World Forums

The deadly threat of a nuclear Iran

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=5532

There's talk (BBC's Washington correspondent) that the US already has special forces on the ground in Iran checking out to see what kind of weapons of mass destruction they may or may not have....

AFAIK, talk is that they were already checking potential attack targets. The denial by the US defense secretery was so half-hearted that I have very little doubt that it is true.

I believe that every country with nuclear weaponry is a deadly threat to peace and, in my opinion, to the survival of our civilization. Not just Iran.

Iran's new president speaks out
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/00 ... 271002.htm

Tehran/London/Washington, June 27: Iran's new hardline president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, yesterday threw down a challenge to western leaders by vowing to resist international pressure to abandon the country's nuclear programme and branding Israel the source of instability in the Middle East.

The remarks, made at his first press conference since a landslide victory, will underline concerns in America, Israel, Britain and other European countries, where wrongfooted diplomats have been scrambling to come to terms with the consequences of his win.

The rise of Ahmadinejad, the ultra-Islamist mayor of Tehran who has expressed a desire to recreate the atmosphere of the early days of Iran's 1979 revolution, has created alarm, not least because of fears it will be even harder to secure a diplomatic solution to the stand-off between Iran and the west over the country's nuclear programe.

The British government has been dismayed by the election result, seeing it as a setback for its efforts along with France and Germany to secure a compromise.

A Foreign Office source, in a rare resort to undiplomatic language, referred to Ahmadinejad as a "headcase''.

It's probably more Rafsanjani loosing than the headcase winning. Passing through Iran in 97 I had the impression that Rafsanjani was very very very unpopular, even if in the West he had been regarded as a "moderate" Many people I spoke with in 97 (but in summertime at the coast of the caspian sea there weren't many or any hardliners, and the hardliners wouldn't speak to me anyway I think) said that he still hold the real power, not Khatami. They said Rafsanjani blocked many of Khatamis initiatives. Looking at the vote, Rafsanjani winning the first round, but losing the second round, could be true, more a Rafsanjani loss than a Ahmadinejad (headcase is easier to write) win. Ok, result is the same.

And of course Iran is still the second most democratic nation in the middle east, after Turkey (ok, third, after Israel and Turkey.) DESPITE the US, not because of the US....

The Australian

Amir Taheri: Islamist regime in total control
June 27, 2005

ZAMINLARZEH! The word, that means earthquake in Persian, is on every mouth in Iran as the nation tries to absorb the shock of Friday's election that catapulted a little-known figure into the position of President of the Islamic Republic.

That figure is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who became mayor of Tehran less than two years ago. He won the presidency in a landslide, crushing the mullah-cum business tycoon Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the pillars of the regime since its inception in 1979.

Ahmadinejad holds a PhD in engineering from Iran's most elite university, and is far better educated than all of his five predecessors as president.

A reservist colonel of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he is the first president of the Islamic Republic with a military background. The son of a blacksmith, he is the first president of the Islamic Republic to come from a poor family and one of few senior figures in the regime not to have amassed a personal fortune in recent years.

But Ahmadinejad's chief asset, and the main if not sole reason for his victory is his relationship with and fierce loyalty to the Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenehi, the true and almost absolute ruler of the country. The two met in 1979 when Khamenehi served as deputy defence minister and have been close ever since.

Some analysts have dismissed Ahmadinejad's emergence as a front-line player in Iranian politics as irrelevant because the electoral process that produced his win was manifestly flawed.

Nevertheless, his election is an important development. After all, this is the first time in the 26-year history of the Islamic Republic that a mullah has been beaten by a non-mullah in a high-profile electoral contest. His win is all the more significant because his rival was not only Iran's richest man but also the best-known figure of the Khomeinist regime.

Ahmadinejad's victory means that Khamenehi, who has established himself as head of the most radical faction within the Khomeinist establishment, now controls all levers of power for the first time. He will now be able to put his own men in charge of all key government departments. Any idea of Western-style reforms to please the restive middle classes will be abandoned.

The concentration of power in the hands of the radical faction will end more than two decades of divided government that has put many aspects of policy on autopilot as it were. Two years ago when King Abdullah II of Jordan telephoned Khatami to complain about Iran setting up terrorist cells in Amman, the Iranian president was able to claim that he knew nothing of it because he did not control all organs of government.

The Europeans who have been negotiating with Tehran over the nuclear issue have also heard similar claims from Iranian counterparts. With Ahmadinejad in charge, however, such claims will no longer be credible because the camarilla headed by Khamenehi is now in complete control. Rafsanjani had promised the Chinese model - meaning the combination of a despotic political regime with capitalist economic policies. Ahmadinejad promises a North Korean model - that is to say a totalitarian system and a command economy.

Ahmadinejad's election shows that the Khomeinist regime cannot be reformed from within. It also shows that there is still a strong constituency in Iran for the populist message of the ayatollah. True, far fewer people voted than the regime claims. But those who did vote preferred Ahmadinejad's "pure Islam" to Rafsanjani's attempt at perpetuating the myth that Iran today is, in the words of the former US president Bill Clinton, "a progressist democracy".

Ahmadinejad describes himself as a fundamentalist, has no qualms about asserting that there can be no democracy in Islam, rejects free-market economics, and insists on "religious duties" rather than human rights. This clarity will, in the medium term, help the people of Iran understand the choices involved. They will learn that they cannot have an Islamist system together with the goodies that the modern world offers in both material and spiritual terms.

Unlike Khatami, who was trying to hoodwink the Europeans over the Iranian nuclear project, Ahmadinejad openly says Iran does have such a program, is proud of it, and that no one has the right to question Iran's right to develop whatever weapons it wants.

Should the outside world be frightened? Not necessarily. Paradoxically, the clarity created by this election may prove useful. Khatami went around the world speaking about Hegel and Nietzsche to ruling elites and creating the illusion that the Islamic Republic was part of the global system symbolised by the World Trade Organisation, the Davos forum, and the Western non-governmental organisations of do-gooders.

Ahmadinejad's victory reveals the true face of the Islamic Republic as a regional power with its own world vision that challenges the so-called "global consensus". It reminds the world that the mini-Cold War that started between the Islamic Republic and the West, notably the US, is far from over.

The Wall Street Journal

Iran Unveiled
June 28, 2005

To gauge the radicalism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's next president, consider that prior to Friday's run-off election Western media widely described him as a "hardliner," whereas rival candidate Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was a "moderate."

Mr. Rafsanjani is the former president whose tenure was marked by repression at home and dozens of terrorist attacks and assassinations abroad, including the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires. Yet that record seems positively benign next to Mr. Ahmadinejad's. If there's a silver lining here, it is that the West may at last see the unveiled face of the Iranian regime and begin acting accordingly.

A student radical during Ayatollah Khomenei's revolution in the late 1970s, Mr. Ahmadinejad was involved in planning the seizure of the U.S. embassy and helped organize Khomenei's Islamic Cultural Revolution, during which universities were shut down and ideologically suspect lecturers and students were arrested and shot.


In the mid-1980s, he worked as an interrogator, or worse, in Tehran's infamous Evin Prison, according to Iranian sources. Mr. Ahmadinejad then joined the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards, where he was an officer in the "Jerusalem Force," which had responsibility for terrorist attacks and assassinations abroad, including against prominent Iranian dissidents.

In the late 1990s, he was one of the organizers of Ansar-i-Hezbollah, government-sponsored vigilantes assigned to break up peaceful demonstrations. In April 2003, Mr. Ahmadinejad was appointed (not elected) mayor of Tehran, where he set about organizing "Abadgaran" (Developers) groups, which seek to return Iran to sterner Khomeinist principles.

Now this man is president-elect of Iran. Some reports have explained his victory as a populist backlash against Mr. Rafsanjani's corrupt clericalism. Yet such "analysis" ignores the facts that 1,000 reform candidates were banned from running, that all the presidential candidates were chosen to run by Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, that the first round of voting was marred by fraud, that turnout was low (notwithstanding the regime's claims), and that the winner benefited from the strong-armed tactics of his erstwhile comrades in the Revolutionary Guards and Ansar. Whatever else Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory represents, it does not represent the will of Iran's people.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory also has consequences abroad. His regime may well create more trouble in Iraq in order to disrupt the chances for a democratic, pluralist and moderate Shiite government. The same goes for Lebanon, whose tenuous democracy is imperiled not only by Syrian meddling but by the Shiite Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in the country.

Most important is the question of Iran's nuclear program, with which Mr. Ahmadinejad promises to press ahead even as he holds out the prospect of further negotiation with the Europeans. We have been skeptical of past negotiations, not least because we did not think there were "moderates" in Iran who could be relied upon to honor the commitments they failed to honor in the past. Still, we're sorry to see Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory prove the point so brutally.

There will be time in the coming months to devise a serious policy to contain the Iranian regime and defeat its nuclear ambitions. The best place to start is not to be deceived by its nature, which Friday's election unmasked.

Zeus, well I wouldn't know how Iranians feel about him. I don't consider it a particularly democratic state either way. I know it's kinda our (US and GB) fault how they came to be a dictatorship in the 50s, but they embraced mullahs in the late 70s so I don't think they can keep blaming us :P

Hey. You forgot Iraq and Afghanistan as the 3rd and 4th most democratic states in the ME!

CQ

New Iranian President Old Iranian Hostage-Taker

Gateway Pundit, My Pet Jawa, and LGF all have highly interesting documentation -- including a number of photographs -- that appear to indict newly-elected Iranian President as one of the radicals who seized the American embassy in 1979. The photographic evidence is bolstered by a number of sources on the background of president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that put him in the center of the organizations involved in the hostage crisis that destroyed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes and made the US look weak and toothless. If so, and the evidence looks damning, then one could make the argument that Ahmadinejad helped start the Islamofascist offensive against the United States.

These three and others have done excellent blog work in fleshing this story out. However, its impact is really more historic and academic than practical. After all, the government in Teheran now is the same as that which co-opted the hostaging, even if one accepts that the embassy takeover was an impulsive grass-roots movement by student radicals. We have dealt both openly and covertly with that government in the 26 years since that act of war against the US. We also know that Iran has provided financing and shelter for terrorist groups worldwide, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and probably al-Qaeda.

With all of this already out in the open, having the mullahcracy twist the recent election to put an experienced terror operative as their head of state really doesn't amount to a big surprise. And given Hashemi Rafsanjani's track record, that result was inevitable anyway.

UPDATE: On the other hand, one of Rusty's commenters brings up an excellent point. Will Jimmy Carter rush to Teheran now as an independent observer to verify Ahmadinejad's election?

It is quite an awful result to the Election, but to say it was, somehow less democratic then, say, in US, would be a stretch. Hell, Hitler also came to power as a result of a democratic election process.

The main damnifying attack on Iranian election had been the exclusion of thousands of the presidential hopefuls from the election. True that did happen. A similar thing happens in the US when it is a foregone conclusion, a four-year cycle after four-year cycle, that a third-party candidate will not win...

besides, quess what, a winner in Iranian presidential election did win more votes than the second guy. You all know what I am pointing at...

I think the Foreign Office were correct about Ahmadinejad being a "headcase". In fact, I've come to believe that was archetypal British understatement at work. The guy wants Israel wiped off the map.

Even on the BBC website where I saw his comments, they still refer to him as merely a "hardliner". This understatement business is getting out of hand.

Jay Nordlinger

Every time I hear some Middle Eastern leader call for the destruction of Israel — as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did on Wednesday — I think of those famous words of a Holocaust survivor. Asked what lesson he had drawn from the experience, he answered, "When someone tells you he wants to kill you, believe him."

Israel must take very seriously such threats as Ahmadinejad's. The Israeli Left doesn't — but the Left is like that everywhere, and, besides, Israel's Left is much smaller than it used to be. Arafat & Co. accomplished that.

Similarly, the United States should take seriously the constant threats directed our way. Al-Qaeda and the rest are very clear about their intentions and desires. (If you're interested in Islamist clarity, go to MEMRI.org.) A corresponding will to survive must be equally clear.

Exactly, let's attack Iran. One thing we've never had before is THREE prolonged endless and miserably expensive conflicts at once. Yeah!