Iraq Deja Vu All Over Iran
By Georgie Anne Geyer
Washington Times
May 15, 2006
A Muslim country deep in the Middle East where America is roundly hated by many. A psychopathic leader who believes in war as the end of time. The prospect of a nuclear weapon looming on the horizon. Fearsome events that could turn Shia against Sunni across the entire Middle East and doom Israel:
Oh no, it can't happen again! And yet, that scenario, much like the one that started the Iraq war, is being talked about here as our new crisis revolves around ... Iran.
But there is one more commonality with the foreboding months before the Iraq war: Virtually nobody here knows what he is doing, while more wily foreign manipulators are stepping in to use the Iran crisis for their benefit.
Let's look at where we are this week:
The world's powers were meeting in the U.N. Security Council to discuss stronger sanctions against Iran. But Russia and China have already said no, and the European powers have made clear that they are not in favor of stronger medicine than continuing their three-year-long negotiations to make Iran give up any idea of a nuclear bomb.
Speaking to a small group of us at the Council on Foreign Affairs last week, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer said the situation was "so dangerous" because Iran feared "being isolated"; only the Europeans' and Iranians' idea of a "grand bargain," he said, in which the U.S. would deal directly with Teheran and exchange security guarantees for promises to pull back nuclear bomb propositions, was a way out.
There is no question that the young and explosive Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who one day threatens to wipe Israel off the map and the next sends a wondering, philosophical treatise to President Bush, is a dangerous man. He is both hardened and inspired by his part in the maniacal Basiji, a mass movement of children whom the Ayatollah Khomeini sent to their deaths by the tens of thousands in the 1980s war with Iraq by clearing minefields with their bodies.
Someday, someone will write an interesting book about the fact that mankind never really learns from wars lost: Ahmadinejad's generation, the children of the 1980s wars, are now waging their own war, much as the American administration's leading members came out of the era of the Vietnam War, also having learned nothing.
I had an interesting phone conversation this week from Paris with Maryam Rajavi, who heads the People's Mujaheddin Organization of Iran, an exile group that wants to overthrow the mullahs, and the group that first brought Iran's nuclear plans to the attention of the world.
She stressed that "a nuclear bomb would enable mullahs to impose their will upon the region and to spread fundamentalism everywhere. Creating an external crisis is the way for them to survive." She, not surprisingly, believes that a Mujaheddin pro-Western government is the only hope for a future Iran.
Into this melange of ideas, with an increasing tempo over the last few weeks, have stepped a number of high-level Israeli military and security officials (who have always worked closely with the neocons here), including a former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces and the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. The message: America must strike militarily at Iran's nuclear facilities, with Israel if necessary. And as the former chief of staff said, "Other countries should be prepared to pay the price, just as Israel is."
Columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, who has extraordinary contacts across the Middle East and whose predictions are nearly always right, wrote last week that a high-level Israeli official told him at Israel's National Day reception that Israel would strike first, in the next "month or two or three."
Stop. Pause. Hold. What we are talking about is attacking a proud and ancient (if often maddened) civilization of 70 million people that controls the Strait of Hormuz, or the world's oil chokepoint; which has widely infiltrated and influenced the 60 percent Shiite population of Iraq and can inspire massive anti-American attacks there; and which has spun off violent Shiite political groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, across the Middle East.
Another strategist who, like Borchgrave, is virtually always right, is Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. He paints a stark picture of the outcome of such an attack. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world," he says. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world."
Even while American support for the Iraq war plummets, there is the danger that America could march like a man blinded by his own perceived omnipotence into this next -- and even vaster -- morass.
As the United Nations met this week, American leaders wasted no time putting down the obviously exploratory letter from the Iranian president, but they should not have. Iranians interviewed on American television said almost unanimously that he was expressing their "Third World view" (even though anti-American). Isn't it time to at least pretend to listen to their views instead of mocking them before any diplomacy can begin?
Every nuclear analyst without a political ax to grind says it will be five to 10 years before Teheran could make a bomb. There are many indicators that Iran would start talks with America. Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush is the first direct attempt to make contact since relations were broken in 1979.
Even if we give up some of our self-destructive pride in a "grand bargain," it would be preferable to the alternative geopolitical closing sale.
Washington Times
May 15, 2006
A Muslim country deep in the Middle East where America is roundly hated by many. A psychopathic leader who believes in war as the end of time. The prospect of a nuclear weapon looming on the horizon. Fearsome events that could turn Shia against Sunni across the entire Middle East and doom Israel:
Oh no, it can't happen again! And yet, that scenario, much like the one that started the Iraq war, is being talked about here as our new crisis revolves around ... Iran.
But there is one more commonality with the foreboding months before the Iraq war: Virtually nobody here knows what he is doing, while more wily foreign manipulators are stepping in to use the Iran crisis for their benefit.
Let's look at where we are this week:
The world's powers were meeting in the U.N. Security Council to discuss stronger sanctions against Iran. But Russia and China have already said no, and the European powers have made clear that they are not in favor of stronger medicine than continuing their three-year-long negotiations to make Iran give up any idea of a nuclear bomb.
Speaking to a small group of us at the Council on Foreign Affairs last week, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer said the situation was "so dangerous" because Iran feared "being isolated"; only the Europeans' and Iranians' idea of a "grand bargain," he said, in which the U.S. would deal directly with Teheran and exchange security guarantees for promises to pull back nuclear bomb propositions, was a way out.
There is no question that the young and explosive Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who one day threatens to wipe Israel off the map and the next sends a wondering, philosophical treatise to President Bush, is a dangerous man. He is both hardened and inspired by his part in the maniacal Basiji, a mass movement of children whom the Ayatollah Khomeini sent to their deaths by the tens of thousands in the 1980s war with Iraq by clearing minefields with their bodies.
Someday, someone will write an interesting book about the fact that mankind never really learns from wars lost: Ahmadinejad's generation, the children of the 1980s wars, are now waging their own war, much as the American administration's leading members came out of the era of the Vietnam War, also having learned nothing.
I had an interesting phone conversation this week from Paris with Maryam Rajavi, who heads the People's Mujaheddin Organization of Iran, an exile group that wants to overthrow the mullahs, and the group that first brought Iran's nuclear plans to the attention of the world.
She stressed that "a nuclear bomb would enable mullahs to impose their will upon the region and to spread fundamentalism everywhere. Creating an external crisis is the way for them to survive." She, not surprisingly, believes that a Mujaheddin pro-Western government is the only hope for a future Iran.
Into this melange of ideas, with an increasing tempo over the last few weeks, have stepped a number of high-level Israeli military and security officials (who have always worked closely with the neocons here), including a former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces and the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. The message: America must strike militarily at Iran's nuclear facilities, with Israel if necessary. And as the former chief of staff said, "Other countries should be prepared to pay the price, just as Israel is."
Columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, who has extraordinary contacts across the Middle East and whose predictions are nearly always right, wrote last week that a high-level Israeli official told him at Israel's National Day reception that Israel would strike first, in the next "month or two or three."
Stop. Pause. Hold. What we are talking about is attacking a proud and ancient (if often maddened) civilization of 70 million people that controls the Strait of Hormuz, or the world's oil chokepoint; which has widely infiltrated and influenced the 60 percent Shiite population of Iraq and can inspire massive anti-American attacks there; and which has spun off violent Shiite political groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, across the Middle East.
Another strategist who, like Borchgrave, is virtually always right, is Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. He paints a stark picture of the outcome of such an attack. "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world," he says. "Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world."
Even while American support for the Iraq war plummets, there is the danger that America could march like a man blinded by his own perceived omnipotence into this next -- and even vaster -- morass.
As the United Nations met this week, American leaders wasted no time putting down the obviously exploratory letter from the Iranian president, but they should not have. Iranians interviewed on American television said almost unanimously that he was expressing their "Third World view" (even though anti-American). Isn't it time to at least pretend to listen to their views instead of mocking them before any diplomacy can begin?
Every nuclear analyst without a political ax to grind says it will be five to 10 years before Teheran could make a bomb. There are many indicators that Iran would start talks with America. Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush is the first direct attempt to make contact since relations were broken in 1979.
Even if we give up some of our self-destructive pride in a "grand bargain," it would be preferable to the alternative geopolitical closing sale.
posted by Hanan Elbadry at 10:24 AM
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