[Fresh Ink] Obama goes over the top in bashing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

[Richard Menec]

<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/09/24/ahmadinejad/print.html>

Obama goes over the top in bashing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Once again, U.S. politicians, including both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, 
pile on the Iranian president. Why does Larry King (!) sound like the adult 
in the room?

By Juan Cole

Sep. 24, 2008 | Sen. Barack Obama responded with outrage to the remarks made 
Tuesday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before the United Nations 
General Assembly, expressing regret that the quirky little president was 
even allowed to speak. Obama's denunciation was mild compared with that of 
Gov. Sarah Palin, who accused Ahmadinejad of dreaming "of being an agent in 
a 'Final Solution' -- the elimination of the Jewish people." In contrast, 
"Larry King Live" carried an hourlong interview with Ahmadinejad in which 
the Iranian was allowed to speak for himself and repeatedly denied any 
violent intentions. King thus reinforced the trend whereby entertainment 
television, whether Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" or King's own 
dog-and-pony interview hour, conveys reality-based news while politicians 
continue to paint inaccurate and even fantastic scenarios that are harmful 
to U.S. foreign policy.

In his speech, Ahmadinejad said "the American empire ... is reaching the end 
of the road" and accused the U.N. Security Council of allowing "Zionist 
murders" because of "pressure from a few bullying powers." Obama issued a 
statement saying, "I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad's outrageous 
remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to 
air his hateful and anti-Semitic views." He added, "The threat from Iran's 
nuclear program is grave." Obama then called on his rival in the 
presidential race, Sen. John McCain, "to join me in supporting a bipartisan 
bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and 
private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran." He 
slammed McCain, saying that the senator was playing partisan politics by 
declining to join Obama in this divestment campaign.

In the heat of the campaign, Obama surely overreached himself in appearing 
to advocate barring leaders of member states from addressing the United 
Nations because their views are obnoxious to Americans. He also fell into 
the trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and 
anti-Semitic ones. If a policy of exclusion had been adopted by past 
administrations, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev could not have announced 
from that podium the reduction of Red Army forces in Eastern Europe in 1988. 
And if anti-American statements should trigger the denial of a visa to come 
to New York, should Nelson Mandela, who called the United States the "most 
dangerous country in the world," be excluded, too?

Obama's assertion that Iran's civilian nuclear energy research program 
constitutes a "grave threat" may or may not be true. The 2005 National 
Intelligence Estimate put Iran at least a decade away from having a nuclear 
weapon if it was trying hard to get one and if the international environment 
was conducive (i.e., if Iran could import all the equipment it needed 
easily). Neither of those conditions actually appears to exist, so Iran is 
very far away from having a bomb. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on 
Iran, parts of which were released last December, concluded that Iranian 
scientists have not done any weapons-related research since early 2003.

As Ahmadinejad pointed out to Larry King, no country has been as intensely 
inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency as Iran. No regularly 
inspected country has ever developed a nuclear bomb. Although the IAEA's 
Mohamed ElBaradei has expressed frustration that Iran failed to declare its 
nuclear research program before 2003, he continues to say that in current 
inspections, "the Agency has been able to continue to verify the 
non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran" to weapons purposes. 
This consistent IAEA finding through recent years raises the question of 
whether Obama is right to be so categorical on this issue.

As for the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran, it might be worth 
considering for a moment whether the U.S., with its faltering economy, is 
even able to cause a major oil exporter such as Iran much harm through a 
unilateral boycott. The law passed by Congress at the insistence of the 
Israel lobby, placing sanctions on firms doing business in Iran, does not 
punish those who merely distribute or import Iranian petroleum. Does Obama 
want to go even further with sanctions? If Congress really could close down 
Iran's production of 4 million barrels a day, it would cause the price of 
petroleum to soar and throw the U.S. into a deep recession or depression. 
>From the point of view of a reality-based foreign policy, this sort of step 
is known as "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Russia and China are 
now balking at placing any further sanctions on Iran via the United Nations 
Security Council. (Russia is not exactly in a cooperative mood after the 
drubbing it took from U.S. politicians over its intervention to protect 
South Ossetia from Georgia.)

The sanctions have in any case had no effect on Iranian policy, though they 
are keeping Iran's gas fields from being developed by American and European 
firms, a task that may fall to Russia's Gazprom or its Chinese counterpart 
instead. (One would not advise a President Obama to threaten to cut off 
economic cooperation with China over its Iran investments, given how much 
U.S. debt Beijing holds.) Since natural gas is a global market, this boycott 
of Iran harms American consumers twice, causing the price of gas to be 
higher than necessary and making sure that the development of Iranian gas 
creates no jobs for Americans and brings no profits into this country.

If Obama's reaction to Ahmadinejad was a bit breathless and probably 
counterproductive to U.S. interests, Gov. Palin's was, typically, like 
something from outer space. In a speech the Republican vice-presidential 
nominee had planned to give at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally on Monday, 
organized by right-wing Zionist organizations before they decided not to 
have major politicians speak, she alleged that the Iranian president "dreams 
of being an agent in a 'Final Solution' -- the elimination of the Jewish 
people. He has called Israel a 'stinking corpse' that is 'on its way to 
annihilation.' She warned apocalyptically that Iran had tested missiles 
capable of reaching Tel Aviv and that "the Iranian nuclear program is 
nearing completion."

But is the Iranian president genocidal? Ahmadinejad explained on "Larry King 
Live" (you'd think at least Palin would watch that even if she does not, 
like, read books and newspapers) that there are some 20,000 Jews in Iran, 
who have a representative in Parliament. That representative, Maurice 
Motemad, and leaders of the Iranian Jewish community, have repeatedly 
protested to Ahmadinejad over his minimizing the extent of the Holocaust. 
Ahmadinejad told King, "We don't have a problem with the Jewish people" (ma 
ba mardom-e yahud moshkeli nadarim). If Ahmadinejad wanted to launch a 
second Holocaust, would he not begin at home? It is tiresome to keep having 
to repeat it, but, moreover, Ahmadinejad does not have the power to launch 
any massacres, since the presidency in Iran is a weak position similar to 
that of our secretary of the interior. The commander in chief of the armed 
forces is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has pledged an Iranian policy of no 
first strike against any country.

As for Jews in Israel, Iran has not threatened to kill any of them, much 
less all of them. On "Larry King Live," Ahmadinejad expressed the hope that 
the Israeli state will collapse just as the apartheid regime in South Africa 
did. In other words, he is advocating a variant of the one-state solution to 
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While his version of that one state is 
unrealistic and unfair to Israeli Jews and does not have a prayer of being 
realized, it is not a genocide, and it is a barefaced lie to say that it 
entails the killing of anyone. As Larry King admitted, the South African 
minority government fell peacefully.

Ahmadinejad was forced again to explain that when he quoted Ayatollah 
Khomeini to the effect that "this occupation regime over Jerusalem must 
vanish from the page of time," he did not mean that "Israel must be wiped 
off the face of the map" (as the quotation was mistranslated). He told King 
Tuesday night that he meant that the Israeli state's policies of committing 
crimes against the Palestinians and killing them and occupying them must 
vanish. He added, "Our solution is in fact a completely humane and 
democratic one. What we're saying is that throughout the Palestinian 
territories [i.e., including Israel and the occupied territories], people 
should gather and determine the type of government they would like to have." 
In other words, he says he means by the vanishing of the regime a single 
democratically elected state in Israel and Palestine.

Committed Zionists, that is to say, Jewish nationalists, who believe that 
Israel must remain a Jewish-majority state, often see the advocacy of a 
one-state solution (in which Israeli Jews might be reduced to a simple 
majority or even only a plurality of the population) as a dire threat to the 
Jewish people. They are also known to smear anyone who demurs from their 
rigid conception of nationalism as an anti-Semite or even a terrorist. 
However, neither their conviction that any criticism of Israel must be 
prohibited, nor their insistence on a state dominated by a single ethnicity, 
nor their often unpleasant tactics of the destruction of reputations should 
stand in the way of Americans seeking an unblinkered understanding of 
contemporary Iran and pursuing American interests in regard to relations 
with Tehran.

It is legitimate to question the truthfulness of Iranian assertions about 
the character of their nuclear energy research program. It is a wise policy 
to pressure Tehran to allow even more rigorous inspections, to permit 
surprise inspections, and to explain just what the country was up to before 
early 2003. Scaled sanctions to get Iran to give up its enrichment program 
altogether might work if these sticks were combined with more carrots. The 
Iranian regime has made numerous hateful comments about Israel and is 
hostile to the Zionist state, and it is natural that this rhetoric should 
make the Israelis nervous. A reason for caution, watchfulness and 
deterrence, however, is not necessarily grounds for war. The United States 
faced down the Soviet Union without ever having gone directly to war against 
it, after all.

But to distort the colorful Ahmadinejad's words, to mistranslate him, to 
misrepresent him as in control of the Iranian military, or to pretend that 
he represents a consensus in the Iranian political elite is to build a 
fantasy world as insubstantial and whimsical as a SimCity computer game. 
Larry King got at the true Ahmadinejad, with all his flaws, more accurately 
and extensively than anything else on American television or in political 
rhetoric. It is clear that for the U.S. to go to war over an imaginary 
threat of genocide (Iran does not have the ability to kill large numbers of 
Israelis and consistently denies that it wants to) at a time when its 
military is overstretched by two protracted guerrilla wars, when its 
financial system is near collapse, and when the resulting run-up in oil 
prices would cripple the U.S. and world economies would be a folly so great 
that only a lunatic would contemplate it. As foolish and hateful as 
Ahmadinejad can be, it remains to be seen if we are any better.

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