Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  The Guardian Council tried to pull the same trick with this year’s presidential election, disqualifying all the reformist candidates, but the opposition responded by threatening to boycott the election, which would have reduced it to a farce. Ayatollah Khamenei intervened, and two reformist candidates were allowed to run together with one “moderate” (Rafsanjani, formerly president between 1989 and 1997 and a cleric himself) and four hard-liners.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hard-liners, but only three weeks ago, the opinion polls gave him a scant 5 percent of the vote. Then, suddenly, a miracle: he was ahead of all the other hard-liners and catching up with Rafsanjani and the reformist candidates.

  On June 17, the moderate Rafsanjani came first, with 21 percent of the votes, but Ahmadinejad came a close second with 19.5 percent. There may have been some skulduggery at the polls, but the main reason for his relative success is that the Islamic authorities, fearing that no pro-regime candidate would make it into the runoff, ordered their loyal supporters in the armed forces, the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia, to swing all their votes to Ahmadinejad.

  Appalled at the prospect of a radical Islamist as president, the defeated reformers urged their supporters to hold their noses and back Rafsanjani in the second round. And yet it ended in a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad. What happened?

  It was actually a very small landslide. Back when Iranians believed that electing a reformist president could bring change, voter turnout was huge, but it has been plummeting as they lost hope: from 83 percent in 1997 to 67 percent in 2001; then down to 62 percent in the first round of voting this month, and only 47 percent in the second round. Ahmadinejad’s “landslide” was less than 30 percent of qualified voters.

  His votes came from religious radicals and the “pious poor,” who back him because he is devout but not one of the clerics who have used their power to enrich themselves. He played up to more sophisticated voters by promising to concentrate on economics, not dress codes—“The country’s true problem is unemployment and housing, not what to wear,” he explained—but he is nevertheless the Supreme Leader’s choice as president, and most people know it. That’s why they didn’t vote.

  The hard-line Islamists now control every branch of Iran’s government, appointed or elected, and for a while they will have their way. But what really happened last week was that a majority of Iranians abandoned the electoral path to reform as hopeless. At some point in the future, therefore, they may try the path of non-violent revolution—and they might win.

  That was my Prediction of the Year, and I’m quite proud of it. But I did not foresee that the next few years would bring a steady escalation in the military threats that the United States made against Iran.

  In the thirty years that the mullahs have been in power they have not attacked any neighbouring state. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in the 1980s, they fought a bitter eight-year war to repel the invasion, but accepted a negotiated peace that simply restored the status quo. There was the suspicion that Iran was working on nuclear weapons, but even if that were true it was not exactly an imminent danger. So why was the Bush administration apparently so eager to attack Iran? Maybe they were watching the wrong movies.

  March 16, 2007

  300: A PROPAGANDA FAILURE

  Being cultural adviser to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be one of the more thankless jobs on the planet, but Javad Shamghadri manages to keep busy. His latest foray is into the cultural space occupied by the teenage bloodlust demographic.

  What bothers Shamghadri—and quite a lot of other people in Iran—is the new Hollywood hit 300, an animated comic book of a film that shows impossibly buff and noble Greeks rebuffing an attempt by evil Persians to strangle Western civilization in its cradle 2,487 years ago. They think it’s “psychological warfare” against present-day Iranians, thinly disguised as a story about their wicked Persian ancestors.

  Shamghadri is so clueless about the workings of Hollywood that you really want to take him gently by the hand and walk him through it. “Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran [in 1979],” he says, “Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture. Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies.”

  After pausing for a moment to savour the notion of “cultural authorities in the U.S.,” let’s move on to the Tehran newspaper Ayandeh-No, which is quite close to the regime. Under a headline screaming “Hollywood declares war on Iranians,” it complains that “the film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people. It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilization before world public opinion at a time of increasing American threats against Iran.”

  Now, I must admit that I haven’t seen 300 (and neither has anybody in Iran). I suppose I should have gone to see the movie before I wrote about it, but a) I’m in Cuba at the moment, where it isn’t playing; and b) I did see the trailer for the movie, which gave me quite enough sense of the thing’s style.

  I don’t know many teenage males who could resist the lure of 300, but as a somewhat-more-than-teenage male, I found myself more in sympathy with the nameless Internet reviewer who wrote: “I feel comfortable enough in my masculinity to say that if I had to stand in the presence of these [ultra-macho Greek heroes] for more than ten seconds, I’d spontaneously grow a pair of ovaries.”

  So, can we all just laugh at those stupid, paranoid Iranians for getting their knickers into a twist about a dumb, harmless splatter film cleverly disguised as art? ‘Fraid not. It really is war propaganda of the crudest, nastiest kind, even though there are no “American cultural authorities” and the people who made the movie have probably never had a consciously political thought in their money-grubbing lives.

  We all swim in the same sea of images, and we all get the same short list of “things to worry about right now” from the media. It’s not a plot, it’s just how things work, and in this case the filmmakers had a great story to work with: the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC really did save Greece from conquest by the nearest Asian empire, Persia (although all the Greeks at Thermopylae died). Plus, they had the extraordinary images from Frank Miller’s comic-book retelling of the story, and they knew that Iran is next on the U.S. hit list.

  For several decades now, the bad guys in American action films with an international setting have mostly been Middle Easterners (or at least, the rough ones are; the smooth ones are still generally British). Iranians actually do live in the Middle East, so lay it on with a trowel.

  As for the stiff, super-patriotic, over-the-top macho dialogue, most of it comes straight from Miller’s comic book. He presumably just picked it up from the general culture in the United States, which has been deeply infected by that sort of thing for the past number of years.

  So, no plot, nobody to blame, and yet the film is everything the Iranians say it is. The Persians are depicted as “ugly, dumb, murderous savages” (in the words of Ayandeh-No) who want to conquer the free people of the world, while the Spartans are clearly Americans, spouting the same slogans about “liberty” and “freedom” that are sprinkled on all political discourse in the United States like sugar on corn flakes.

  What’s more, the Spartans are underdogs. In almost all U.S.-made action films with an international setting, the American heroes are underdogs fighting against enormous odds, even though they actually come from the most powerful country in the history of the world. Just the same, you know that they are in the right because in the movies the underdogs are always in the right, and they always win in the end.

  So the gallant Spartan-Americans triumph over the evil Persians, and let that be a lesson to evildoers everywhere. But our Iranian friends should not worry that this film is juicing up American youth for an invasion of their country, because the kids just won’t get it. Down in the teenage bloodlust demographic, practically nobody knows that the
Persians of ancient times and the Iranians of today are the same people.

  It was Iran’s alleged drive for nuclear weapons that gave American hostility to the country some resonance in the rest of the world. But the American accusations were never substantiated, and they may not be correct.

  September 25, 2007

  IRAN’S NUCLEAR ASPIRATIONS

  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two speeches in New York this week, at Columbia University and then at the United Nations General Assembly, have stirred up the usual storm of outrage in the Western media. He is a strangely naïve man, and his almost-but-not-quite denial of the Holocaust—he called for “more research,” as if rumours had recently cropped up suggesting that something bad happened in Nazi-occupied Europe—was as bizarre as his denial that there are any homosexuals in Iran.

  But he is not a “cruel dictator,” as Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, called him. Indeed, in the areas that matter most to foreigners—foreign policy, defence and nuclear questions—Ahmadinejad has no power at all. Those subjects are the sole responsibility of Iran’s unelected parallel government, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Guardian Council.

  So ignore the capering clown on the stage. The real questions are: Does Iran have a nuclear-weapons program? Could it “threaten the world” even if it did? And why does American rhetoric about the Iranian nuclear threat sound so much like American rhetoric about the Iraqi nuclear threat five years ago?

  We know that there once was an Iranian nuclear-weapons program, but that was under the Shah, whom Washington was grooming as the policeman of the Gulf. After the revolution of 1979, the new leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, cancelled that program on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction were un-Islamic, although he retained the peaceful nuclear-power program.

  Then came the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, in which the United States ultimately backed Saddam Hussein, although he had clearly started the war. Saddam was known to be working on nuclear weapons, so despite their Islamic reservations, the Iranian ayatollahs sanctioned the restarting of the Shah’s nuclear weapons program in 1984 to counter that threat.

  That is when Iran began work on the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz that figures in so many American accusations. When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, however, work at Natanz slowed to a crawl. And once UN inspectors dismantled all of Iraq’s nuclear facilities, after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and his subsequent defeat in the first Gulf war, Natanz seems to have stopped functioning entirely.

  Why did Iran then restart work at Natanz seven or eight years ago? Probably in response to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons tests in 1998 and the subsequent overthrow of the elected government there. Iran is Shia, whereas Pakistan is largely Sunni and home to some very militant Sunni extremists. The extremists were not yet in power, but Iranians worried that one day they might be, so they took out an insurance policy.

  Iran started building Natanz in secret because, back in 1984, there were daily Iraqi air-raids across the country. Natanz stayed secret after the war because there was no legal requirement to reveal its existence to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) until six months before it began to process nuclear fuel, and Iran feared an Israeli attack on the facility.

  Iran was embarrassed when the existence of Natanz was revealed in 2002, and immediately suspended work there for three years, but the plant is not illegal and it does not prove that Iran is currently seeking nuclear weapons. Other countries have similar enrichment facilities to upgrade uranium as fuel for nuclear reactors, and that is what Iran says it is doing, too.

  No doubt the Iranian government also knows that, in a crisis, it could run the fuel through the centrifuges many more times and turn it into weapons-grade uranium, but so do other governments. This is called a “threshold” nuclear-weapons capability, and it is a very popular option.

  The IAEA found no evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons, so, in 2005, the United States has the issue transferred to the UN Security Council, where political rather than legal considerations decide outcomes. The Security Council imposed mild sanctions on Iran, and Washington is pressing for much harsher ones. It also threatens to use force against Iran, but for all its rhetoric, there is still no evidence that Iran is doing anything illegal.

  The enrichment facilities may be solely for peaceful nuclear power now, but they would give Iran the ability to build its own nuclear deterrent much more quickly in a panic. President Ahmadinejad is a profound embarrassment to his country, but the grown-ups are still in charge in Iran.

  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Iran has signed) guarantees the “inalienable right” of every signatory to develop the ability to enrich uranium for nuclear power generation under full IAEA safeguards, but the Bush administration wasn’t interested in legalisms. In November 2007, White House spokesperson Dana Perino offered a simple proof of Iran’s wickedness. Tehran, she said, is “enriching and reprocessing uranium, and the reason that one does that is to lead towards a nuclear weapon.” Case closed.

  Apart from the nine nuclear-weapons powers (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea), four other countries already have plants on their territory for “enriching and reprocessing uranium” under IAEA safeguards: Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil. Argentina, Australia and South Africa are also building or actively considering uranium enrichment facilities, again under IAEA safeguards. So there was some rapid back-pedalling at the White House when a journalist inquired if all these countries are also seeking nuclear weapons.

  U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Gordon Johndroe was wheeled out to “clarify” Dana Perino’s statement. “Each country is different, but obviously Dana was asked and was talking about Iran,” he explained. In other words, the real proof that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons lies in the fact that we know in our hearts that it is evil.

  By late 2007, there was good reason to fear that the Bush administration was getting ready to attack Iran before it left office—so the U.S. intelligence agencies set out to discredit the rhetoric of their own government.

  December 7, 2007

  IRAN AND THE INTELLIGENCE PROCESS

  For four years the Bush administration told us that Iran must be subject to sanctions, and maybe to military attack, because it was secretly working on nuclear weapons. Suddenly, last week, the U.S. intelligence agencies tell President Bush that for the past four years Iran has not been working on nuclear weapons. So he announces that unless Iran abandons its civil nuclear-power program it must be subject to sanctions and maybe to military attack anyway, because “what’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

  The sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies (sixteen!) that produce the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) didn’t expect to shake Bush’s determination to go after Iran. That’s why they insisted that the new NIE be declassified and published so quickly. It was a pre-emptive strike against the White House, to make it more difficult politically for Bush to press ahead despite the evidence.

  Like the U.S. armed forces, the intelligence services are in a state of near-mutiny as they watch President Bush drag the country towards another unnecessary and unwinnable war. But how come the same intelligence agencies were telling us two years ago with “high confidence” that Iran was developing nuclear weapons?

  I have been saying all along (with moderate confidence) that Iran probably has no immediate intention of developing nuclear weapons. Others have been saying this too, of course, and if they come forward I’ll gladly join them in a bid to take over the provision of strategic intelligence to the U.S. government.

  We’d do it for half the current budget, give back a billion dollars every time we got it wrong, and still end up rolling in wealth. Whereas the intelligence agencies have a huge and cumbersome array of electronic and human “assets” that feed them a torrent of mostly irrele
vant or misleading information in little bits and bites, we outsiders would just apply common sense and a little local knowledge to the process.

  Common sense is no help at all when you are trying to figure out radio frequencies, missile ranges, and all the other technical details that the military want to know about the armed forces of a potential opponent. For that, you need electronic intelligence-gathering and/or spies. Strategic intelligence is a quite different matter, however, and here all the clutter of electronic and human data must be subordinated to a political analysis of the other country’s interests and intentions. This rarely happens in practice.

  Take the comment in the latest NIE report that the suspension of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2003, in response to international pressure, showed that Tehran’s decisions “are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” Gosh, what a revelation! And here we all thought that the Iranian regime were a bunch of mad mullahs who desired nothing more than nuclear martyrdom.

  Well, not all of us thought that, but I suspect that the political analysis of the Tehran regime’s goals and strategies inside the U.S. government did not rise far above that level. Obviously, if you just assume that the people running Iran are rational human beings and put yourself in their shoes, you can pretty easily figure out what their strategic concerns and priorities will be.

  They wouldn’t dream of attacking Israel with nuclear weapons even if they had them because that would unleash a nuclear Armaged don on their own country. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the only imaginable use for a few Iranian ones would be to deter Israel from a first strike because of the risk of Iranian retaliation. And why would Iran suddenly want such a deterrent now, when it has been a target for Israeli nuclear weapons for at least thirty years?