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Major Pentagon Consultant Takes Hard Look At Ahmadinejad
s Iran Crucible - Part I
22 March 2006,FOCUS News Agency

Beyond Yapping Dogs and Superpowers Made of Straw
By Alex Alexiev*
This material will get on Rummy's desk. So why is it in a low currency Bulgarian news source?
President Ahmadinejad’s recent calls for the annihilation of Israel have provided much needed clarity to a reality the West, rhetoric apart, has often refused to acknowledge let alone do something about. While his genocidal threats against a fellow-member of the United Nations should serve as a wake up call to people of good will anywhere, other less well-known tirades may tell us more about why the fanatics in Tehran feel they can spew hatred with impunity and why the terrorist regime in Iran has become a clear and present danger that could no longer be ignored by civilized nations.
"clear and present danger" is Pentagon code for: Let's roll!

"Europeans are like yapping dogs, kick them once and they run away," Ahmadinejad recently opined, while simultaneously dismissing the United States as a "superpower made of straw." Such rants are seldom paid much attention in the Western media, which tends to treat them as unfortunate noise that is best ignored. The "yapping dogs" remark, for instance, was not made public in Europe until four months after it was actually made.

This is unfortunate, because such ravings can tell us more than the reams of sober Western punditry generated on the subject of late. They should also make us think through the implications of such views both in terms of the threat this regime poses and what policies could best counter it. It may be useful to begin with the simple proposition that, looked at from the vantage point of Iran’s Islamist regime, Ahmadinejad’s outbursts may in fact be a rational assessment of actual European and U.S. policies as opposed to their rhetoric vis-à-vis Tehran.

To start with neither Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, nor Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe out Israel are either new or unprecedented. Iran has been pursuing nuclear capabilities for many years and extremely bellicose tirades against Jews and the West have been a regular staple of the mullahs’ rhetoric since Khomeini. Just a few months after 9/11, for instance, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the number two in the Iranian regime then and now, and a man often approvingly characterized as "pragmatic" in the Western media, urged the Muslim world to annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons, assuring them that they will only suffer "some damages" as a result of a nuclear
exchange.

Despite such vitriol, Europe has, by and large, chosen to ignore the fact that Iran is a designated terrorist state and a key sponsor of terrorism. To this day, the Tehran
controlled Lebanese Hezbollah, for instance, is not to be found on the EU list of terrorist organizations, ostensibly because it also provides "social services." Instead, the Europeans have focused on business better than usual and today
hundreds of EU companies do some $15 billion of export business with Iran that is growing at 25% per annum. Germany alone exported $5 billion worth of goods to Iran in 2005, a 30% increase from 2004. And these EU exports, which represent 44% of Iran’s total, are mostly in the strategic oil and gas, petrochemical and telecommunications sectors and cannot be easily replaced by Russian or Chinese goods. Fully 75% of the machinery and technology that keeps Iran’s economy - and
oil and gas exports - going is of EU provenance. This has made business with Europe an absolutely indispensable economic prop for the regime. Moreover, much of it is done with the direct support and encouragement of European governments in the form of export credit guarantees and bilateral agreements in direct
contravention of U.S. declared policy on dealing with terrorist states. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, wittingly or not, European governments are helping keep the mullah regime in power. Which brings us to the "superpower made of straw." Unlike the Europeans, the United States has taken the Iranian terrorist regime seriously and President Bush declared the country one of the axis of evil. Even
before that, in 1996, the U.S. Congress unanimously passed tough legislation known as the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) authorizing sanctions against companies and individuals doing business with the Iranian regime, especially in the oil and gas sector. Yet, despite the fact that ILSA was extended for another five years in 2001 and the countless violations of its provisions in the meantime, Washington has never imposed sanctions on any company doing business in Iran, except a few
Chinese arms dealers.

Thus, at least in the regime’s view, U.S. implicit threats to Iran have to date proven to be little more than empty rhetoric. There is no reason to expect that they‘ll be taken
any more seriously in the future than they have been in the past unless Washington finally decides to up the ante. And unless it does, the United States will soon face an
unpredictable terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and a Middle East profoundly destabilized and on the verge of nuclear war.

Perhaps, as many hope, with the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council, the Europeans will finally prove Ahmadinejad wrong and show some bite along with the "yapping." Unfortunately, given past experience and the large European economic interests involved, the odds of that happening are not very good. Nor is it likely that Russia and China will suddenly decide to abandon their long-standing efforts to
obstruct American policy and strike their own lucrative deals with Tehran. Indeed, just days after Russia’s voted to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated publicly Moscow’s strong opposition to "any possible sanctions" against Iran.

Washington’s current hopes to prevent Iran from going nuclear with the help of the UN will yet again prove illusory. This does not mean that America must face this daunting task alone, for in facing the warmongers in Tehran we have the most
powerful of potential allies - the Iranian people. The first and most important step though is to realize that the status quo is simply no longer acceptable and it will not really get better until there is a regime change in Tehran. Before getting into a discussion of how regime change could best be accomplished, however, it is important to briefly discuss the evolution of the regime in Iran into a ticking time bomb and an imminent threat to world peace.

From Totalitarian Theocracy to Messianic Islamofascism

From its very beginning, Khomeini’s revolution was based on the essentially totalitarian concept of vilayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent), which simply meant absolute political power for a "supreme leader" and a small clique of top clerics. Though claiming to derive its legitimacy from Islam and having a version of Islamic fanaticism as its ideological banner, this system had much more in common with the Nazi Fuehrer principle and the Bolshevik "vanguard party" concept than with anything found in the Quran or the Twelver Shia doctrine. Indeed, it followed the organizational and operational modus operandi of its totalitarian confreres to the letter, complete with a "cult of personality" of the leader and brutal suppression of the rule of law, dissent, freedom of speech and basic human rights by means of a typical totalitarian security services network and extrajudicial violence. It also followed closely the totalitarian economic model in its socialist version, with 70% of the economy controlled by the state, central planning, five-year plans etc.
Overtime, the system became progressively ossified and corrupt and failed to perform economically. Timid half-baked reform experiments under President Khatami predictably came to nothing, yet, despite being tightly controlled, threatened the absolute power and economic privilege of the clerics. The ruling oligarchy responded by putting an end to even the pretence of reform and toleration of reformists and opted out for a new wave of wholesale repression, euphemistically dubbed the "Second Islamic Revolution." All the while, the regime
continued to blame the Great Satan and evil Zionists for its own failures with the time-tested "externalization of evil" propaganda tactic of totalitarians.

The result has been the near complete stifling of dissent in Iran. Reformists have been prevented from contesting elections, most reformists publications have been banned and many hundreds of journalists, bloggers and non-conformists have been jailed on trumped up charges and often tortured. Since the arrival of Ahmadinejad on the scene, this process has been accelerated and led to the thorough purge of suspected reformists from all levels of government and their
replacement with hard-line zealots.

The growing tendency of the regime to seek greater ideological conformity and use repression as a first resort in its efforts to deal with the palpable discontent of Iranian society, has dramatically enhanced the political clout of the most
reactionary parts of the regime’s support structures in the security, intelligence and paramilitary vigilante baseej forces and their hardline Islamist mentors. It is these circles that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged from and represents.
While this group of extremists is a zealous defender of the Islamist regime, their views are even more radical than those of most regime clerics in virtually all aspects and they see themselves as the true representatives and guardians of
Ayatollah Khomeini’s legacy. In this respect, they implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly, criticize the clerical establishment for not being radical enough in pursuing the goals of the Islamic revolution as they see them.

Two areas of particular relevance for our discussion here are their attitudes toward the West and the messianic nature of their beliefs. Guided by the teachings of their ideological godfather - the ultra-hardline Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi and the "Westoxication" conspiracy theories of Ahmad Fardid,
a third-rate Persian follower of Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, these zealots exhibit a pathological hatred of the West and its civilization and a firm belief in the inevitability of an apocalyptic struggle between Islam and the West that will usher in the final triumph of Islam worldwide.

By itself, this fervent fantasy is hardly new, but its current interpretation by Ahmadinejad and the extremists now in power in Tehran is novel and highly disturbing. For they have combined it with the messianic Shiite belief in the
reappearance of the Hidden Imam and appear to believe that the final violent confrontation with the enemies of Islam is not only close at hand, but that it could be speeded up and that it is the religious obligation of the Iranian people
to do that through the “art of martyrdom.” And martyrdom in
Ahmadinejad’s fantasy world is no longer just about individuals but about the whole nation. "A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity," he exalts and warns that those who undermine this "principle … undermine the foundation of our eternity." The way to avoid this great misfortune is simple in his view and he urges the Iranians to follow those who are "doing their best to pave the way for the urgent reappearance of the Hidden Imam." How long that will take is also no secret and Ahmadinejad is on record saying that he expects the Imam to appear in two short years. What exactly "paving the way" for the Messiah’s appearance
involves is not clear from the ravings of these lunatics, but for the civilized world to assume that these fantasies are totally unrelated to Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons would be folly. Recently, a religious scholar and disciple of
Ahmadinejad’s mentor Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, better known to Iranians as "Professor Crocodile," publicly justified the use of nuclear weapons against the enemies of Islam in what regime opponents saw as a new effort by the hardliners to "prepare the religious grounds for the use of these weapons."

There are many in the West that are already dismissing these ominous threats as empty bluster and yet again urging dialog and calling for more tolerance of the intolerant. For them, it may be instructive to see how some prominent Iranians
who are far from being friends of the West or enemies of the Islamic republic perceive these trends. Abdul-Karim Soroush, the most prominent Iranian philosopher still living in the country, for instance, sees a "hidden fascism" on the march and believes that the current Tehran rulers are going "even further than the Taliban," while, in the words of former president Khatami, they aspire "to imitate Bin Laden" and "compete with the Taliban in calling for violence and
in carrying out extremist crimes."

* Alex Alexiev is a vice president of the Center for Security Policy on Washington, D.C. and is a manager of the program "Islamic Radicalism and International
Terrorism."
Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=146348