WarSclerotic

JPost.com | BlogCentral | The Warped Mirror | Obama’s challenger.

President Obama recently claimed that his policy towards Iran has resulted in an increasing isolation of the regime in Teheran. Now Iran’s president has responded, countering that it isn’t Iran, but the US and Obama that are isolated.

According to a CNN report, Ahmadinejad declared in a speech broadcast on Iranian TV that “Obama has only one way to remain in power and be successful. This way is Iran.” Ahmadinejad confidently claimed that the US was no longer “at the height of glory,” but was instead “collapsing.” His assessment was that Americans “have many economic and cultural problems. They have security problems in the world and their influence in Iraq and Afghanistan is vanishing.”

The Iranian president also said that the US would like to dominate the Middle East but was unable do so without Iran’s cooperation, and insisted that “the nuclear issue” was just a pretext. Teasing Obama to deliver on the change he had promised, Ahmadinejad announced that he had sent the American president a message telling him that there had not yet been “any genuine change,” and according to CNN, Ahmadinejad referred to American-Israeli relations when he added: “Superficial changes do not matter.”

Ahmadinejad’s posturing sounds as if he was trying to make the case for Lee Smith’s fascinating new book The Strong Horse, where Smith writes:

“Iran and the resistance bloc [i.e. Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and some Iraqi groups] compete with the United States and its allies to impose regional order as the strong horse.”

Smith’s “strong horse” thesis seems even more persuasive in view of Teheran’s efforts to organize an “international denuclearization conference” that is taking place this weekend under the motto “Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for No One”. While one Iranian official denied that this gathering was meant to compete with Obama’s recent nuclear security summit, Al Jazeera interviewed an Iranian analyst who noted that Ahmadinejad’s opening speech was “targeting a global audience.” As the analyst explained:

Most countries in the world do feel that the UN Security Council as well as the IAEA board of governors is not democratic, so it is something that most people in the south have a great deal of sympathy with […] The problem that Iran is facing right now is the fact that western countries are very much biased against the country. So he [i.e. Ahmadinejad] is using this opportunity to point out Iran’s position and show that it is a very reasonable and logical one and the reason that Iran is unable to get its voice across is because these bodies are undemocratic.”

Right, why shouldn’t Iran be the champion of democracy for the downtrodden “people in the south”?

Obama’s summit focused on the somewhat narrower goal of preventing nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists. But critics have rightly pointed out that “the two greatest such threats were not even on the agenda.” As Charles Krauthammer noted, Iran is not only “frantically enriching uranium to make a bomb,” but is also considered by the State Department “as the greatest exporter of terrorism in the world”; likewise, Pakistan is busy adding to the world’s stockpile of fissile material by producing plutonium, which is obviously cause for grave concern considering the Taliban and al-Qaida presence in the country.

Krauthammer’s dismissive view of “Obama’s nuclear strutting and fretting” may well be shared in Teheran. Iran’s rulers are also certainly aware of the fact that many analysts believe the Obama administration is already resigned to a nuclear Iran. A good example is the current cover of the influential Foreign Affairs magazine, which features an essay entitled “After Iran Gets the Bomb“.

And once Iran gets the bomb – or even enough material for a “dirty bomb” that could be used for a mega-terrorist attack – the Middle East will be transformed into a testing ground for the question of whether the Cold War doctrine of MAD, i.e. mutually assured destruction, remains valid in the very different conditions pertaining to the region.

There is clearly reason to doubt that deterrence offers a fool-proof solution when it comes to Iran. Two analysts from the Investigative Project on Terrorism have rightly pointed out that “Western policies in place until now have utterly failed to deter Iran from facilitating terrorism using conventional weapons. US deterrence has been eroded by Iran’s perception of American weakness, and by the fact that the Iranian regime has been able to foment terrorism and violence against the United States and the West for more than 30 years and get away with it.”

In his new book, Lee Smith has argued that in the context of Middle Eastern power politics, Israel’s two most recent wars with Hizbullah and Hamas illustrate that “Israel has been a proxy strong horse not just for the United States but also for Sunni Arab regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

Smith fully acknowledged that his interpretation of the Middle East was “likely to cause unease”; and indeed, even a favorable review of his book warned that “[in] a climate increasingly attuned to avoid offense, Smith’s strident declarations are bound to attract significant criticism.”

But it is hard to deny that Ahmadinejad’s recent declarations follow exactly the pattern that one would expect on the basis of Smith’s book, and other developments also support the “strong horse” thesis. Yet most Western pundits will likely prefer to either overlook Ahmadinejad’s challenge to Obama, or interpret it as some sort of desperate attempt to conceal a sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Smith invoked a very different scenario when he wrote a few weeks ago about a Middle East without American influence, arguing:

Victory does not always go to the smartest – or even to those who have the most airplanes, the most military bases, and the best technology. It goes to those who do not hesitate to impose their wills on the world in order to reshape it to their liking. It goes to the strong horse.”

The Obama administration might respond that their objective is not “victory,” but rather finding shared interests as a basis for peaceful cooperation and coexistence. But what happens if one is facing an opponent who has invested decades of effort to achieve victory?

For Israel, the prospect of a Middle East where American influence is greatly diminished is obviously a dismal one. But the notion that Israel could shore up America’s position by submitting to a dictated “peace” that would fulfill Palestinian and Arab demands is pure fantasy: “resistance” against Israel has been glorified in the Middle East ever since Israel was established 62 years ago. Anyone who thinks that Israel would only have to make some entirely reasonable concessions to achieve peace in the Middle East would do well to consider the results of a Pew Global Attitudes survey published in summer 2007. Pollsters asked the question: “Can a Way be Found for Israel and Palestinian Rights to Coexist?” These were the results:

Western publics generally believe that a way can be found for Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of the Palestinians are addressed. The picture is quite different, however, among Muslim publics in the Middle East.

More than seven in ten Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians and Kuwaitis believe ‘the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.’ Lebanese opinion is divided on this issue: Christians tend to believe strongly that coexistence can work, while the Shia community overwhelmingly disagrees. Among Lebanese Sunnis, 57% believe a way can be found for Israel to exist and Palestinian rights be addressed – a far greater percentage than among Sunnis in other countries.”

For decades, Arab rulers have relied on inciting popular resentment against Israel to distract their citizens from the lack of freedom and opportunity in their own countries. There is a reason why the Saudi peace initiative – first proposed a few months after 9/11 – has always been presented as a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposition. The Saudis may have been alarmed to see the consequences of the radicalization they helped foster for so long, but neither they nor other Arab leaders were willing to openly call on their publics to give peace a chance.

This entry was posted on April 18, 2010 at 11:32 PM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.