[THS] Pepe Escobar: How Under-the-Gun Iran Plays it Cool

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19857.htm

How Under-the-Gun Iran Plays it Cool

By Pepe Escobar

02/05/08 "Asia Times" -- --- -More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh
disclosed in the New Yorker how President George W Bush was considering
strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize
that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying
the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the
period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.

The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are
building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American
soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking US warships in the Persian
Gulf. Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of
the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to
offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.

Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear
weapons". Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of
action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with US commander in Iraq
General David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and
malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of
an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no
smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is
involved".

But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam take-out of 2003 proved:
that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the US is
ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian
Gulf.

But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to
make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways
to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian
chessboard.

1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of
the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's
population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological - and revolutionary -
religion, fueled by a passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair.
As much as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners
should feel a certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean
nausea towards the vacuous material world.

For more than 1,000 years, Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of
Shi'isms - a kind of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political
exclusion and implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an
immensely dramatic view of history with it.

It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that
the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation
state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of the
nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts from the
umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they see it, is but
a way-station on the road to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam.

To venture beyond the present stage of history, however, they also
recognize the necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a
sanctuary - and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally
triumphs, the concept of nation-state - a heritage, in any case, of the West
- will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to the will of
Prophet Mohammad.

In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly
became a mashti - a pilgrim visiting a privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise,
the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-
Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner lost in a pious multitude of
black chadors and white turbans occupying every square inch of the huge
walled shrine, I felt a tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a
believer, just a simple infidel.

2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city of Qom, bordering
the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms,
that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned, their supreme mission is
to convert the rest of Islam to the original purity and revolutionary power of
Shi'ism - a religion invariably critical of the established social and political
order.

Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and
conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial
intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Indian worlds. It is the key
transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the
Caucasus, and the Indian sub-continent. It lies between three seas (the
Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at
the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate
Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third-largest city, is roughly
equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder US Vice President Dick
Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock
'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).

Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in north Tehran might spin
dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by
the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran
respected as a major regional power.

To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's
"sole superpower", but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement
foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-
September 11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq
and the Gulf states. It faces the US military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani
and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever-tightening US economic
sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats
involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other)
facilities.

The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a
rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that
is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The
policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive
energy deals with China, India and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and
Latin America. To the horror of American neo-cons, an intercontinental "axis
of evil" air link already exists - a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight
via Iran Air.

Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia
this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on
the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly
offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American
imperialism".

Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks,
Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Americans - all placing their bets on which
future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of
Central Asia.

As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state
in an oil-and-gas-fueled new Silk Road - the backbone of a new Asian
energy security grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence
it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the
main reason why US neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or
all of the above, are throwing such a collective - and threatening - fit.

3. What is Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian
president Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations",
Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's
nuclear program: it's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power;
the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran - unlike the US -
has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.

Think of George W Bush and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as
the new Blues Brothers: both believe they are on a mission from God. Both
are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the
imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and
has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a
coming end and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual
invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western
ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer
in a new Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-
hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the
map". That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context,
comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student
conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi,
was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of
time". He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini
hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by
another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke
Israel.

In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini also
made it very clear that the production, possession or use of nuclear
weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
later issued a fatwa - a religious injunction - under the same terms. For the
theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful
symbol of independence vis-a-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians
of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon
colonialism.

Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and
butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq war, he was a
member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces.
(That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the
Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in
guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the
leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij
(informally known in Iran as "the army of 20 million"), are betting on a US
attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic
regime and their faction of it.

Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last
October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare
honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear
dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for
peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the
Europeans, and the IAEA.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of
Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the leader himself let it be known
that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately
contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet
evidently with the leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and
replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.

4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian
elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his
house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to
revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which
then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously
enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")

But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers
of power - the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians,
the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of
the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini
in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush
administration), the media - they assumed they would also control the self-
described "street cleaner of the people". How wrong they have been.

For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop
internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as
of the legislature, the judiciary, the IRGC, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs
in Qom.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged
the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to
crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from
entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for
women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the Iran-Iraq
war days. These friends proved to be as faithful as administratively
incompetent - especially in terms of economic policy. Instead of solidifying
the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad
increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.

Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence has
not translated into street barricades and it probably will not; nor, contrary
to neo-con fantasy land scenarios, would an attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single political faction supports
the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.

There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may be wildly unpopular
- because of so much enforced austerity in an energy-rich land and the
virtual absence of social mobility - but for millions, especially in the
countryside and the remote provinces, life is still bearable. In the large
urban centers - Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz - most would be in favor
of a move toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a
progressive liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the
other way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.

At least four main factions are at play in the intricate Persian-miniature-like
game of today's Iranian power politics - and two others, the revolutionary
left and the secular right, even though thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't
be forgotten either.

The extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically socialist,
has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.

The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious
figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme right,
yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial internal split.
The substantially wealthy bonyads - the Islamic foundations, active in all
economic sectors - badly want a reconciliation with the West. They know
that, under the pressure of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both
capital and brains is working against the national interest.

Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as US$600 billion in
Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies.
The best and the brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic
foundations also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines
Ahmadinejad's power.

The extremely influential IRGC, a key component of government with vast
economic interests, transits between these two factions. They privilege the
fight against what they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with
Sunni Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In
fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter
the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan" but
to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and
Southwest Asia.

The current reformists/progressives of the left were originally former
partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular
mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some sort of religious democracy,
their new icon became former president Mohammad Khatami (of "dialogue
of civilizations" fame). Here, after all, was an Islamic president who had
captured the youth vote and the women's vote and had written about the
ideas of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as
well as the possibility of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran
Spring" didn't last long - and is now long gone.

The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a former two-term president, current chairman of the
Expediency Council and a key member of the Council of Experts - 86 clerics,
no women, the Holy Grail of the system, and the only institution in the
Islamic Republic capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is
now supported by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as
"The Shark", Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains
privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the ultimate
survivor - moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as
power in the country shifted.

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader.
As the regime's de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the
Islamic Revolution of 1979 but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and
reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: he knows that
an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major
cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global
modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float
out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani
would be the man to talk to.

5. Heading down the New Silk Road. Reformist friends in Tehran keep
telling me the country is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign
in Cuba - and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip" or any of the other
color-coded Western-style movements that Washington might dream of is,
as yet, on the horizon.

Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran?
The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in
2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly
powerful against US interests elsewhere in the world.

>From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Strait of
Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to
cause real damage to American forces and interests - and certainly to drive
the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a
disaster for everyone.

The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush
administration and the US military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look
East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.

Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of
American neo-cons, the Asian energy security grid is quickly becoming a
reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran
is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-
economic politics".

This year, Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The
framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as
the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian US allies are
ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic,
political, cultural, and - crucially - geostrategic connections with Iran. An
attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia.

What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Cheney's
faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John
McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself - in his occult
wisdom - is betting on a US war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be
reborn.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a
snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at
pepeasia at yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2008 Pepe Escobar.)