cabinet meeting reconvened as a firing squad, which perhaps the subsequent minutes covered under “new business.”
* * *
Watching Saddam get fitted with a noose, my own thoughts turned to the Ambrose Bierce short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The story is a standby in high school English courses. It was also a popular movie. So most readers will recall that the Confederate partisan on those gallows imagines the rope breaking, his drop into the river and then a return to the welcome arms of his wife—until the escape is proven nothing more than a dying man’s fleeting wish, and he is hanged. Bierce ends the story famously:
"At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon -- then all is darkness and silence!"
Less well remembered about the story is the profile of the man on the scaffold. He is not a Southern soldier, but an amateur, drawn romantically to the Confederate cause, who has set out from his homestead with the dream of avenging the invasion of the South. He is caught near the bridge, tried, and sentenced on the spot. Bierce describes him in terms that remind me of President Bush dragging the U.S. into war in Iraq:
"Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war."
At least when his end came, it was done with respect. Bierce writes: “Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.”
* * *
One problem for the U.S. President, among many, in the sloppy prosecution of the War on Terror is that the house rules of engagement have included political assassination. In theory, the U.S. outlawed targeting foreign leaders in 1975, after the findings of the Church Committee into various plots against Fidel Castro and others out of American favor. In those days presidential rubouts were the province of the Central Intelligence Agency, and its weapons included exploding cigars. In recent years, ever since President Ronald Reagan used stealth bombers to try to eliminate Muammar al-Qaddafi, the preferred method of assassination is to have the Army or the Air Force carry out the contract.
In the war over Kosovo, for example, American jets bombed the home of Slobodan Milosevic, with the hopes of killing him. In Iraq, members of the armed forces surrounded the safe house of Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, and sprayed it with machine fire for six hours, as if perhaps they were rival bootleggers. More recently, U.S. planes strafed what has been described as an al-Qaida cell in Somali and killed numerous inhabitants. Undoubtedly, American troops have shoot to kill orders against Osama bin Laden, even though he has never been sentenced, to my knowledge, in a U.S. or international court. Anyone who has watched the Saddam hanging knows that his killing varies only in small degrees from the ritual executions that hooded terrorists carry out against Western hostages and then post on grainy Web sites, complete with a soundtrack of angry chanting.
I suppose it could be argued that all war is a form of assassination. But I see a distinct legal and moral difference between defending your citizens and borders from invasion as opposed to putting together secret lists of enemies and sending operatives (in both planes and trench coats) to kill them. What is also clear from recent trends in international law is that world leaders no longer enjoy immunity, by virtue of holding a political office, from crimes against individuals or humanity. Look at the dock in The Hague, and then estimate how many defendants believe that they authorized killings in the interest of a particular state. Certainly Milosevic thought he was fighting to provide for a more perfect union. Would Donald Rumsfeld sound much different in arguing his defense, if he is ever picked up at the Amsterdam airport?
To be sure, only losers are put on trial at the International Court or otherwise brought to justice. (An American at the Nuremburg trials quipped to a friend: “If we had lost, that would be us on trial.”) In committing more lives and money to the lost cause in Iraq, President Bush may be acknowledging his personal discomfort with being at the head of a state that could be losing a war. Better to muddle through until he is safely from office? Hence the token reinforcements and the campaigns slogans about a Job Corps. Mussolini knew well about lost initiatives and wars, and spent his first day of eternity dangling from a meat hook at a Milan gas station. As we know from Saddam’s hanging, trying to keep Iraq together isn’t easy, and losing is not a pretty picture.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Generally troops in retreat lay down a cover of smoke, and that would appear to be the tactic of the Baker-Hamilton report, although I have doubts that adjectives like “dire” and “costly” will obscure the front lines long enough for coalition forces to flee safely to the rear. But then the only flanks covered in the report are those of tarnished reputations in Washington.
Let’s be clear: the report has little, if anything, to do with Iraq. The authors of the study do not read or speak Arabic. They went only once to Iraq, and then, of the ten, only one member ventured briefly beyond the cordon sanitaire of the Green Zone. Even inside the American redoubt, they would have learned little about Iraq, given that of the 1000 Americans manning that diplomatic fortress, only six speak Arabic well and only about 35 can stumble through a few elementary phrases. The rest of the sources, cited in the appendices, read like the A list for a Council on Foreign Relations dinner party. (Among the Grand Panjandrums consulted are Messrs. Lake, Scowcroft, Holbrooke, Kissinger, Powell, Schultz, Brzezinski, Christopher, Kerry, etc.) Think of it as The Best and Brightest Ball. Such are the sources from which Messrs. Baker and Hamilton cut and pasted their Iraq term paper, which with its terrible punctuation and awkward style reads no better than yet another cribbed assignment downloaded from the Internet.
Thinking about the authors of this so-called bipartisan report, it is hard to imagine putting together a group less informed about the Middle East. For example, who would consult a list of 300 million Americans and then decide that former Attorney General and Reagan administration bagman, Edwin Meese III, is the right person to get to the truth about the Sunni triangle or Iranian influence in Najaf, a place, even now, I suspect he could not locate on a map? In terms of Middle Eastern knowledge I doubt Ed Meese ranks any lower in the class than the likes of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor or Clinton presidential pal, Vernon Jordan, both of whom strike me as more qualified to fix parking tickets on Capitol Hill than to explain the motivations of those laying down improvised explosive devices on the roads outside Falluja. (The good news: 17 of the report’s 142 pages are devoted to the biographies of the panelists.)
Judged by its members, the Iraq Study Group’s report would appear to have been put together as a firewall to protect various reputations, as if it were a white paper whose sole purpose is to remain on display in the gift shops of various presidential libraries. What else explains the presence on the study group of so many Washington political operatives, each with their careers linked to one or more presidential image?
It would seem that Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, were given three votes at the Study Group table, and they chose former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, and the family lawyer, Mr. Jordan, whose mission is to argue that the first Clinton administration was not soft on terror and that a possible second Clinton administration shares the pain of the American people over losses in Iraq. The first President George Bush clearly had a hand in nominating the likes of Robert Gates (the archivist of his papers) and former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, there to emphasize that while Desert Storm was a box office hit, the sequel, March to Baghdad, is too long, lacks convincing special effects, and has a terrible ending.
Why the Lyndon Johnson lobby was given a delegate is a mystery, but there in the Study Group is his son-in-law, former Senator Charles Robb (D-Miss Virginia), perhaps to wall off the analogy that Iraq is another Vietnam and further tarnish LBJ’s quagmire presidency. The Reaganites were given two complimentary seats at the dinner, and they sent Judge O’Connor and Ed Meese, to be sure that no part of the study brought up Iran-Contra days, when the Reagan administration was embracing Iran with a Bible and a cake. Vice President Dick Cheney chose as his proxy Cody, Colorado lawyer and retired Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson (R-Bechtel), maybe on the basis that he planned not to read the report anyway. Only former president Jimmy Carter was not given a chair, as the other members perhaps feared he might actually travel around Iraq, do the required reading, and write (by himself) a dissenting opinion.
No doubt the current President Bush assented to the co-chairmanship of Fix-it Everyman, James Baker, for the same reason that his campaign had him recount votes in Florida in the 2000 election: it was hoped he might yet again save an otherwise doomed election (one in Washington, not in Baghdad). The former Congressman Lee Hamilton is there to take the sting out of any possible House investigations, including the possibility of impeachment. No one wanted to duplicate the mistakes that Woodrow Wilson made at Versailles (that of ignoring the Congress), although it was the messianic American president who thought, fatally, that Mesopotamia should be “regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes.”
Read as a plea bargain for errant presidential behavior, the Iraq Study report is a triumph, as it covers the walls of numerous presidential libraries with gallons of whitewash. Lyndon Johnson is not remembered for the Iraq-like folly of wanting to nail Ho Chi Minh’s coonskin to the White House door. Ronald Reagan continues to lie in state as the great communicator, rather than someone who dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to a warm embrace with Saddam Hussein. The first President Bush is recalled as one of the seven pillars of wisdom, someone who knew where to draw lines in Arabian sands. Nothing in the report establishes paternity between President Clinton’s dalliance with air power (cf. Belgrade, Sudan, Afghanistan) and the later feckless shock-and-awe policies of Secretary Rumsfeld. Even the current President Bush is voted an “E” for effort in Iraq—an exporter of democracy and hope, not someone running up a $2 trillion tab in the desert so that Karl Rove would not have to shoot all his campaign spots in a studio. In the end no one is to blame for the splendid little war in Iraq—save for some pesky roadside anarchists, and those suspects are best rounded up by the next president.
Let’s be clear: the report has little, if anything, to do with Iraq. The authors of the study do not read or speak Arabic. They went only once to Iraq, and then, of the ten, only one member ventured briefly beyond the cordon sanitaire of the Green Zone. Even inside the American redoubt, they would have learned little about Iraq, given that of the 1000 Americans manning that diplomatic fortress, only six speak Arabic well and only about 35 can stumble through a few elementary phrases. The rest of the sources, cited in the appendices, read like the A list for a Council on Foreign Relations dinner party. (Among the Grand Panjandrums consulted are Messrs. Lake, Scowcroft, Holbrooke, Kissinger, Powell, Schultz, Brzezinski, Christopher, Kerry, etc.) Think of it as The Best and Brightest Ball. Such are the sources from which Messrs. Baker and Hamilton cut and pasted their Iraq term paper, which with its terrible punctuation and awkward style reads no better than yet another cribbed assignment downloaded from the Internet.
Thinking about the authors of this so-called bipartisan report, it is hard to imagine putting together a group less informed about the Middle East. For example, who would consult a list of 300 million Americans and then decide that former Attorney General and Reagan administration bagman, Edwin Meese III, is the right person to get to the truth about the Sunni triangle or Iranian influence in Najaf, a place, even now, I suspect he could not locate on a map? In terms of Middle Eastern knowledge I doubt Ed Meese ranks any lower in the class than the likes of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor or Clinton presidential pal, Vernon Jordan, both of whom strike me as more qualified to fix parking tickets on Capitol Hill than to explain the motivations of those laying down improvised explosive devices on the roads outside Falluja. (The good news: 17 of the report’s 142 pages are devoted to the biographies of the panelists.)
Judged by its members, the Iraq Study Group’s report would appear to have been put together as a firewall to protect various reputations, as if it were a white paper whose sole purpose is to remain on display in the gift shops of various presidential libraries. What else explains the presence on the study group of so many Washington political operatives, each with their careers linked to one or more presidential image?
It would seem that Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, were given three votes at the Study Group table, and they chose former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, and the family lawyer, Mr. Jordan, whose mission is to argue that the first Clinton administration was not soft on terror and that a possible second Clinton administration shares the pain of the American people over losses in Iraq. The first President George Bush clearly had a hand in nominating the likes of Robert Gates (the archivist of his papers) and former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, there to emphasize that while Desert Storm was a box office hit, the sequel, March to Baghdad, is too long, lacks convincing special effects, and has a terrible ending.
Why the Lyndon Johnson lobby was given a delegate is a mystery, but there in the Study Group is his son-in-law, former Senator Charles Robb (D-Miss Virginia), perhaps to wall off the analogy that Iraq is another Vietnam and further tarnish LBJ’s quagmire presidency. The Reaganites were given two complimentary seats at the dinner, and they sent Judge O’Connor and Ed Meese, to be sure that no part of the study brought up Iran-Contra days, when the Reagan administration was embracing Iran with a Bible and a cake. Vice President Dick Cheney chose as his proxy Cody, Colorado lawyer and retired Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson (R-Bechtel), maybe on the basis that he planned not to read the report anyway. Only former president Jimmy Carter was not given a chair, as the other members perhaps feared he might actually travel around Iraq, do the required reading, and write (by himself) a dissenting opinion.
No doubt the current President Bush assented to the co-chairmanship of Fix-it Everyman, James Baker, for the same reason that his campaign had him recount votes in Florida in the 2000 election: it was hoped he might yet again save an otherwise doomed election (one in Washington, not in Baghdad). The former Congressman Lee Hamilton is there to take the sting out of any possible House investigations, including the possibility of impeachment. No one wanted to duplicate the mistakes that Woodrow Wilson made at Versailles (that of ignoring the Congress), although it was the messianic American president who thought, fatally, that Mesopotamia should be “regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes.”
Read as a plea bargain for errant presidential behavior, the Iraq Study report is a triumph, as it covers the walls of numerous presidential libraries with gallons of whitewash. Lyndon Johnson is not remembered for the Iraq-like folly of wanting to nail Ho Chi Minh’s coonskin to the White House door. Ronald Reagan continues to lie in state as the great communicator, rather than someone who dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to a warm embrace with Saddam Hussein. The first President Bush is recalled as one of the seven pillars of wisdom, someone who knew where to draw lines in Arabian sands. Nothing in the report establishes paternity between President Clinton’s dalliance with air power (cf. Belgrade, Sudan, Afghanistan) and the later feckless shock-and-awe policies of Secretary Rumsfeld. Even the current President Bush is voted an “E” for effort in Iraq—an exporter of democracy and hope, not someone running up a $2 trillion tab in the desert so that Karl Rove would not have to shoot all his campaign spots in a studio. In the end no one is to blame for the splendid little war in Iraq—save for some pesky roadside anarchists, and those suspects are best rounded up by the next president.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Swift Bank Veterans
In the last two weeks, the New York Times broke the story that, in the days after 9/11, the Bush administration had demanded and received unfettered access to the global system that sends bank transfers around the world. Since that black September, the US Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other assorted government agencies have been able to review money transfers, in theory, provided only that the payor or payee had a corporate affiliation with terror. The clearing house for international financial payments, known as SWIFT, is located is Brussels, but it has a US presence, and that link caused the cooperative—formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication—secretly, and without telling its clients, to turn state’s evidence in the war on terror.
By its own account, the New York Times anguished before it decided to rat on the secret US government sting operation. The Times executive editor, Bill Keller, even went to the length of writing an open letter to his readers in which he explains and then defends the decision to publish “information about the government’s examination of international banking records.” His mea culpa is written in homespun language (“As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I’d like to offer a personal response.”) rather than in the sober monotones of a Times editorial. But before the ink was dry in Keller’s printer, the Bush administration had accused the Times—in its sound bites anyway—of acts that it believed were alien and seditious.
Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney used the same adjective, “disgraceful,” to denounce the Times’s decision to publish news of the SWIFT snooping. President Bush said: “Congress was briefed. And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.” Vice President Cheney hummed the same tune (he said the program had been “successful in breaking up terrorist plots”) and other loyalists in the cabinet and the Congress implied that the Times had “given comfort” to America’s enemies. Representative Peter King thundered that the Times be investigated under the Espionage Act. But who knew prior to the administration’s outbursts that so-many jihadis in the war on terror were such faithful readers of the New York Times? From the accusatory language of the President and Vice President, you could almost draw the picture of terror cell members in places like Hamburg or Jakarta arguing over who gets the first crack at the Sunday magazine crossword or jumping on clues such as “Busted Brussels bank.”
For those of you wondering who or what SWIFT is, it’s useful to recall the banking era before there were standardized international wire transfers. From Venetian counting houses into the 1970s, banks needed to have accounts with each other to settle international payments. Or they needed a correspondent bank that worked with both of them. If a bank in Florence had a positive balance with another bank in Amsterdam, it could instruct the Dutch bank to advance money to one of its customers in Holland. Sometimes, if the Dutch bank had faith in the Florentines, it would advance money without proper collateral. But when there were doubts, the second bank waited for the funds to arrive from the first bank before paying out the cash. In those days foreign checks sent out “on collection” took about six weeks to clear, which, oddly, is still the case.
Beginning in the 1970s, all wire transfers were sent in a standardized SWIFT format, which provided the names and account numbers, and the amount to be transferred, from one bank to another. SWIFT did not ensure that either bank was good for the money, but as time passed admission to the SWIFT network did imply that the bank was creditworthy, and not flying by night. In effect, what SWIFT gave to the international banking system was an internal Western Union by which all members (effectively, most international banks) could communicate quickly and settle payments in all major currencies, not just US dollars.
One of the great modern ironies is that, if you travel to the United States, you are required to tell customs’ officials if you are physically carrying more than $10,000 in cash or if you have bought more than $400 in Greek souvenirs. At the same time, if you settle a foreign exchange transaction in US dollars, you might wire (via SWIFT) more than $1 billion from Europe to America, and no more have to explain the transaction than if you were buying a coffee at Starbucks. Nevertheless, the Bush administration saw September 11th as a chance to corner the markets in financial transparency, and thus tapped into a system that, on average, sends 11,034,472 messages a day. With about 4 billion telexes to sort through per year, what can’t the US discover about the global economy? Only a country with pretensions as grand as Rome’s would ever make the claim that it alone should supervise the world’s business. As the Emperor Caligula noted: “Let them hate us so long as they fear us.”
* * *
American financial hegemony dates to the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollars became the coin of the realm. Toward the end of the Second World War, the dollar was seen as the successor to the British pound as the world’s reserve currency, and other currencies generally established their value in relation to the greenback. In effect, the dollar became as good as gold—the US could print more when wealth was needed—and it was easy to send it around the world to settle trade and financial transactions. So long as the world continued to believe in the “full faith and credit” of the United States, financial markets would continue to trade and save in dollars. That indirectly allowed Washington to keep its supervisory eye on world’s financial system. By definition, any transfer made in the US dollars had to clear through a US bank, and that bank had either a federal or a state banking charter, putting it under the thumb of some government regulator.
About the time that the SWIFT system developed its banking worldwide web of telexes, however, the US dollar began to lose its luster as a reserve currency. In 1971, President Richard Nixon detached its gold backing, letting the dollar float against a basket of other currencies. The US also embarked on a long run of budget and trade deficits, and moved from being a creditor to a debtor nation. (In 1960, the national debt was $260 billion; in 1990 it had grown to $3.2 trillion.) The hangover effect of living off easy money weakened the value of the US dollar to the point that investors increasingly preferred to hold their savings in such currencies as the Japanese yen or, later, the European Euro. Over time, the US became just one of a number of reserve currencies—but one which continued to lose its value in international markets. The smart money managers—George Soros and Warren Buffet among them—made huge long-term bets on the dollar’s continuing decline, which was like wagering that a drunken sailor would belly up to the bar for another drink.
In response to the reports published in the New York Times, the President defended the looting of the SWIFT systems: “If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that’s exactly what we are doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.” From this justification it is possible to imagine hard-working Homeland Security agents following a trail of funds from the bank accounts of Osama bin Laden into the coffers of various terrorist organization, and thus avoiding another attack against US citizens. It may happen like that on “Crime Scene Investigation: Crawford,” but in the murky underworlds of violence, if you were actually to follow the money, you would find payments made by couriers or offsets confirmed by e-mails, not SWIFT messages. Terror networks are not hedge funds. How many suicide bombers do you imagine even have bank accounts?
In the meantime, the Bush administration now has unrestricted access to tap into anyone’s bank transfers. When the Times ran its story, the President protested that no laws had been broken and said that Congress had been “briefed” on the program. But how does “briefing” Republican leaders in Congress square with the Fourth Amendment, which in its entirety reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” In its searches, the Bush administration asserts the right to bypass the constitutional requirement for specific court orders and subpoenas, and claims the right to judge nearly all global banking records before deciding which of them poses a threat to domestic tranquility. We’re a long way from the sentiments of Pericles, whom Thuycidides quotes as saying: “The individual can be trusted. Let him alone.”
* * *
SWIFT is a Belgian-based cooperative, with about 8,000 members, and I suspect for the foreseeable future it will have to explain in any number of world courts on what basis it allowed the US government access to private financial records. It writes on its Web site: “Protecting your privacy is very important to SWIFT. To do so, we follow general principles in accordance with worldwide best practice on data protection. Information we collect may include personal data related to individuals such as name, address and email address. We treat all this information as confidential. We do not give it or sell it to any third party, except as required by law or as necessary for us to provide you with the required services. We hope the following policy will help you understand how SWIFT collects, uses and safeguards your information on our website.” At least that sounds more dignified than if it were to write: “We also will provide all your private and confidential data to the CIA, FBI, and any one else, at least whenever the Bush administration is threatening to put us out of business.”
Already a human rights group, Privacy International, located in London, has sued SWIFT in 32 countries, saying it violated laws in Europe and Asia that pertain to “data protection rules.” The group’s director said: “It [SWIFT] was willing to overlook European civil liberties rules in order to satisfy U.S. objectives and this is the most recent in a long list of attempts by the U.S. to invade the privacy of Europeans.” In response, it will not be sufficient for SWIFT to explain that the US Congress had been “briefed” on its conduct. Indeed, when the SWIFT story broke, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence saw fit to release a letter that he had sent in May 2006 to the President, which reads, in part: “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee not been briefed. In the next few days I will be formally requesting information on these activities. If these allegations are true, they may represent a beach of responsibility by the Administration, a violation of law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and Members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies.” (So much for: “Congress has been briefed…..”)
In rounding up the usual suspects, the Bush administration has put the rest of the financial world on notice that banks anywhere in the world, especially those trading US dollars, are under the watchful eye of the Big American Brother. I am afraid this impression may pay a variety of unanticipated dividends. Potentially a SWIFT transfer of Euros from a French to a Spanish bank is sitting on the desks at Homeland Security. How long will it take for legitimate, international banking clients to conclude that their business is also that of the US government, whether or not it has a subpoena to open an investigation? In my view, such a development will only hasten the global crisis of confidence in the US dollar. In that battle, those attacking the US treasury will not be Muslim brothers so much as the international financial system, which may finally conclude it has had enough of US imperium.
One consequence of legislation like the USA Patriot Act—another September 11th invasion—is that many foreign investors want nothing to do with American stocks and bonds. Now the revelation that Homeland Securitizers are tapping bank transfers could give fresh impetus to, for example, the global petroleum business to peg the price of oil to the Euro, and not the dollar. Nor does anyone know how long the exporting nations of Asia plan to keep investing in US debt obligations, given the potential weakness of the dollar. The Bush administration is forever invoking the image of terrorists “hitting” the United States, to justify domestic repression and invasions of privacy. But those who will hijack the dollar will not be jihadis so much as central bankers and petroleum companies. At least in their case, it will be easier to follow the money.
* * *
In any economic counterattacks, the US has everything to lose. Total US debt—if you can read one of those spinning clocks—is $8.4 trillion, and, of that, foreign central banks and individuals hold almost half. China and Japan alone own about $1 trillion of the US debt, making them customers that Washington cannot afford to lose. (Buyers of US debt are also buyers of the dollar.) But why should any nation keep a bulk of its savings in a currency that continually loses value or in the paper money of a country that runs a budget deficit between $300-400 billion?
As regards the American dollar’s dependence on oil consumption, the U.S. consumes 20.7 million barrels daily, of which 11 percent comes from the Persian Gulf and 27 percent comes from OPEC members. Overall, the US imports 65 percent of its oil. At $72 a barrel, the country sends abroad $968 million a day in payment for foreign petroleum products. Should some of those countries wish to injure the US, for whatever reason, they could accept only Euros in payment for oil exports or to push within OPEC that the organization peg petroleum to currencies other than the dollar. As it stands now, the US can mitigate the inflationary costs of the oil price increases by paying with depreciated dollars. If it has to pay with gold or Euros, the sticker shock will become more readily apparent.
In the meantime, to keep the electoral home front burning, the Bush administration is shifting its failures in the war on terror to the likes of the New York Times or anyone who opposes the war in Iraq. Vice President Cheney said: “Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs.” From that you might have thought that the Times had directly aided and abetted an enemy, when all it did was report that the US government had pressured a foreign cooperative to reveal the contents of international banking transactions, many of which had no connection to the United States—either its territory or its currency. For a long time legal precedents have governed how to search bank information. As Keller writes in his open letter: “…bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation.” But Messrs. Bush and Cheney might prefer only to work with newspaper editors who have sworn loyalty oaths.
Is the New York Times, as President Bush stated, really among the reasons that the US is not winning the war on terror? My own sense is that labeling a major newspaper as treasonous is another way of brooking opposition to the government’s appropriated war powers. It also forestalls any questioning of the economic consequences of September 11th. You don’t hear it in Congress or much in the traitorous press (although maybe it’s in the SWIFT receipts), but to date the US has spent $320 billion prosecuting the war in Iraq. Alas, for that money, you still cannot drive safely in Baghdad from the airport to the US embassy. Projected costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now forecast to reach $811 billion, more than was spent, on an adjusted basis, in Vietnam. Current estimates are that the war in Iraq costs almost $9 billion monthly, but for that money the US cannot make it clear if it is backing the Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds or whether some of our Iraqi allies are not, in fact, getting help from many names on the foreign terrorist organization list. In fiscal 2006, according to the Washington Post, the “war on terror” will consume $435 billion in budget allocations, leaving aside the $110 million sent daily to the Persian Gulf to fill up American tanks.
What I find incredible in this story isn’t just the administration threats against the Times—A Fox network acolyte said: "My advice to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at this point in time is chop-chop, hurry up, let's get these prosecutors fired up and get the subpoenas served, get the indictments going, and get these guys (meaning Timesmen) behind jail"—but that the editors were as accommodating as they appear to have been to the government. Keller writes in his open letter: “Our decision to publish the story of the Administration’s penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me.” In what brave new world is a newspaper—operating in a democracy that has voted to uphold freedom of the press and which in the Constitution makes no exceptions for “matters of national security”—required to spend weeks explaining to the government why it plans to run a story about how that same government has secretly and probably illegally penetrated the banking records of millions of people, most of whom don’t even live in the US?
Perhaps the only good to come of this heavy-handed government bullying could have been that now Keller understands what it means to be Swift boated. But a week later he wrote, along with the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, an Op-Ed piece that further explains the decision to reveal the bank spying. Astonishingly, the tone of the piece is fawning and apologetic. (“No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing.”) Further, it shows the extent to which the Bush administration routinely bullies the press, and gets away with it. Keller and Baquet write of government spiked articles: “But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times’ decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration’s case for secrecy.” Plus the authors reveal that the Washington Post, under administration pressure, has withheld publishing the location of the secret CIA prisons.
* * *
In military and economic terms, the US suffered little as a result of the attacks of September 11th. The hijackers were not the first wave of an invasion force, and most had grievances with governments other than that in Washington. To be sure, it was shocking to lose four planes, two large office towers in New York, parts of the Pentagon, and about 3,000 citizens. That same year, however, the US lost 42,900 persons in road accidents, following which no one declared war on driving or General Motors. Instead of deeming 9/11 a criminal act, with jurisdiction residing in the office of the New York District Attorney, the Bush administration deemed September 11th to be a physical attack on the territory of the United States—and appropriated to the federal government all sorts of self-proclaimed war powers, of which the right to inspect bank transfers anywhere in the world is just the latest example.
Abroad, the US government has launched a preemptive war in Iraq, held prisoners beyond the reach of US or international law, had its troops target certain individuals for assassination, ferried detainees to jurisdictions that tolerate torture, and degraded prisoners of war in manners that make a mockery of Geneva conventions. At home, the government is threatening to investigate a major newspaper under the Espionage Act while it claims the unilateral right for itself to police the books withdrawn from libraries or to eavesdrop on portable phones calls and millions of e-mails.
Perhaps the biggest abuse of the Bush administration is to employ language that justifies its state-of-siege measures as being in support of a “war on terror.” Rarely, if ever, do I hear anyone spell out exactly with whom the United States is at war. As best as I can determine, terror is method, not a place or a nation. Thus the US is fighting a tactic, not a country or even an ideology. On various State Department and congressional Web sites, it is possible to download compendiums of foreign terrorist organizations, and I have one before me that lists 36 such potential enemies, beginning with Abu Nidal and ending with the United Self-Defense Forces in Columbia. In between are the murderers’ row of terror, including Islamic Jihad, the Tamil Tigers, Basque separatists, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
I have no sympathy with any of these groups but why would any nation choose to declare war on gangs as far-flung as the Shining Path in Peru and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan? In declaring itself in a war against terror, the Bush administration finds itself potentially fighting on as many fronts as there are bored and angry teenagers with access to car bombs—not to mention governments, like those in Iran or Sudan, which subscribe to terrorist rules. A week after 9/11 the President declared in front of Congress: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorists group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Most strategists counsel against two-front wars; in attacking terror, the US has as many enemies as its wishes to imagine, and on every continent. (I need some help identifying exactly which barricades are manned by the Salafist Group for Call and Combat or Jaish-e-Mohammed.) No wonder the US thinks it needs to review 11 million banking transactions a day.
I would submit that if “you want to find out what the terrorists are doing,” that instead of auditing global funds transfers, you spend a few weeks in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, south Lebanon, the slums of Cairo, Baluchistan, the holy city of Qom, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, or remote jungles in the southern Philippines. Given that most of the September 11th hijackers were nationals of Saudi Arabia, as is Osama bin Laden, it might even help to pass through the madrassas in Riyadh, not to mention his erstwhile headquarters in Sudan. You could also make contact with his sympathizers in Yemen. Whether such a journey will pinpoint who lives in the land of Terror or if and why they hate Americans is another question. My guess is that you will discover that the war on terror is more an opportunity to scam national security appropriations and to read each other’s e-mails, than it is about pacifying Harakat ul-Mujahidin or rounding up the Philippine New People’s Army. The journey may even shed light on whether the US has declared war against Shiites, Sunnis, nationalists, separatists, irredentists, or just arsonists.
One thing you will discover on such a journey is that few of the banks operating in those regions are even members of SWIFT. Indeed, as a test, ask that someone wire you funds in Quetta, Pyongyang, or in southern Mindanao. While waiting for the money, it might be useful to compare the advice of John Quincy Adams (“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”) with George Orwell’s observation ( "A few agents of the thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous..."), and decide which best describes America in the new millennium.
By its own account, the New York Times anguished before it decided to rat on the secret US government sting operation. The Times executive editor, Bill Keller, even went to the length of writing an open letter to his readers in which he explains and then defends the decision to publish “information about the government’s examination of international banking records.” His mea culpa is written in homespun language (“As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I’d like to offer a personal response.”) rather than in the sober monotones of a Times editorial. But before the ink was dry in Keller’s printer, the Bush administration had accused the Times—in its sound bites anyway—of acts that it believed were alien and seditious.
Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney used the same adjective, “disgraceful,” to denounce the Times’s decision to publish news of the SWIFT snooping. President Bush said: “Congress was briefed. And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.” Vice President Cheney hummed the same tune (he said the program had been “successful in breaking up terrorist plots”) and other loyalists in the cabinet and the Congress implied that the Times had “given comfort” to America’s enemies. Representative Peter King thundered that the Times be investigated under the Espionage Act. But who knew prior to the administration’s outbursts that so-many jihadis in the war on terror were such faithful readers of the New York Times? From the accusatory language of the President and Vice President, you could almost draw the picture of terror cell members in places like Hamburg or Jakarta arguing over who gets the first crack at the Sunday magazine crossword or jumping on clues such as “Busted Brussels bank.”
For those of you wondering who or what SWIFT is, it’s useful to recall the banking era before there were standardized international wire transfers. From Venetian counting houses into the 1970s, banks needed to have accounts with each other to settle international payments. Or they needed a correspondent bank that worked with both of them. If a bank in Florence had a positive balance with another bank in Amsterdam, it could instruct the Dutch bank to advance money to one of its customers in Holland. Sometimes, if the Dutch bank had faith in the Florentines, it would advance money without proper collateral. But when there were doubts, the second bank waited for the funds to arrive from the first bank before paying out the cash. In those days foreign checks sent out “on collection” took about six weeks to clear, which, oddly, is still the case.
Beginning in the 1970s, all wire transfers were sent in a standardized SWIFT format, which provided the names and account numbers, and the amount to be transferred, from one bank to another. SWIFT did not ensure that either bank was good for the money, but as time passed admission to the SWIFT network did imply that the bank was creditworthy, and not flying by night. In effect, what SWIFT gave to the international banking system was an internal Western Union by which all members (effectively, most international banks) could communicate quickly and settle payments in all major currencies, not just US dollars.
One of the great modern ironies is that, if you travel to the United States, you are required to tell customs’ officials if you are physically carrying more than $10,000 in cash or if you have bought more than $400 in Greek souvenirs. At the same time, if you settle a foreign exchange transaction in US dollars, you might wire (via SWIFT) more than $1 billion from Europe to America, and no more have to explain the transaction than if you were buying a coffee at Starbucks. Nevertheless, the Bush administration saw September 11th as a chance to corner the markets in financial transparency, and thus tapped into a system that, on average, sends 11,034,472 messages a day. With about 4 billion telexes to sort through per year, what can’t the US discover about the global economy? Only a country with pretensions as grand as Rome’s would ever make the claim that it alone should supervise the world’s business. As the Emperor Caligula noted: “Let them hate us so long as they fear us.”
* * *
American financial hegemony dates to the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollars became the coin of the realm. Toward the end of the Second World War, the dollar was seen as the successor to the British pound as the world’s reserve currency, and other currencies generally established their value in relation to the greenback. In effect, the dollar became as good as gold—the US could print more when wealth was needed—and it was easy to send it around the world to settle trade and financial transactions. So long as the world continued to believe in the “full faith and credit” of the United States, financial markets would continue to trade and save in dollars. That indirectly allowed Washington to keep its supervisory eye on world’s financial system. By definition, any transfer made in the US dollars had to clear through a US bank, and that bank had either a federal or a state banking charter, putting it under the thumb of some government regulator.
About the time that the SWIFT system developed its banking worldwide web of telexes, however, the US dollar began to lose its luster as a reserve currency. In 1971, President Richard Nixon detached its gold backing, letting the dollar float against a basket of other currencies. The US also embarked on a long run of budget and trade deficits, and moved from being a creditor to a debtor nation. (In 1960, the national debt was $260 billion; in 1990 it had grown to $3.2 trillion.) The hangover effect of living off easy money weakened the value of the US dollar to the point that investors increasingly preferred to hold their savings in such currencies as the Japanese yen or, later, the European Euro. Over time, the US became just one of a number of reserve currencies—but one which continued to lose its value in international markets. The smart money managers—George Soros and Warren Buffet among them—made huge long-term bets on the dollar’s continuing decline, which was like wagering that a drunken sailor would belly up to the bar for another drink.
In response to the reports published in the New York Times, the President defended the looting of the SWIFT systems: “If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money. And that’s exactly what we are doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.” From this justification it is possible to imagine hard-working Homeland Security agents following a trail of funds from the bank accounts of Osama bin Laden into the coffers of various terrorist organization, and thus avoiding another attack against US citizens. It may happen like that on “Crime Scene Investigation: Crawford,” but in the murky underworlds of violence, if you were actually to follow the money, you would find payments made by couriers or offsets confirmed by e-mails, not SWIFT messages. Terror networks are not hedge funds. How many suicide bombers do you imagine even have bank accounts?
In the meantime, the Bush administration now has unrestricted access to tap into anyone’s bank transfers. When the Times ran its story, the President protested that no laws had been broken and said that Congress had been “briefed” on the program. But how does “briefing” Republican leaders in Congress square with the Fourth Amendment, which in its entirety reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” In its searches, the Bush administration asserts the right to bypass the constitutional requirement for specific court orders and subpoenas, and claims the right to judge nearly all global banking records before deciding which of them poses a threat to domestic tranquility. We’re a long way from the sentiments of Pericles, whom Thuycidides quotes as saying: “The individual can be trusted. Let him alone.”
* * *
SWIFT is a Belgian-based cooperative, with about 8,000 members, and I suspect for the foreseeable future it will have to explain in any number of world courts on what basis it allowed the US government access to private financial records. It writes on its Web site: “Protecting your privacy is very important to SWIFT. To do so, we follow general principles in accordance with worldwide best practice on data protection. Information we collect may include personal data related to individuals such as name, address and email address. We treat all this information as confidential. We do not give it or sell it to any third party, except as required by law or as necessary for us to provide you with the required services. We hope the following policy will help you understand how SWIFT collects, uses and safeguards your information on our website.” At least that sounds more dignified than if it were to write: “We also will provide all your private and confidential data to the CIA, FBI, and any one else, at least whenever the Bush administration is threatening to put us out of business.”
Already a human rights group, Privacy International, located in London, has sued SWIFT in 32 countries, saying it violated laws in Europe and Asia that pertain to “data protection rules.” The group’s director said: “It [SWIFT] was willing to overlook European civil liberties rules in order to satisfy U.S. objectives and this is the most recent in a long list of attempts by the U.S. to invade the privacy of Europeans.” In response, it will not be sufficient for SWIFT to explain that the US Congress had been “briefed” on its conduct. Indeed, when the SWIFT story broke, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence saw fit to release a letter that he had sent in May 2006 to the President, which reads, in part: “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee not been briefed. In the next few days I will be formally requesting information on these activities. If these allegations are true, they may represent a beach of responsibility by the Administration, a violation of law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and Members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies.” (So much for: “Congress has been briefed…..”)
In rounding up the usual suspects, the Bush administration has put the rest of the financial world on notice that banks anywhere in the world, especially those trading US dollars, are under the watchful eye of the Big American Brother. I am afraid this impression may pay a variety of unanticipated dividends. Potentially a SWIFT transfer of Euros from a French to a Spanish bank is sitting on the desks at Homeland Security. How long will it take for legitimate, international banking clients to conclude that their business is also that of the US government, whether or not it has a subpoena to open an investigation? In my view, such a development will only hasten the global crisis of confidence in the US dollar. In that battle, those attacking the US treasury will not be Muslim brothers so much as the international financial system, which may finally conclude it has had enough of US imperium.
One consequence of legislation like the USA Patriot Act—another September 11th invasion—is that many foreign investors want nothing to do with American stocks and bonds. Now the revelation that Homeland Securitizers are tapping bank transfers could give fresh impetus to, for example, the global petroleum business to peg the price of oil to the Euro, and not the dollar. Nor does anyone know how long the exporting nations of Asia plan to keep investing in US debt obligations, given the potential weakness of the dollar. The Bush administration is forever invoking the image of terrorists “hitting” the United States, to justify domestic repression and invasions of privacy. But those who will hijack the dollar will not be jihadis so much as central bankers and petroleum companies. At least in their case, it will be easier to follow the money.
* * *
In any economic counterattacks, the US has everything to lose. Total US debt—if you can read one of those spinning clocks—is $8.4 trillion, and, of that, foreign central banks and individuals hold almost half. China and Japan alone own about $1 trillion of the US debt, making them customers that Washington cannot afford to lose. (Buyers of US debt are also buyers of the dollar.) But why should any nation keep a bulk of its savings in a currency that continually loses value or in the paper money of a country that runs a budget deficit between $300-400 billion?
As regards the American dollar’s dependence on oil consumption, the U.S. consumes 20.7 million barrels daily, of which 11 percent comes from the Persian Gulf and 27 percent comes from OPEC members. Overall, the US imports 65 percent of its oil. At $72 a barrel, the country sends abroad $968 million a day in payment for foreign petroleum products. Should some of those countries wish to injure the US, for whatever reason, they could accept only Euros in payment for oil exports or to push within OPEC that the organization peg petroleum to currencies other than the dollar. As it stands now, the US can mitigate the inflationary costs of the oil price increases by paying with depreciated dollars. If it has to pay with gold or Euros, the sticker shock will become more readily apparent.
In the meantime, to keep the electoral home front burning, the Bush administration is shifting its failures in the war on terror to the likes of the New York Times or anyone who opposes the war in Iraq. Vice President Cheney said: “Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs.” From that you might have thought that the Times had directly aided and abetted an enemy, when all it did was report that the US government had pressured a foreign cooperative to reveal the contents of international banking transactions, many of which had no connection to the United States—either its territory or its currency. For a long time legal precedents have governed how to search bank information. As Keller writes in his open letter: “…bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation.” But Messrs. Bush and Cheney might prefer only to work with newspaper editors who have sworn loyalty oaths.
Is the New York Times, as President Bush stated, really among the reasons that the US is not winning the war on terror? My own sense is that labeling a major newspaper as treasonous is another way of brooking opposition to the government’s appropriated war powers. It also forestalls any questioning of the economic consequences of September 11th. You don’t hear it in Congress or much in the traitorous press (although maybe it’s in the SWIFT receipts), but to date the US has spent $320 billion prosecuting the war in Iraq. Alas, for that money, you still cannot drive safely in Baghdad from the airport to the US embassy. Projected costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now forecast to reach $811 billion, more than was spent, on an adjusted basis, in Vietnam. Current estimates are that the war in Iraq costs almost $9 billion monthly, but for that money the US cannot make it clear if it is backing the Sunnis, Shiites, or Kurds or whether some of our Iraqi allies are not, in fact, getting help from many names on the foreign terrorist organization list. In fiscal 2006, according to the Washington Post, the “war on terror” will consume $435 billion in budget allocations, leaving aside the $110 million sent daily to the Persian Gulf to fill up American tanks.
What I find incredible in this story isn’t just the administration threats against the Times—A Fox network acolyte said: "My advice to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at this point in time is chop-chop, hurry up, let's get these prosecutors fired up and get the subpoenas served, get the indictments going, and get these guys (meaning Timesmen) behind jail"—but that the editors were as accommodating as they appear to have been to the government. Keller writes in his open letter: “Our decision to publish the story of the Administration’s penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me.” In what brave new world is a newspaper—operating in a democracy that has voted to uphold freedom of the press and which in the Constitution makes no exceptions for “matters of national security”—required to spend weeks explaining to the government why it plans to run a story about how that same government has secretly and probably illegally penetrated the banking records of millions of people, most of whom don’t even live in the US?
Perhaps the only good to come of this heavy-handed government bullying could have been that now Keller understands what it means to be Swift boated. But a week later he wrote, along with the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, an Op-Ed piece that further explains the decision to reveal the bank spying. Astonishingly, the tone of the piece is fawning and apologetic. (“No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing.”) Further, it shows the extent to which the Bush administration routinely bullies the press, and gets away with it. Keller and Baquet write of government spiked articles: “But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times’ decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration’s case for secrecy.” Plus the authors reveal that the Washington Post, under administration pressure, has withheld publishing the location of the secret CIA prisons.
* * *
In military and economic terms, the US suffered little as a result of the attacks of September 11th. The hijackers were not the first wave of an invasion force, and most had grievances with governments other than that in Washington. To be sure, it was shocking to lose four planes, two large office towers in New York, parts of the Pentagon, and about 3,000 citizens. That same year, however, the US lost 42,900 persons in road accidents, following which no one declared war on driving or General Motors. Instead of deeming 9/11 a criminal act, with jurisdiction residing in the office of the New York District Attorney, the Bush administration deemed September 11th to be a physical attack on the territory of the United States—and appropriated to the federal government all sorts of self-proclaimed war powers, of which the right to inspect bank transfers anywhere in the world is just the latest example.
Abroad, the US government has launched a preemptive war in Iraq, held prisoners beyond the reach of US or international law, had its troops target certain individuals for assassination, ferried detainees to jurisdictions that tolerate torture, and degraded prisoners of war in manners that make a mockery of Geneva conventions. At home, the government is threatening to investigate a major newspaper under the Espionage Act while it claims the unilateral right for itself to police the books withdrawn from libraries or to eavesdrop on portable phones calls and millions of e-mails.
Perhaps the biggest abuse of the Bush administration is to employ language that justifies its state-of-siege measures as being in support of a “war on terror.” Rarely, if ever, do I hear anyone spell out exactly with whom the United States is at war. As best as I can determine, terror is method, not a place or a nation. Thus the US is fighting a tactic, not a country or even an ideology. On various State Department and congressional Web sites, it is possible to download compendiums of foreign terrorist organizations, and I have one before me that lists 36 such potential enemies, beginning with Abu Nidal and ending with the United Self-Defense Forces in Columbia. In between are the murderers’ row of terror, including Islamic Jihad, the Tamil Tigers, Basque separatists, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
I have no sympathy with any of these groups but why would any nation choose to declare war on gangs as far-flung as the Shining Path in Peru and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan? In declaring itself in a war against terror, the Bush administration finds itself potentially fighting on as many fronts as there are bored and angry teenagers with access to car bombs—not to mention governments, like those in Iran or Sudan, which subscribe to terrorist rules. A week after 9/11 the President declared in front of Congress: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorists group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Most strategists counsel against two-front wars; in attacking terror, the US has as many enemies as its wishes to imagine, and on every continent. (I need some help identifying exactly which barricades are manned by the Salafist Group for Call and Combat or Jaish-e-Mohammed.) No wonder the US thinks it needs to review 11 million banking transactions a day.
I would submit that if “you want to find out what the terrorists are doing,” that instead of auditing global funds transfers, you spend a few weeks in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, south Lebanon, the slums of Cairo, Baluchistan, the holy city of Qom, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, or remote jungles in the southern Philippines. Given that most of the September 11th hijackers were nationals of Saudi Arabia, as is Osama bin Laden, it might even help to pass through the madrassas in Riyadh, not to mention his erstwhile headquarters in Sudan. You could also make contact with his sympathizers in Yemen. Whether such a journey will pinpoint who lives in the land of Terror or if and why they hate Americans is another question. My guess is that you will discover that the war on terror is more an opportunity to scam national security appropriations and to read each other’s e-mails, than it is about pacifying Harakat ul-Mujahidin or rounding up the Philippine New People’s Army. The journey may even shed light on whether the US has declared war against Shiites, Sunnis, nationalists, separatists, irredentists, or just arsonists.
One thing you will discover on such a journey is that few of the banks operating in those regions are even members of SWIFT. Indeed, as a test, ask that someone wire you funds in Quetta, Pyongyang, or in southern Mindanao. While waiting for the money, it might be useful to compare the advice of John Quincy Adams (“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”) with George Orwell’s observation ( "A few agents of the thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous..."), and decide which best describes America in the new millennium.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Iranian Idol
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?
* * *
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.
* * *
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.”
* * *
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.’”
* * *
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.”
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?
* * *
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.
* * *
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.”
* * *
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.’”
* * *
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.”
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Iranamok
Assuming that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not get blown off the nuclear map, my sense of recent events is that Tehran is the clear winner in the war on terrorism. Prior to September 11th, Iran had a revolutionary past, and an uncertain future. Students—presumably clamoring for blue jeans and mascara—were rioting against the Persian theocracy. On its borders it had enemies in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, not to mention oil competition from another traditional foe, Azerbaijan. As always the United States was hostile, invoking economic sanctions, and the Russian fear of Islam’s dry wind blowing sparks across its former Central Asian republics had Moscow lined up against the mullahs. But then the enemies of our enemies were reincarnated as the coalition of the willing, and Iran found itself happily being pulled to regional predominance in the wake of the Great Satan’s post-9/11 crusades.
Beginning in November 2001, America stepped up to do the mullahs’ bidding. It pushed the Sunni-rooted Taliban out of Afghanistan, leaving large portions of that country in the control of warlords, some of whom are in the pay of Tehran. Next the US turned on Iraq, overthrew Hussein (who had fought a grisly 8-year war against Iran) and, as it dismantled the Iraqi military, announced that the battlefield objective was to bring democracy to the Sunni triangle. Jefferson had no such illusions when he dealt with Barbary’s pirates. But the administration of George W. Bush hoped the idea of a democratic Middle East would play well on sound-bite storyboards. Instead, in Iraq, as the US removed the minority Sunnis and Baathists from power, it positioned Baghdad either for a Shiite-dominated government (which would be friendlier with Iran) or civil war (also an Iranian interest). As if those gifts were not enough to the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Bush administration went for an Iran trifecta when it used its swagger to evict the Syrian army from Lebanon—leaving that troubled country more at the mercy of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists from whose ranks suicide bombers are routinely recruited. Thus in a few short years, Iran went from fearing a New Age or consumerist counterrevolution to its restoration as the regional great power in the Middle East—all thanks to the theocracy in Washington that, presumably, shares some of its fundamentalist values.
You would have thought that the ayatollahs might have shown some gratitude towards their American soldiers of fortune. After all, al-Qaida’s pretensions toward predominance in the Arab world had origins in the Sunni madrassas of Saudi Arabia, not the holy city of Qom. But rather than reward the Americans with some discounted crude oil or invite President Bush to spend New Year’s Eve in Persepolis, as the Shah would have done, the mullahs decided to follow up their victories by pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium and possibly construct nuclear weapons. Seen from Tehran, the choice of atomic energy or a bomb was a no-lose proposition. As follows: once Iran had a nuclear capability, it would no longer fear an invasion from American-occupied Iraq. At the same time it could rally the Arab faithful around the idea of finally having the capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yes, the UN could issue sanctions, and the air forces of either the US or Israel might take out some cooling towers or research laboratories. But those would be minor setbacks and, perversely, might confirm Iran’s status as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power—once again capable of holding the West hostage. Bomb technology might also serve notice on domestic opponents of the mullahs, who in 2005 had banned more than a thousand candidates in regional and national elections and then backed the presidential candidacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, to celebrate his victory, decided to win friends and influence allies by announcing the Holocaust a “myth.”
Obviously, like anyone who would rather not see Istafan turn into a nuclear Sarajevo, I would like to think the Bush administration is capable of “muddling through” this crisis (as was said of the incompetent Hapsburg government of Franz Joseph). But I am not optimistic. My sense is that the US government needs to the idea of a “Mad Fakir” in Tehran just as much the Iranian government needs to fill the streets with demonstrators rallying against the “Enemy of Islam.” Nor do I believe that this nuclear showdown will be easily halted before the brink. Each side has too much invested in its enemy.
* * *
Just a summary of American-Iran relations should not give anyone reason to hope that Washington has broken the da Vinci code to understanding Iran. Leaving aside 10,000 years of Persian history, let’s move the clock to 1953, when British and American intelligence agencies staged a coup against the possibly communist-influenced prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Returned to the throne in Iran was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose father—a mid-ranking Iranian military officer—had seized power by a coup in 1925 and proclaimed himself “shah.” In the early 1950s, Iran was seen as a swing vote in the Cold War, and the Truman administration feared that Iran, and its oil, would become another satellite in orbit around the Soviet Union. But the memory of the coup has made the US an anathema to many Iranians.
Grateful to the Americans for his restoration from exile, the Shah recast the Persian Empire as a modern Western state. In exchange for serving the Americans security and petroleum interests in the region, he was given carte blanche to skim state profits and crack down on domestic opposition, which included those like the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Iran to became an Islamic state. Neither all the Shah’s SAVAK agents nor all the Shah’s men, however, could keep a lid on this dissident movement. In January 1979—a year after President and Mrs. Carter had spent New Year’s Eve in Tehran and called the Shah “an island of stability”—Pahlavi fled his country. Fearful of reprisal, Carter refused to grant his friend asylum, and the exiled leader wandered the world, as Henry Kissinger put it, like the Flying Dutchman, finding shelter in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Egypt. When the Shah’s cancer worsened in October 1979, he was finally allowed into the United States for treatment. In response, militant students in Tehran stormed the American embassy—taking 66 hostages, 51 of whom they held from November 1979 to January 1981.
Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States and cut off Iranian petroleum imports, but clearly those holding the American hostages were neither oil traders nor foreign investors. The nightly television news featured bound and gagged American diplomats, who became synonymous with Carter’s missing mojo. To recapture his mettle, the President then launched one of the oddest rescue missions in military history, in which a platoon of airborne forces, cruising the Iranian deserts in helicopters, were suppose to liberate the hostages, then held in various locations around a chaotic city of four million residents. Some of the helicopters crashed in a desert sandstorm, the mission was aborted, and the Iranians only released the hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the next president—giving rise to the suspicion that Reagan’s campaign had found the hostages as convenient a campaign symbol as did Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration may have thought that it could “do business” with the Imam, who clearly understood the politics of television as well as the Reagan ‘imagineers'. But the Ayatollah proved a spiritual heir to another Persian sect, the assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than another Middle Eastern potentate eager to jet ski in Cannes. Iran sought to export its Shiite fundamentalism around the Middle East. For example, it backed Hezbollah in the anarchic Lebanese civil war, hoping to secure some missile launch pads near the Israeli border. It may well have plotted the 1983 suicide bombing of the American barracks in Beirut that killed 240 marines. But by that point Iran was involved in trench warfare with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which enjoyed support, including the ingredients of chemical weapons, from such western powers as Germany, the UK and the US. (Remember when Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld on bended knee to Saddam?) Essentially the American strategy in the Iran-Iraq war was to bleed two unpopular regimes, keep an eye out for Israel, and to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil. Iran, however, saw western trademarks on the incoming canisters of chemical weapons—one reason that today it continues to work so feverishly toward producing an atomic bomb.
Then in the mid-1980s the US decided to sell weaponry to the mullahs, touching off what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, something that suggested that Ronald Regan had never outgrown his fondness for vaudeville. In this triangular trade, hatched in the mind Lt. Colonel Oliver North—but backed by everyone in the Reagan administration not later found to be “out of the loop”—the Americans would sell Iran advanced guided missiles. Israel would act as the middleman, and the proceeds from the arms deals would be sent to the “contras,” forces opposed to the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The reason money for Central American freedom fighters was laundered through Iran is because Congress had outlawed aid to the contras. (A number of Reagan administration officials were later sentenced to jail for lying to Congress over the affair. Bush Senior, however, pardoned them. Bush Junior now has some of them back working in places like the state and defense departments.)
The high-water mark of this deadly burlesque came when Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, flew to Tehran on an Israeli chartered plane. To confirm his diplomatic bona fides, he had with him a Bible and a chocolate cake. The reason that the US was doing business at all with Tehran is that the weapon sales were ransom payments for American hostages held in Beirut. For a while these strange dealings prolonged the slaughter in the trenches between Iran and Iraq, and topped up the contras bank accounts. But then Iran realized that hostages were a freely convertible currency, and grabbed a few every time they grew low on ammunition. On November 13, 1986 President Reagan said: “There’s been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” Three days later, his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said: “Iran has and continues to pursue a policy of terrorism.”
About the time that McFarlane and his cake were in Tehran, a US guided-missile cruiser, on station in the Persian Gulf (but largely there to protect shipments of Iraqi crude oil), shot down an Iran Air commercial flight, killing some 290 passengers. The USS Vincennes had confused the civilian Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter, and launched its missiles. For that engagement, the Navy decorated the ship’s captain. Although it was never proved, as the trail of money and Semtex wove through places like Syria and Libya, it was always suspected that the Iranian government sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in revenge for the loss of its flight to Bandar-Abbas.
Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. At his public funeral, as the body was being carried through Tehran, frenzied mourners rioted and nearly managed to destroy the casket and pitch the dead Imam into the street. Some ten thousand people were injured. Subsequently, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the hard-line relations between Iran and the US might thaw, especially when so-called reformers occupied more positions of authority within the Iranian government. In the world of Apple computers and Nike sneakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked increasingly like Albania or North Korea, countries clothed behind veils of unreality. During the attacks against the Taliban in November 2001, Iran let American forces use certain port facilities. Then, two months later, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush christened the “axis of evil,” and included Iran on the list, infuriating Tehran. A year later, not only were American armored forces patrolling the Iraq-Iran border, but also there was talk in the administration and in sympathetic think tanks about how “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” So much for reconciliation.
Within the Bush administration, there are two schools of thought as regards the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who would open a dialogue with the mullahs (sometimes this is called “constructive engagement”) and those who would use the American presence in Iraq to launch either an invasion or a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary council’s nuclear facilities. Recently, after an earthquake in Iran, President Bush sent aid to the victims, and spoke of the differences between the Iranian people and those running its government. According to an official quoted in the “New Yorker,” the goal of this kind of engagement is to “talk to them—but with the purpose of overthrowing them.” But more hard-liners, notably the circle around Vice-President Dick Cheney, see war with Iran over its nuclear capacity as inevitable. They imagine using lightening air strikes to “take out” Iran’s uranium enrichment program. As one strategist said: “it could all be done in a single night,” which sounds ominously like the refrain in August 1914, that the “troops would be home for Christmas.”
* * *
In recent weeks, while thinking about the coming Iranian-American confrontation over Iran’s nuclear capability, I searched the Internet for a clear statement from President Bush on how he views the Iranian situation. At the same time, I attended a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, given by the Iranian foreign minister on “Iran and the Nuclear Issue.” Having now listened to them both, I cling to my belief that this conflict will only end badly—in this sense: I fear that the Americans will first try to set the clock back to 1953 and attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, preferring, in the first stage, covert action to air strikes. But later, especially if the 2006 mid-term election looks to be going poorly for the Republicans, I could well imagine that Karl Rove might call the nation to general quarters over Iran’s looming nuclear arsenal.
From its side, I sense the Iranians feel their survival as an independent nation is linked to having nuclear weapons, which will give them the opportunity to menace Israel or to take hostages from a distance—and thus keep alive the dream of a theocratic Persian empire. Either way, the two countries seem incapable of rational dialogue.
Let’s hear about Iran, first and at length, from President Bush, who recently gave an Iraq set speech to Freedom House in Washington and then took questions from the audience. The point he is trying to make is that Iran needs to hear from many countries, not just the United States, that its pursuit of uranium enrichment, were it to lead toward a weapons capability, is viewed as dangerous and unacceptable. But from the transcript of the President’s response, what is most apparent is that his manner of thinking resembles that of some corrupted computer hard drive, broken into a series of partitions, none of which can connect and articulate a coherent position.
Here is what the President said, in answer to a question:
“THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian issue is more -- in dealing with Iran, we're dealing with more than just influence into the formation of [Iraq’s] national unity government. I happen to believe that ultimately the Iraqis will say, we want to have our own government. We want to be on our own feet. We've had a little problem with Iran in the past and, therefore, let us kind of manage our own affairs. No question right now we're concerned, however, about influencing the formation of the government, but also, obviously, we're deeply concerned about whether or not the Iranians have the wherewithal and/or the knowledge about building a nuclear weapon.
“My negotiation strategy on this issue is that I believe it is better for the Iranians to hear from more than one voice as to whether or not the world accepts them as a viable nation in the international affairs. And so we have asked Germany and France and Great Britain to take the lead, to send a clear message to the Iranian government.
“It's difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies. It's easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there's a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it's important to keep your counsel.
“But I am pleased with the progress we have made on the diplomatic front. As you know, there are now talks of a presidential letter out of the United Nations, and my Secretary of State, working with Ambassador John Bolton, are constructing such a letter and trying to make sure that there is common consensus, particularly amongst the P5 plus Germany. As a matter of fact, Condi leaves I think today, if not tomorrow, for Europe to sit down with the P5 plus Germany to continue keeping people knitted up on our strategy. Obviously, there's some cross pressures to some members of the P5. There's a lot of politics in Europe -- which is a good thing, by the way, that people are questioning whether or not it's worth it to try to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon. I just believe strongly it's worth it. Now is the time to deal with these problems before they become acute.
“I'm troubled by a non-transparent regime having a weapon which could be used to blackmail freedom-loving nations. I'm troubled by a president who has declared his intentions to destroy our ally Israel. And we need to take these admonitions and these threats very seriously in order to keep the peace.”
Not long after the President made these stream-of-unconscious remarks, Seymour Hersh reported in the “New Yorker” that US military planners had “not ruled out” using tactical nuclear weapons on various Iranian nuclear facilities. Under the administration’s Orwellian logic, this phrase does not mean the US had decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian reprocessing laboratories buried underground; only that it had not eliminated tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenal of any possible attack against Iran. But when it comes to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, the US will discover that it is more isolated than it thinks in the Middle East, and that the region’s system of alliances more resembles the anarchy of the Balkans in 1914 than the system of check and balances that lead to stability in Europe after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Here’s a brief update on who is friends with whom in the Middle East:
--The US has Britain and Israel as firm friends, and allies of convenience in Afghanistan and Pakistan—so long as the money keeps rolling in. In the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the US has suppliers, or customers, but not really allies.
--Russia, wary of American encroachments in Central Asia, has looked to expand its relations with Turkey, and renew those with Syria. Plus it would like to be the “honest broker” in solving the Iranian standoff, and thus capture that rich market for itself. Both Russia and Iran oppose American efforts to siphon Caspian Sea oil west through Georgia and Turkey.
--Turkey, which would like to be closer to the European Union, failed to support the American invasion of Iraq, fearing it could lead to an independent Kurdistan, which would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. In recent years, its ties with Israel have waned, as it seeks Syrian support on the Kurdish question and thus it has developed more ties with Russia and, by extension, Iran.
--India, fretful about all the American aid pouring into Pakistan, demanded, and received, commercial nuclear technology from the Bush administration, despite the fact that India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement (NPT), a treaty that even Iran has signed. Presumably, the Americans let India have more nuclear genies, thinking some help may be required in a face-off between war-headed Iran and (in a worst case) a more fundamentalist regime in Pakistan.
--If Iraq dissolves into civil war, neither the Americans nor its coalition allies will know whom to support. Support the Shiite majority, and you help Iran. Help the Kurds achieve independence, and you start a war with Turkey. Restore the Sunnis or the Baathists, and you will have fought a war both to topple Saddam Hussein and then another to restore his followers to power.
--In Iran, the confrontation with the Great Satan continues to solidify the power of the mullahs, at a time when they could have been marginalized. Meanwhile, Iran is well positioned in Lebanon to press the campaign against Israel, has some Russian support (at least for its commercial nuclear intentions), has less to fear from Afghanistan, is well-positioned in southern (Shiite) Iraq, and now is coming to the table with nuclear cards.
* * *
The foreign minister of Iran is Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki, who addressed, in good English, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He appeared behind the lectern wearing a black suit and a high white collar, making me think I was listening to an Iranian Woodrow Wilson. To get to his position, he has risen through the ranks at the ministry of foreign affairs. I find his academic background odd, at least for someone hired by the revolutionary council to justify to the West Iran’s nuclear strategy. He received his undergraduate degree in Bangalore, India, and most of his academic writings have focused on Iran’s relations with Japan. Maybe he’s there to keep a big client happy? Often overlooked is the fact that Japan would have the most to lose if UN sanctions were voted against Iran. The Islamic Republic supplies 15 percent of Japan’s energy needs, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened the last time Japan’s oil trade was cut off.
In defending Iran’s nuclear option, Dr. Mottaki invited many atomic chickens, first hatched by the United States, to come home to roost. On the matter of national security, he invoked the specter of 9/11, to argue that all countries have the right of self-defense. He aligned Iran with “multi-lateralism” and the ideas of collective security, in contrast to the “unilateral” approach taken by the Bush administration in Iraq. He made the point that Iran has been a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for 36 years but now asked: “Why can’t we enjoy the privileges of membership?” (It made the bomb sound like an American Express card.) He equated Iran with environmentalism: “Why can’t we have clean nuclear energy?” Of course, he attacked Israel: “the nuclear program of the Zionist regime and its nuclear weapons, which are outside the safeguard regime, are a threat against regional peace and security.” But the sophistry reached it height when Dr. Mottaki invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, citing “…[Iran’s] inalienable right under international law to peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “a natural right of the Islamic Republic of Iran” for uranium enrichment. It reminded me of George Orwell’s observation that: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In that sense, I suppose the Declaration of Independence justifies going nuclear.
Of course, Dr. Mottaki is a professional diplomat, not unlike the Japanese foreign minister who in 1936 walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer questions about his country’s invasion of Manchuria. But he preferred to score rhetorical points—“How can we trust a country that has already used atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”—rather than explain how Iran has got as far with its nuclear program as it has. Several other countries, not unlike Iran in world politics—Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina—all undertook independent nuclear development, and each gave up before being able to process weapons grade plutonium or test-fire an accurate inter-continental ballistic missile. But no matter what it says in world forums, Iran is far down the road toward atomic independence, be it for clean energy or dirty bombs, although not for reasons that will ever appear in one of President Bush’s press conferences.
* * *
In order to understand how we are approaching the nuclear precipice with Iran, I would suggest reading a two-part series that appeared in “The Atlantic” in the last year. The author is William Langewiesche, and the first part is entitled “The Wrath of Khan.” It is a profile of a Pakistani atomic scientist, Dr. Abdu Quadeer Khan, who effectively stole nuclear technology from the West and coordinated Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The second essay has the title “The Point of No Return,” and it describes how Dr. Kahn, undoubtedly with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, sold turnkey nuclear programs to a variety of rogue states, including North Korea, Libya, and Iran. In one of the series’ more damning sentences, Langewiesche writes: “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan.” He also concludes: “Indeed, Iran was Pakistan’s longest-standing customer.”
How it was possible for Pakistan, the American linchpin in the war on terror, to have sold nuclear technology to Iran makes compelling reading. Initially, Langewiesche writes, Kahn assisted the effort to build a Pakistani bomb out of fear and loathing for India: “He believed, as many Pakistanis still do, that India had never accepted the Subcontinent’s partition, and (as he told his friends) that Hindus were tricksters with hegemonic designs.” In the 1970s, India tested nuclear weapons not far from the border with Pakistan. By 1982, thanks to Kahn, Pakistan had the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium. By 1984, “it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year.” But once Kahn had developed a domestic nuclear capacity he needed missile technology for its delivery system, and that led him into business with North Korea, which traded information about its NoDang missile in exchange for some of Pakistan’s enrichment components. Later, either for money or the glory of fathering a “Muslim bomb,” Kahn started doing business with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan became the Wal-Mart of the atomic bomb: a place to go for do-it-yourselfers.
Why the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s atomic warehouse is a mystery of criminal negligence. During the 1980s, the US needed the support of Islamabad to fight its Afghan proxy war against the Russians. In the 1990s, it may also have tolerated a Pakistani bomb as a way to establish a balance of power on the Subcontinent; India had proven maddeningly non-aligned. After 9/11 the Bush administration bet all on finding Osama bin Laden, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and launching its invasion of Iraq. For those enterprises, Pakistan was an indispensable, if shaky ally, and by all accounts the US chose to ignore the signs that Dr. Kahn was wholesaling the country’s atomic secrets.
Langewiesche is most scathing about the Bush administration’s delay in releasing, until October 2002 (by which time Congress had authorized the invasion of Iraq), the intelligence information that Pakistan had supplied nuclear technology to North Korea. He continues: “The blundering of that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan—which…was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists.” When the news broke that Pakistan, via Khan, was running an atomic chop shop, the government in Islamabad quietly pensioned off the scientist, confined him to a form of house arrest, and continued to round of up the usual al-Qaida suspects. The US did not react. Clearly someone left the yellowcake out in the rain.
* * *
What will happen next in the nuclear showdown could well be the following: the US will push the European Union to take the lead in confronting Iran’s successful enrichment program, and there could be forms of so-called “smart sanctions” enforced against the Islamic Republic. In response, Iran will hole up in its nuclear bunkers, and then occasionally fire off some test ballistic missiles, to make the point that it has the capability to reach Tel Aviv or the West. More locally, it will increase the funding of subversion in southern Iraq, not to mention turning up the heat on Lebanese anarchy—both of which serve to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
From its side, the Bush administration will seize on the Iranian nuclear capability as the ideal midterm campaign issue, one both to justify the presence of American forces in Iraq and to make the electorate forget about Scooter Libby, the various deficits, and Jack Abramoff’s Indians. Rove is also a big believer in the permanent state of war. I doubt, however, the Bush-Cheney war lobby will mobilize against Iran before the election, for the simple reason that it is thought to be years, not months, away from having the bomb. But, facing ruinous budget figures brought on by the splendid little war in Baghdad, the administration will put its energies into covert operations against the mullahs. It will seem a cost-efficient front to open, and already the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs has vastly increased the budget to besiege Tehran with what might be called Radio Free Iran. That Secretary also happens to be Elizabeth Cheney, Dr. Evil’s daughter.
* * *
In thinking about the coming crisis with Iran, I can’t help but be reminded of the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 13 days in October 1962, when the world perched on the nuclear brink. At the time I was 8 years old and watched with my parents on a black-and-white television as President John F. Kennedy announced that he was placing Cuba (it always sounded like “Cuber”) under quarantine. Even in the third grade, I was obsessed with what the teacher called “current events,” and every day I brought clippings to class to indicate where the American Navy was stationed and how long it would take the Russian missile ships to reach the blockade. I had enormous admiration, as well, for President Kennedy. I had seen him during the 1960 campaign and knew intimately the story of PT 109, which had seen service among the same Pacific islands where my own father’s infantry battles had taken place. But during the Missile Crisis, school children spent a lot of time under their desk or in the halls, hands covering our heads, drilling for deliverance.
What I learned later was the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had acted from weakness, rather than strength, in sending Russian missiles to Cuba. He had seen the gap widening between American and Soviet atomic capabilities, and figured a few inter-continental ballistic missiles off the Florida Keys might narrow the divide. He withdrew his missiles in exchange for guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba and for dismantling NATO missiles in Turkey. Could Iran’s supreme council be arming for the same reasons of weakness, fearful of American troops on their border and nuclear weapons held by Pakistan and Israel, both in America’s pocket?
The differences between the Cuban Missile crisis and today’s Iranian nuclear standoff are many, but perhaps most striking is the incongruous background of the respective leadership in the US and Iran from those, in 1962, who were running America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had seen war among the bloody waters of the Solomon Islands, in some stretches known then and now as Iron Bottom Sound, for all the ships sunk at a cost of thousands of lives. Khrushchev had served in World War II as the commissar with Russian forces holding the desperate line at Stalingrad, where more than a million lives were lost between the German and Russian armies in a campaign that unfolded as the Americans were clinging to the beachhead at Guadalcanal. I sense that by 1962 both leaders had seen enough war to last them a lifetime.
In their place today, in the US and Iran, are men comfortable with the chants of religious fundamentalism, for whom Armageddon is more a promised land of redemption than a mine field to be avoided. The current Bush administration places great faith in a military in which few of them served while the mullahs, not to mention the country’s new president, owe their tenuous political legitimacy to the halcyon days when Iran held America hostage. Sadly, President George W. Bush may be “no Jack Kennedy.” My fear is that he will confront Iran much the way, after 9/11, he reduced the complicated history of Iraq and the Middle East to the simplistic plots of a Clint Eastwood movie (“We’re taking that fucker out.”). But this time he will be confronting an enemy of religious zealots for whom martyrdom—yours and theirs—is one of the recommended paths to salvation.
Beginning in November 2001, America stepped up to do the mullahs’ bidding. It pushed the Sunni-rooted Taliban out of Afghanistan, leaving large portions of that country in the control of warlords, some of whom are in the pay of Tehran. Next the US turned on Iraq, overthrew Hussein (who had fought a grisly 8-year war against Iran) and, as it dismantled the Iraqi military, announced that the battlefield objective was to bring democracy to the Sunni triangle. Jefferson had no such illusions when he dealt with Barbary’s pirates. But the administration of George W. Bush hoped the idea of a democratic Middle East would play well on sound-bite storyboards. Instead, in Iraq, as the US removed the minority Sunnis and Baathists from power, it positioned Baghdad either for a Shiite-dominated government (which would be friendlier with Iran) or civil war (also an Iranian interest). As if those gifts were not enough to the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Bush administration went for an Iran trifecta when it used its swagger to evict the Syrian army from Lebanon—leaving that troubled country more at the mercy of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists from whose ranks suicide bombers are routinely recruited. Thus in a few short years, Iran went from fearing a New Age or consumerist counterrevolution to its restoration as the regional great power in the Middle East—all thanks to the theocracy in Washington that, presumably, shares some of its fundamentalist values.
You would have thought that the ayatollahs might have shown some gratitude towards their American soldiers of fortune. After all, al-Qaida’s pretensions toward predominance in the Arab world had origins in the Sunni madrassas of Saudi Arabia, not the holy city of Qom. But rather than reward the Americans with some discounted crude oil or invite President Bush to spend New Year’s Eve in Persepolis, as the Shah would have done, the mullahs decided to follow up their victories by pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium and possibly construct nuclear weapons. Seen from Tehran, the choice of atomic energy or a bomb was a no-lose proposition. As follows: once Iran had a nuclear capability, it would no longer fear an invasion from American-occupied Iraq. At the same time it could rally the Arab faithful around the idea of finally having the capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yes, the UN could issue sanctions, and the air forces of either the US or Israel might take out some cooling towers or research laboratories. But those would be minor setbacks and, perversely, might confirm Iran’s status as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power—once again capable of holding the West hostage. Bomb technology might also serve notice on domestic opponents of the mullahs, who in 2005 had banned more than a thousand candidates in regional and national elections and then backed the presidential candidacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, to celebrate his victory, decided to win friends and influence allies by announcing the Holocaust a “myth.”
Obviously, like anyone who would rather not see Istafan turn into a nuclear Sarajevo, I would like to think the Bush administration is capable of “muddling through” this crisis (as was said of the incompetent Hapsburg government of Franz Joseph). But I am not optimistic. My sense is that the US government needs to the idea of a “Mad Fakir” in Tehran just as much the Iranian government needs to fill the streets with demonstrators rallying against the “Enemy of Islam.” Nor do I believe that this nuclear showdown will be easily halted before the brink. Each side has too much invested in its enemy.
* * *
Just a summary of American-Iran relations should not give anyone reason to hope that Washington has broken the da Vinci code to understanding Iran. Leaving aside 10,000 years of Persian history, let’s move the clock to 1953, when British and American intelligence agencies staged a coup against the possibly communist-influenced prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Returned to the throne in Iran was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose father—a mid-ranking Iranian military officer—had seized power by a coup in 1925 and proclaimed himself “shah.” In the early 1950s, Iran was seen as a swing vote in the Cold War, and the Truman administration feared that Iran, and its oil, would become another satellite in orbit around the Soviet Union. But the memory of the coup has made the US an anathema to many Iranians.
Grateful to the Americans for his restoration from exile, the Shah recast the Persian Empire as a modern Western state. In exchange for serving the Americans security and petroleum interests in the region, he was given carte blanche to skim state profits and crack down on domestic opposition, which included those like the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Iran to became an Islamic state. Neither all the Shah’s SAVAK agents nor all the Shah’s men, however, could keep a lid on this dissident movement. In January 1979—a year after President and Mrs. Carter had spent New Year’s Eve in Tehran and called the Shah “an island of stability”—Pahlavi fled his country. Fearful of reprisal, Carter refused to grant his friend asylum, and the exiled leader wandered the world, as Henry Kissinger put it, like the Flying Dutchman, finding shelter in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Egypt. When the Shah’s cancer worsened in October 1979, he was finally allowed into the United States for treatment. In response, militant students in Tehran stormed the American embassy—taking 66 hostages, 51 of whom they held from November 1979 to January 1981.
Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States and cut off Iranian petroleum imports, but clearly those holding the American hostages were neither oil traders nor foreign investors. The nightly television news featured bound and gagged American diplomats, who became synonymous with Carter’s missing mojo. To recapture his mettle, the President then launched one of the oddest rescue missions in military history, in which a platoon of airborne forces, cruising the Iranian deserts in helicopters, were suppose to liberate the hostages, then held in various locations around a chaotic city of four million residents. Some of the helicopters crashed in a desert sandstorm, the mission was aborted, and the Iranians only released the hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the next president—giving rise to the suspicion that Reagan’s campaign had found the hostages as convenient a campaign symbol as did Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration may have thought that it could “do business” with the Imam, who clearly understood the politics of television as well as the Reagan ‘imagineers'. But the Ayatollah proved a spiritual heir to another Persian sect, the assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than another Middle Eastern potentate eager to jet ski in Cannes. Iran sought to export its Shiite fundamentalism around the Middle East. For example, it backed Hezbollah in the anarchic Lebanese civil war, hoping to secure some missile launch pads near the Israeli border. It may well have plotted the 1983 suicide bombing of the American barracks in Beirut that killed 240 marines. But by that point Iran was involved in trench warfare with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which enjoyed support, including the ingredients of chemical weapons, from such western powers as Germany, the UK and the US. (Remember when Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld on bended knee to Saddam?) Essentially the American strategy in the Iran-Iraq war was to bleed two unpopular regimes, keep an eye out for Israel, and to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil. Iran, however, saw western trademarks on the incoming canisters of chemical weapons—one reason that today it continues to work so feverishly toward producing an atomic bomb.
Then in the mid-1980s the US decided to sell weaponry to the mullahs, touching off what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, something that suggested that Ronald Regan had never outgrown his fondness for vaudeville. In this triangular trade, hatched in the mind Lt. Colonel Oliver North—but backed by everyone in the Reagan administration not later found to be “out of the loop”—the Americans would sell Iran advanced guided missiles. Israel would act as the middleman, and the proceeds from the arms deals would be sent to the “contras,” forces opposed to the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The reason money for Central American freedom fighters was laundered through Iran is because Congress had outlawed aid to the contras. (A number of Reagan administration officials were later sentenced to jail for lying to Congress over the affair. Bush Senior, however, pardoned them. Bush Junior now has some of them back working in places like the state and defense departments.)
The high-water mark of this deadly burlesque came when Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, flew to Tehran on an Israeli chartered plane. To confirm his diplomatic bona fides, he had with him a Bible and a chocolate cake. The reason that the US was doing business at all with Tehran is that the weapon sales were ransom payments for American hostages held in Beirut. For a while these strange dealings prolonged the slaughter in the trenches between Iran and Iraq, and topped up the contras bank accounts. But then Iran realized that hostages were a freely convertible currency, and grabbed a few every time they grew low on ammunition. On November 13, 1986 President Reagan said: “There’s been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” Three days later, his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said: “Iran has and continues to pursue a policy of terrorism.”
About the time that McFarlane and his cake were in Tehran, a US guided-missile cruiser, on station in the Persian Gulf (but largely there to protect shipments of Iraqi crude oil), shot down an Iran Air commercial flight, killing some 290 passengers. The USS Vincennes had confused the civilian Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter, and launched its missiles. For that engagement, the Navy decorated the ship’s captain. Although it was never proved, as the trail of money and Semtex wove through places like Syria and Libya, it was always suspected that the Iranian government sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in revenge for the loss of its flight to Bandar-Abbas.
Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. At his public funeral, as the body was being carried through Tehran, frenzied mourners rioted and nearly managed to destroy the casket and pitch the dead Imam into the street. Some ten thousand people were injured. Subsequently, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the hard-line relations between Iran and the US might thaw, especially when so-called reformers occupied more positions of authority within the Iranian government. In the world of Apple computers and Nike sneakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked increasingly like Albania or North Korea, countries clothed behind veils of unreality. During the attacks against the Taliban in November 2001, Iran let American forces use certain port facilities. Then, two months later, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush christened the “axis of evil,” and included Iran on the list, infuriating Tehran. A year later, not only were American armored forces patrolling the Iraq-Iran border, but also there was talk in the administration and in sympathetic think tanks about how “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” So much for reconciliation.
Within the Bush administration, there are two schools of thought as regards the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who would open a dialogue with the mullahs (sometimes this is called “constructive engagement”) and those who would use the American presence in Iraq to launch either an invasion or a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary council’s nuclear facilities. Recently, after an earthquake in Iran, President Bush sent aid to the victims, and spoke of the differences between the Iranian people and those running its government. According to an official quoted in the “New Yorker,” the goal of this kind of engagement is to “talk to them—but with the purpose of overthrowing them.” But more hard-liners, notably the circle around Vice-President Dick Cheney, see war with Iran over its nuclear capacity as inevitable. They imagine using lightening air strikes to “take out” Iran’s uranium enrichment program. As one strategist said: “it could all be done in a single night,” which sounds ominously like the refrain in August 1914, that the “troops would be home for Christmas.”
* * *
In recent weeks, while thinking about the coming Iranian-American confrontation over Iran’s nuclear capability, I searched the Internet for a clear statement from President Bush on how he views the Iranian situation. At the same time, I attended a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, given by the Iranian foreign minister on “Iran and the Nuclear Issue.” Having now listened to them both, I cling to my belief that this conflict will only end badly—in this sense: I fear that the Americans will first try to set the clock back to 1953 and attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, preferring, in the first stage, covert action to air strikes. But later, especially if the 2006 mid-term election looks to be going poorly for the Republicans, I could well imagine that Karl Rove might call the nation to general quarters over Iran’s looming nuclear arsenal.
From its side, I sense the Iranians feel their survival as an independent nation is linked to having nuclear weapons, which will give them the opportunity to menace Israel or to take hostages from a distance—and thus keep alive the dream of a theocratic Persian empire. Either way, the two countries seem incapable of rational dialogue.
Let’s hear about Iran, first and at length, from President Bush, who recently gave an Iraq set speech to Freedom House in Washington and then took questions from the audience. The point he is trying to make is that Iran needs to hear from many countries, not just the United States, that its pursuit of uranium enrichment, were it to lead toward a weapons capability, is viewed as dangerous and unacceptable. But from the transcript of the President’s response, what is most apparent is that his manner of thinking resembles that of some corrupted computer hard drive, broken into a series of partitions, none of which can connect and articulate a coherent position.
Here is what the President said, in answer to a question:
“THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian issue is more -- in dealing with Iran, we're dealing with more than just influence into the formation of [Iraq’s] national unity government. I happen to believe that ultimately the Iraqis will say, we want to have our own government. We want to be on our own feet. We've had a little problem with Iran in the past and, therefore, let us kind of manage our own affairs. No question right now we're concerned, however, about influencing the formation of the government, but also, obviously, we're deeply concerned about whether or not the Iranians have the wherewithal and/or the knowledge about building a nuclear weapon.
“My negotiation strategy on this issue is that I believe it is better for the Iranians to hear from more than one voice as to whether or not the world accepts them as a viable nation in the international affairs. And so we have asked Germany and France and Great Britain to take the lead, to send a clear message to the Iranian government.
“It's difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies. It's easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there's a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it's important to keep your counsel.
“But I am pleased with the progress we have made on the diplomatic front. As you know, there are now talks of a presidential letter out of the United Nations, and my Secretary of State, working with Ambassador John Bolton, are constructing such a letter and trying to make sure that there is common consensus, particularly amongst the P5 plus Germany. As a matter of fact, Condi leaves I think today, if not tomorrow, for Europe to sit down with the P5 plus Germany to continue keeping people knitted up on our strategy. Obviously, there's some cross pressures to some members of the P5. There's a lot of politics in Europe -- which is a good thing, by the way, that people are questioning whether or not it's worth it to try to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon. I just believe strongly it's worth it. Now is the time to deal with these problems before they become acute.
“I'm troubled by a non-transparent regime having a weapon which could be used to blackmail freedom-loving nations. I'm troubled by a president who has declared his intentions to destroy our ally Israel. And we need to take these admonitions and these threats very seriously in order to keep the peace.”
Not long after the President made these stream-of-unconscious remarks, Seymour Hersh reported in the “New Yorker” that US military planners had “not ruled out” using tactical nuclear weapons on various Iranian nuclear facilities. Under the administration’s Orwellian logic, this phrase does not mean the US had decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian reprocessing laboratories buried underground; only that it had not eliminated tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenal of any possible attack against Iran. But when it comes to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, the US will discover that it is more isolated than it thinks in the Middle East, and that the region’s system of alliances more resembles the anarchy of the Balkans in 1914 than the system of check and balances that lead to stability in Europe after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Here’s a brief update on who is friends with whom in the Middle East:
--The US has Britain and Israel as firm friends, and allies of convenience in Afghanistan and Pakistan—so long as the money keeps rolling in. In the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the US has suppliers, or customers, but not really allies.
--Russia, wary of American encroachments in Central Asia, has looked to expand its relations with Turkey, and renew those with Syria. Plus it would like to be the “honest broker” in solving the Iranian standoff, and thus capture that rich market for itself. Both Russia and Iran oppose American efforts to siphon Caspian Sea oil west through Georgia and Turkey.
--Turkey, which would like to be closer to the European Union, failed to support the American invasion of Iraq, fearing it could lead to an independent Kurdistan, which would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. In recent years, its ties with Israel have waned, as it seeks Syrian support on the Kurdish question and thus it has developed more ties with Russia and, by extension, Iran.
--India, fretful about all the American aid pouring into Pakistan, demanded, and received, commercial nuclear technology from the Bush administration, despite the fact that India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement (NPT), a treaty that even Iran has signed. Presumably, the Americans let India have more nuclear genies, thinking some help may be required in a face-off between war-headed Iran and (in a worst case) a more fundamentalist regime in Pakistan.
--If Iraq dissolves into civil war, neither the Americans nor its coalition allies will know whom to support. Support the Shiite majority, and you help Iran. Help the Kurds achieve independence, and you start a war with Turkey. Restore the Sunnis or the Baathists, and you will have fought a war both to topple Saddam Hussein and then another to restore his followers to power.
--In Iran, the confrontation with the Great Satan continues to solidify the power of the mullahs, at a time when they could have been marginalized. Meanwhile, Iran is well positioned in Lebanon to press the campaign against Israel, has some Russian support (at least for its commercial nuclear intentions), has less to fear from Afghanistan, is well-positioned in southern (Shiite) Iraq, and now is coming to the table with nuclear cards.
* * *
The foreign minister of Iran is Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki, who addressed, in good English, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He appeared behind the lectern wearing a black suit and a high white collar, making me think I was listening to an Iranian Woodrow Wilson. To get to his position, he has risen through the ranks at the ministry of foreign affairs. I find his academic background odd, at least for someone hired by the revolutionary council to justify to the West Iran’s nuclear strategy. He received his undergraduate degree in Bangalore, India, and most of his academic writings have focused on Iran’s relations with Japan. Maybe he’s there to keep a big client happy? Often overlooked is the fact that Japan would have the most to lose if UN sanctions were voted against Iran. The Islamic Republic supplies 15 percent of Japan’s energy needs, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened the last time Japan’s oil trade was cut off.
In defending Iran’s nuclear option, Dr. Mottaki invited many atomic chickens, first hatched by the United States, to come home to roost. On the matter of national security, he invoked the specter of 9/11, to argue that all countries have the right of self-defense. He aligned Iran with “multi-lateralism” and the ideas of collective security, in contrast to the “unilateral” approach taken by the Bush administration in Iraq. He made the point that Iran has been a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for 36 years but now asked: “Why can’t we enjoy the privileges of membership?” (It made the bomb sound like an American Express card.) He equated Iran with environmentalism: “Why can’t we have clean nuclear energy?” Of course, he attacked Israel: “the nuclear program of the Zionist regime and its nuclear weapons, which are outside the safeguard regime, are a threat against regional peace and security.” But the sophistry reached it height when Dr. Mottaki invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, citing “…[Iran’s] inalienable right under international law to peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “a natural right of the Islamic Republic of Iran” for uranium enrichment. It reminded me of George Orwell’s observation that: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In that sense, I suppose the Declaration of Independence justifies going nuclear.
Of course, Dr. Mottaki is a professional diplomat, not unlike the Japanese foreign minister who in 1936 walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer questions about his country’s invasion of Manchuria. But he preferred to score rhetorical points—“How can we trust a country that has already used atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”—rather than explain how Iran has got as far with its nuclear program as it has. Several other countries, not unlike Iran in world politics—Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina—all undertook independent nuclear development, and each gave up before being able to process weapons grade plutonium or test-fire an accurate inter-continental ballistic missile. But no matter what it says in world forums, Iran is far down the road toward atomic independence, be it for clean energy or dirty bombs, although not for reasons that will ever appear in one of President Bush’s press conferences.
* * *
In order to understand how we are approaching the nuclear precipice with Iran, I would suggest reading a two-part series that appeared in “The Atlantic” in the last year. The author is William Langewiesche, and the first part is entitled “The Wrath of Khan.” It is a profile of a Pakistani atomic scientist, Dr. Abdu Quadeer Khan, who effectively stole nuclear technology from the West and coordinated Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The second essay has the title “The Point of No Return,” and it describes how Dr. Kahn, undoubtedly with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, sold turnkey nuclear programs to a variety of rogue states, including North Korea, Libya, and Iran. In one of the series’ more damning sentences, Langewiesche writes: “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan.” He also concludes: “Indeed, Iran was Pakistan’s longest-standing customer.”
How it was possible for Pakistan, the American linchpin in the war on terror, to have sold nuclear technology to Iran makes compelling reading. Initially, Langewiesche writes, Kahn assisted the effort to build a Pakistani bomb out of fear and loathing for India: “He believed, as many Pakistanis still do, that India had never accepted the Subcontinent’s partition, and (as he told his friends) that Hindus were tricksters with hegemonic designs.” In the 1970s, India tested nuclear weapons not far from the border with Pakistan. By 1982, thanks to Kahn, Pakistan had the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium. By 1984, “it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year.” But once Kahn had developed a domestic nuclear capacity he needed missile technology for its delivery system, and that led him into business with North Korea, which traded information about its NoDang missile in exchange for some of Pakistan’s enrichment components. Later, either for money or the glory of fathering a “Muslim bomb,” Kahn started doing business with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan became the Wal-Mart of the atomic bomb: a place to go for do-it-yourselfers.
Why the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s atomic warehouse is a mystery of criminal negligence. During the 1980s, the US needed the support of Islamabad to fight its Afghan proxy war against the Russians. In the 1990s, it may also have tolerated a Pakistani bomb as a way to establish a balance of power on the Subcontinent; India had proven maddeningly non-aligned. After 9/11 the Bush administration bet all on finding Osama bin Laden, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and launching its invasion of Iraq. For those enterprises, Pakistan was an indispensable, if shaky ally, and by all accounts the US chose to ignore the signs that Dr. Kahn was wholesaling the country’s atomic secrets.
Langewiesche is most scathing about the Bush administration’s delay in releasing, until October 2002 (by which time Congress had authorized the invasion of Iraq), the intelligence information that Pakistan had supplied nuclear technology to North Korea. He continues: “The blundering of that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan—which…was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists.” When the news broke that Pakistan, via Khan, was running an atomic chop shop, the government in Islamabad quietly pensioned off the scientist, confined him to a form of house arrest, and continued to round of up the usual al-Qaida suspects. The US did not react. Clearly someone left the yellowcake out in the rain.
* * *
What will happen next in the nuclear showdown could well be the following: the US will push the European Union to take the lead in confronting Iran’s successful enrichment program, and there could be forms of so-called “smart sanctions” enforced against the Islamic Republic. In response, Iran will hole up in its nuclear bunkers, and then occasionally fire off some test ballistic missiles, to make the point that it has the capability to reach Tel Aviv or the West. More locally, it will increase the funding of subversion in southern Iraq, not to mention turning up the heat on Lebanese anarchy—both of which serve to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
From its side, the Bush administration will seize on the Iranian nuclear capability as the ideal midterm campaign issue, one both to justify the presence of American forces in Iraq and to make the electorate forget about Scooter Libby, the various deficits, and Jack Abramoff’s Indians. Rove is also a big believer in the permanent state of war. I doubt, however, the Bush-Cheney war lobby will mobilize against Iran before the election, for the simple reason that it is thought to be years, not months, away from having the bomb. But, facing ruinous budget figures brought on by the splendid little war in Baghdad, the administration will put its energies into covert operations against the mullahs. It will seem a cost-efficient front to open, and already the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs has vastly increased the budget to besiege Tehran with what might be called Radio Free Iran. That Secretary also happens to be Elizabeth Cheney, Dr. Evil’s daughter.
* * *
In thinking about the coming crisis with Iran, I can’t help but be reminded of the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 13 days in October 1962, when the world perched on the nuclear brink. At the time I was 8 years old and watched with my parents on a black-and-white television as President John F. Kennedy announced that he was placing Cuba (it always sounded like “Cuber”) under quarantine. Even in the third grade, I was obsessed with what the teacher called “current events,” and every day I brought clippings to class to indicate where the American Navy was stationed and how long it would take the Russian missile ships to reach the blockade. I had enormous admiration, as well, for President Kennedy. I had seen him during the 1960 campaign and knew intimately the story of PT 109, which had seen service among the same Pacific islands where my own father’s infantry battles had taken place. But during the Missile Crisis, school children spent a lot of time under their desk or in the halls, hands covering our heads, drilling for deliverance.
What I learned later was the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had acted from weakness, rather than strength, in sending Russian missiles to Cuba. He had seen the gap widening between American and Soviet atomic capabilities, and figured a few inter-continental ballistic missiles off the Florida Keys might narrow the divide. He withdrew his missiles in exchange for guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba and for dismantling NATO missiles in Turkey. Could Iran’s supreme council be arming for the same reasons of weakness, fearful of American troops on their border and nuclear weapons held by Pakistan and Israel, both in America’s pocket?
The differences between the Cuban Missile crisis and today’s Iranian nuclear standoff are many, but perhaps most striking is the incongruous background of the respective leadership in the US and Iran from those, in 1962, who were running America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had seen war among the bloody waters of the Solomon Islands, in some stretches known then and now as Iron Bottom Sound, for all the ships sunk at a cost of thousands of lives. Khrushchev had served in World War II as the commissar with Russian forces holding the desperate line at Stalingrad, where more than a million lives were lost between the German and Russian armies in a campaign that unfolded as the Americans were clinging to the beachhead at Guadalcanal. I sense that by 1962 both leaders had seen enough war to last them a lifetime.
In their place today, in the US and Iran, are men comfortable with the chants of religious fundamentalism, for whom Armageddon is more a promised land of redemption than a mine field to be avoided. The current Bush administration places great faith in a military in which few of them served while the mullahs, not to mention the country’s new president, owe their tenuous political legitimacy to the halcyon days when Iran held America hostage. Sadly, President George W. Bush may be “no Jack Kennedy.” My fear is that he will confront Iran much the way, after 9/11, he reduced the complicated history of Iraq and the Middle East to the simplistic plots of a Clint Eastwood movie (“We’re taking that fucker out.”). But this time he will be confronting an enemy of religious zealots for whom martyrdom—yours and theirs—is one of the recommended paths to salvation.
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