by Amir Taheri
Moments after Ahmadinejad announced the “nuclear miracle” in 2007, the head of the Iranian nuclear project, Ghulam-Reza Aqazadeh, unveiled plans for manufacturing 54,000 centrifuges, which are needed to enrich enough uranium for hundreds of nuclear warheads. “We are going into mass production,” he boasted. The Iranian game plan was simple: dancing the diplomatic dance for another two years until Bush became a “lame duck” unable to persuade his people to take military action against the Khomeinist regime.
While “waiting Bush out,” the Islamic Republic did all it could to consolidate its gains in the region. Iran is now the strongest presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq, after the United States. It has turned Syria and Lebanon into part of its glacis, which means that for the first time since Khosrow Parviz, the Persian King of Kings in the seventh century, Iran is militarily present on the Mediterranean coast. The Islamic navy is building a base in the Syrian port of Latakiya to keep an eye on the U.S. Sixth Fleet and, when the time comes, to project power on the doorsteps of Europe. The IRGC already controls the Beirut airport and, through Hamas and Hezballah, controls firepower on the Mediterranean. In a massive political jamboree in Tehran in February 2007, the Islamic Republic also assumed control of the so-called “Jerusalem Cause,” which includes “wiping Israel off the map” on behalf of the Muslim world. The Ahmadinejad government has also reactivated Iran’s network of Shiite radical organizations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen, while resuming contact with Sunni fundamentalist groups in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco.
From early boyhood, Shiites are told to cultivate two contradictory qualities. The first is entezar, the capacity to wait for the return of the Hidden Imam in patience. The second is taajil, actions needed to hasten the Mahdi’s return. Thus “waiting Bush out” was not a difficult game for Ahmadinejad to play. The task of entezar is tackled in cycles of seven years, which means Iran has ample time to build a nuclear arsenal. And that would remove the only advantage that the infidels have. The infidels do not have the stomach for a long conventional war in which they could sustain high casualties. Thus, they may feel forced to “nuke” the Islamic Republic. This advantage would be lost if the Islamic Republic became a nuclear power. In one of his lectures, Abbasi claimed that the United States would never have been able to defeat and conquer Japan without using nuclear weapons. The reason was that the United States could not have sustained the human losses that the Japanese were prepared to inflict. Once the infidel power loses its nuclear advantage, it could be worn down in a long low-intensity war, at the end of which surrender to Islam would appear the least bad of all options. And that would be a signal for the Hidden Imam to reappear.
At the same time, not to forget the task of hastening the Mahdi’s second coming, Ahmadinejad will pursue his provocations. For the past three years, he has presided over the biggest show of military force Tehran has ever seen. In 2006, the Islamic Republic fire-tested what it presented as “the fastest underwater antisubmarine missile ever.” This was followed by the unveiling of a “flying assault ship” as part of a massive military exercise held in the Persian Gulf; it was described as a “present to Prophet Muhammad” on his 1424th birthday. The exercise was designed to show that Iran could close the Persian Gulf and stop the flow of half the world’s crude oil. Enjoying his moment of triumph, Ahmadinejad was as candid as ever: “To those who are angry with us, we have one thing to say: be as angry as you like until you die of anger!”
According to Abbasi, “The Americans are impatient and, at the first sight of a setback, they run away. We, however, know how to be patient. After all, we have been weaving carpets for thousands of years.” Ahmadinejad did not invent the claim that the Islamic Republic is the government of the Hidden Imam and must, therefore, rule the world. The claim was the organizing principle of the Khomeinist system from the start. Addressing IRGC commanders in 1981, Khomeini said: “The Imam of the Time, the Awaited Mahdi, may my soul be sacrificed to Him, is personally your Commander. He looks after you personally, and the reports of your activities are sent to him on a daily basis.”1
Apart from his thirty-six “nails,” the Hidden Imam needs 313 “pure Shiites,” the same number as Muhammad’s companions in his most decisive battle, to conquer the world. Christians will instantly rally to the Mahdi because he has enlisted Jesus Christ as his special assistant. The Mahdi rides a white steed while Jesus follows on a brown one. At the same time, everyone knows that the Mahdi’s mother was a Roman princess, thus passing on to him a dynastic claim to rule the West as well. One sign that the world was beginning to take notice of the Hidden Imam came last spring when the cyclone that struck Myanmar (Burma) was named nargiss, after the Hidden Imam’s mother.
For centuries Shiite life has vacillated between fear and hope: fear that the Imam will not return in one’s lifetime, and hope that he might. The overwhelming majority of Shiites could be described as entezaaris, that is to say those who know how to wait until the Imam decides to return in his own good time. Some Shiites have even used the term entezaari or its variants such as Montazeri as family names. The theory of entezaar leads to political quietism. Since the believer is not aware of the Imam’s intentions, he had better refrain from actions that might not accord with them. In practical politics, this means doing the minimum, or avoiding involvement altogether if possible. Ahmadinejad, however, is a political activist, not the typical entezaari. He and his theological guide, Mesbah-Yazdi, are taajilis, people who believe that they could and should hasten the Imam’s return through their own action.
According to Shiite tradition, the Imam will return when “seven wonders” (al-aja’eb al-sabaah) appear. First comes a massive storm of locusts that destroys all cultivation. This is followed by an invasion of snakes and serpents that appear all over the place as if pouring from the skies. next comes a huge fire that burns several cities. An unprecedented famine follows, triggering a pandemic of many hitherto unknown diseases. Finally, Shiite girls suddenly lose their virginity for no clear reason. Ahmadinejad sees the “seven wonders” as metaphors for actual contemporary events. In speech after speech he passes the coded message about the imminence of the Imam’s return to audiences that see the growing hardship of life and constant talk of martyrdom and war as confirmations of the president’s messianic vision.
In a sense, Ahmadinejad is a creature of the shah’s regime, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that ends up threatening to kill its creator. He was born in 1956 in the village of Aradan, a suburb of Garmsar, itself a dusty hamlet in Semnan, one of Iran’s poorest provinces on the edge of the Kavir Lut, a lunar desert the size of Germany. Originally, the family was known by the name Sabrian. A year after Mahmoud’s birth, an earthquake struck their village and razed most of its mud-brick houses. The Ahmadinejads had to leave, and after months of peregrination they ended up in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad senior started work as an apprentice ironsmith. In the capital, Mahmoud and his siblings became the first in the history of their family to go to school, along with millions of other Iranians who had come of age at a time that the country was able to offer all of its children primary education for the first time.
By the time Ahmadinejad had completed his primary education, Iran was on the threshold of what was to become its economic and social golden age. Thanks to a series of reforms backed by rising oil revenues, the booming economy was generating enough growth to finance a massive expansion of public services. These included free education for all, from primary school to university. Between 1968, when Ahmadinejad graduated from secondary school, and 1978, when the mullahs launched their revolt, the average annual income per capita in Iran more than doubled, lifting millions of people out of poverty and creating a new middle class. The Ahmadinejads prospered beyond their wildest dreams. Mahmoud’s father, now a skilled worker earning good wages, was able to move the family to narmak, a new neighborhood built by French town planners east of Tehran with easy access to the center of the capital on one side and th
e nearby ski slopes on the other. All the children of the family were able to receive secondary and university education while also discovering such middle-class privileges as annual holidays and foreign travel.
As the Khomeinist revolt started in 1978, Ahmadinejad was where none of his ancestors would have dreamed of being: in an undergraduate course at the University of Science and Technology in Tehran, where he was to obtain his Ph.D. in transportation engineering after the revolution. He had every reason to be happy, but he was not. In fact, he claims that he felt “a deep sense of sadness” as he observed what he calls “the process of de-Islamicization” under the shah. Although his family were not religious, Ahmadinejad claims that they, too, were concerned about what they feared was an “irrevocable Westernization” of the country. According to Muhammad-Ali Sayyed-nezhad, a friend of Ahmadinejad in his youth, the future “nail of the Imam” was specially shocked to see girls wearing hot-pants and mini-skirts in the streets of Tehran and on the campus of the university. “It was as if we were in Paris, not Tehran, the capital of a Muslim country,” Sayyed-nezhad recalls. “We wondered what was going to happen. Was this catastrophe a sign that the Mahdi was about to return?”2 It was as if the prophecy about Shiite girls suddenly losing their virginity were being fulfilled. Ten years earlier, students in Paris had revolted partly to demand greater sexual freedom. In the late 1970s, many Iranian students, like Ahmadinejad, were in revolt because they thought there was too much sexual freedom.
Attending special indoctrination sessions at madrassas and mosques, the young Ahmadinejad was easily convinced that the only path to salvation was a return to Islam and “active waiting” for the return of the Hidden Imam. Some of his entourage claim that Ahmadinejad was in his teens when the Hidden Imam approached him with the startling news that he was to be one of the “nails.” It is quite possible, though hard to prove, that the madrassas and mosques Ahmadinejad attended in his leisure time were run by mullahs working for SAVAK, the shah’s secret service. At the time, SAVAK was trying to play the Islamic card against the left, especially among teenagers and students. That this might have been the case is indicated by the militant anti-left positions of Ahmadinejad within the Khomeinist student movement. At any rate, Ahmadinejad’s generation was the first to be economically comfortable enough to indulge in political activities against the regime. Unlike his father, who had worked since the age of five, Ahmadinejad did not need a job to pay for his keep. The government paid his school fees plus a generous stipend, providing him with ample time and resources to devote himself to the overthrow of the regime.
At university, Ahmadinejad joined the radical Islamist and anti-Marxist group led by Hussein Esrafilian, a young lecturer close to Hojatieh, and became an editor of their monthly, Jigh va Daad (“Hue and Cry”), in opposition to the monthly Ahangar (“Ironmonger”), the organ of Communist students. When the shah’s regime fell, Ahmadinejad was elected as a representative of his university in an audience granted by Khomeini to leaders of over a hundred student organizations. After the audience, he was elected as one of the five members of the Council for the Consolidation of the Students’ Unity, known by its Persian acronym, Tahkim.3 It was in this capacity that Ahmadinejad, in October 1979, more than seven months after the victory of the revolution, found himself in a defining moment of his early political career. At one of its weekly meetings, the council discussed reports that the U.S. embassy in Tehran was receiving and shipping a large quantity of diplomatic boxes through the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. One of the council members claimed that this pointed to a possible plot by the United States to seize control of the revolution with the help of the Bazargan government, five of whose ministers were either U.S. citizens or holders of American “green cards.” The two radical leftist members of the council suggested the occupation of the U.S. embassy compound for two or three days to probe “suspicious activities” there and attract public attention to whatever plot was being hatched. The suggestion led to a heated debate in which Ahmadinejad led the opposition to the leftist plan.
“Aren’t we also facing provocations by Marxist groups and interventions by the Soviets in our domestic affairs?” Ahmadinejad asked. “If we are to react, why should we pick America [alone]? Why shouldn’t we confront the Soviets as well? Because of the treacherous deeds of the leftists, the Soviets should be our priority. Who says the threat from America is greater than that [from] the Soviets?”4
From the various accounts of the meeting, it is not clear what actually happened. It seems that three of the five members voted for a raid on the U.S. embassy, leaving Ahmadinejad isolated. When the raid took place and won Khomeini’s approval, Ahmadinejad feared that his revolutionary career might end. Like hundreds of thousands of young men and women, Ahmadinejad had joined the revolution in its penultimate phase as it stood on the threshold of victory. The revolutionary period itself, spanning just a few months, had not been long enough to allow newcomers to build up their CVs as soldiers of the revolution. The shah had quickly left the country, allowing the revolution to succeed with unexpected ease. There had been no big struggle between two camps, no civil war, and few occasions for self-styled revolutionaries to create romantic autobiographies. As Mehdi Bazargan noted, the Khomeinists had pushed a door that was already ajar. The shah, his suitcase packed and his aircraft’s engines running, had appeared on television to say: You want a revolution? OK, go ahead and have it!
Poor souls like Ahmadinejad had had no opportunity to show bravery and self-sacrifice against a regime that didn’t want to kill them. The shah had not thrown them in prison, even for a single day, or sent them into exile or denied them the chance to attend university. nor had his police beaten them up or tortured them, let alone killed them in the streets. Their sole hope for securing a revolutionary biography was to do something radical afterwards, claiming that they were defending the victorious revolution against its enemies. In a sense, even today Ahmadinejad is still trying to write the revolutionary autobiography that the shah didn’t let him have before the revolution.
The raid on the U.S. embassy provided a golden opportunity for postfactum revolutionaries to secure the coveted CV. Middle-class boys and girls who had lived privileged lives were suddenly able to grow beards, wear battle fatigues, tote Uzi machine guns, and claim that they were “humbling the arch-imperialist” power. In complete safety themselves, protected by IRGC units posted outside the embassy, these spoiled middle-class brats had an opportunity to compose revolutionary CVs by torturing and humiliating their American captives, often in front of television cameras. With those CVs in hand, many of them rose to the highest positions in government. They became ministers, ambassadors, members of parliament, governors of provinces, and chief executives of public sector companies. The U.S. embassy, or “nest of Spies” as the hostage-takers dubbed it, became a high-speed elevator for social mobility.
Ahmadinejad had missed that elevator and had to sweat for years to secure a place on it. He had believed SAVAK’s subtle message that the Soviet Union, huge and right next door, was a bigger threat to Iran than the United States could ever be. Khomeini, however, thought differently: Communism would never appeal to Iranians, while American-style democracy and “pursuit of happiness” would. Ahmadinejad had to wait before he had another opportunity to write his revolutionary biography. Ten months after the seizure of the U.S. embassy, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Ahmadinejad jumped on the opportunity to become one of the first volunteers to accompany the defense minister, Mostafa Chamran, to the battlefront. Ahmadinejad had the last laugh. While his leftist fellow students were still bogged down at the embassy and bullying the American hostages, he could wear the Baseej battle fatigues and do his bit of a “Che” with Chamran if not with “Che” Guevara.
For the first five years of the war, Ahmadinejad was involved mostly in logistics and ancillary activities and saw no combat. In 1986, he joined the IRGC’s Ramadan brigade, which specialized in raids deep inside Iraq. According to some account
s, on at least one occasion Ahmadinejad accompanied a mixed force of IRGC and Iraqi Kurdish fighters in a raid on the Iraqi town of Kirkuk’s oilfields. That was the start of his connection with Iraqi Kurds and his interest in the Kurdish issue in general. In 1987, he was appointed commander of an engineering unit in an IRGC division, a position he held for a year, after which he joined the IRGC’s intelligence unit. Technically, he never became a member of the IRGC’s officer corps, always being seconded to the force through Baseej. It was in this capacity that in 1989, once the war with Iraq had ended, he accompanied a delegation sent by Rafsanjani to Vienna to negotiate with the exiled leaders of the opposition Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDK). On the last day of the negotiations, a Khomeinist hit squad raided the hotel room where the two teams had gathered, and machine-gunned the four Kurdish leaders, including their president, Abdul-Rahman Qassemlou. Ahmadinejad, who probably had not been told that the mission was a trap for the Kurdish leaders, was slightly wounded but managed to escape aboard an Iran Air jet before the Austrian police could arrest him along with three other Khomeinist negotiators. From then on, as a reserve officer of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad knew that he had a strong political base. Ideologically, his home was Hojatieh; politically, it was the Baseej and the IRGC.