Iranian President's Got Game. But Which Game?

[Shammu]

Ahmadinejad and Bush: The Nuclear Shadowboxers

Tuesday , June 13, 2006

By John Moody

 

TEHRAN, Iran — “If he’s convinced he’s right, he’s not going to change his mind, no matter what anyone says,” said the president’s friend. Though such assessments are frequently used to characterize President Bush, in this case it was a description of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bush’s counterpart in Iran.

The friend in this case is Nasser Hadian-Jazy, an associate professor of political science at Tehran University, who has known Ahmadinejad since grade school, and has recently become a minor celebrity in the West because of his friend’s ascent to power.

“I wonder why more people haven’t noticed how much alike they are,” he says, speaking of the two leaders.

Though both men would deny it emphatically, the parallels between their presidencies are obvious and unavoidable. Each came to power in controversial elections, and each brought with him a new and decidedly conservative outlook on governing.

Each invokes the name of God frequently in speeches, a habit that has attracted the disdain of the country’s elite, while drawing the rock-ribbed, fundamentalist religious believers closer to him.

Each has made statements that ricocheted around the world and were variously interpreted as straight talk or heedless bellicosity, verging on war fervor.

Neither dresses with particular élan. And neither, to put it kindly, has a reputation for elegance in public speaking.

In the U.S. and much of Europe — in short, the traditional center of the Christian world — Ahmadinejad comes across as an out-of-control anti-Semite who wants Israel destroyed and who would risk his country’s survival on a gamble that the world will not and cannot stop him from producing a nuclear weapons arsenal.

From Tehran — and by extension, much of the Islamic world — Bush is seen as a simpleton with the world’s mightiest military ready to do his reckless bidding as he tries to reshape the Middle East according to Western principles of democracy.

Neither man can hope for much support in the other’s homeland. Ahmadinejad rightly forfeited any chance to be heard impartially in the West with his ill-considered statements questioning the reality of the Holocaust and his promise that Israel would be wiped off the map. Bush’s image in Iran, where there is no official American presence, is shaped almost entirely by a vitriolic Iranian media that caricatures him as anything from Hitler to a drooling caveman.

And yet, like or loathe them, both presidents have a relatively straightforward foreign policy and clear-cut social priorities tied closely to their respective religious backgrounds. In Bush’s case, the attacks of 9/11 helped shape his worldview, in which terrorist threats to Western democracy could not simply be opposed, but wiped out. The doctrine that anyone who harbors a terrorist is also a terrorist plays well in the U.S. But across the broad Middle East, it created waves of panic as U.S. troops invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq. “Who will this guy go after next?” is the subtext to almost every political conversation here with Iranians.

Bush has claimed the authority to go after terrorists anywhere in the world; Ahmadinejad the right to develop nuclear technology that could be used to wage nuclear war upon anyone.

Unlike Bush, the Iranian may not be the author of his own foreign policy. His detractors suspect that he is merely mouthing the thoughts of the ultra-conservative clergy who hold real power in this Islamic republic, especially the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some question whether Ahmadinejad, whose last job was mayor of Tehran, even understands what he is saying.

Yet his odious remarks about Israel tap into a widespread Iranian hatred, bordering on the pathological, of the Jewish state. To that extent, he is playing to his base.

Bush’s social agenda is infused with his religious convictions, but he appears unable to push it through. He opposes most abortion, which remains legal in America. He supports a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, which failed to pass the Senate earlier this month. He says he is a fiscal conservative, yet, due largely to the war in Iraq, has presided over record government spending and deficits.

His Iranian counterpart faces similar frustrations. Ahmadinejad says one thing about the hottest social issues in Iran but does another. He issued a decree permitting women to attend soccer games along with men, but backed down as soon as Khamenei voiced opposition. He has called upon the population to demonstrate its religious devotion, yet attendance at the Friday prayer sessions in Iran is down from millions each week to tens of thousands. Professions like prostitution and gambling are strictly outlawed by Islamic government, but flourish under the disinterested gaze of the once-feared revolutionary guards.

A Beltway insider recently predicted that Bush’s approval ratings, which have gone as low as 30%, have bottomed out and will soon rebound precisely because he has stayed true to his core beliefs. Gallup has not been invited to test Ahmadinejad's public standing. But intimates of the Iranian president confidently predict that he, too, will stay the course. To him, as to Bush, remaining true to his conscience is also a virtue.

Ahmadinejad and Bush: The Nuclear Shadowboxers

[Shammu]

In Iran, Relax and Learn to Enjoy the Bomb

Tuesday , June 13, 2006

By John Moody

TEHRAN, Iran — There is a Persian saying that, roughly translated, goes: Once you’ve been near death, the flu isn’t so bad.

Perhaps it is such wisdom that Iranians use now to cope with the frustrations of living in a theocracy.

Islamic law, as applied here, forbids pleasures taken for granted in the West: casual contact between men and women, the consumption of alcohol (although smoking, treated as a near mortal sin in the United States, is practiced without penalty), dancing, racy movies, financial loans that carry interest charges, and open debate on topics like religion.

Still, Iranians who lived through much or part of the 27 years since a revolution ousted the shah and brought religious zealots to power appreciate the relative moderation they now enjoy in comparison with only a few years ago. Hands and heads are no longer lopped off publicly, as they were at the behest of Attorney General Sadeq Khalkhali during the early days of the theocracy. Public fights and public displays of affection are both punishable by stiff fines, a sentence that one chastened lovebird says “is more painful than their damned whips.”

And for all his conservative-sounding rhetoric, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has allowed enforcement of social regulations to go lax. The tasks of humiliating women who let too much hair peek out from their headscarves, or ankle show beneath their Capri pants, has been transferred from the once-dreaded Revolutionary Guards to regular municipal police, who appear to appreciate the sight as much as anyone.

Young couples in uptown Tehran, as the capital’s wealthiest section is known, stroll the streets hand in hand. Do they dare do more?

“Sex is easy in Iran, probably easier than in America,” says a young man with slicked-back hair who has visited the United States. Once behind the doors of their homes, the hajibs, or headscarves, come off, and the liquor bottles come out. While there are some voluntary followers, for millions of others in Iran, adherence to Islamic law is a matter of public appearance, not a real lifestyle.

While Japanese and German cars sell for nearly double their U.S. prices, homemade models of Peugeot and Kia, notably called the Pride, sell for $6,000. Not surprisingly, car sales have skyrocketed, reaching an estimated 900,000 last year. As a result, the wide boulevards and ancient alleys of Tehran, whose metropolitan area has a population of 20 million, are choked with cars that run on 10-cent-a-gallon gasoline that still contains lead. Pollution levels rival those of Mexico City, generally considered the most polluted city on earth.

Housing remains a problem, both in Tehran and other major cities. A one-bedroom apartment in the capital can cost $500,000, well beyond the means of the average Iranian. Since mortgages are un-Islamic, buyers must pay cash. President Ahmadinejad recently proclaimed an interest-free loan program for potential homebuyers on a limited budget that dodges the religious objections of clerics. But the amounts offered are paltry in comparison with the inflated real estate prices.

What few people besides the chattering classes in Tehran spend much time worrying about is Iran’s development of a nuclear program based on enrichment of uranium that could also be used to make nuclear bombs.

“Nobody wants a nuclear war, but when Ahmadinejad sticks his finger in the Americans’ eye, people say, ‘That’s our boy,’” says Nasser Hadian-Jazy, an associate professor of political science at Tehran University and a longtime friend of the president. “They don’t think Iran will use its uranium to make a bomb, not even to use on Israel. And they don’t think the Americans will dare to attack us unless they can prove we’ve got a bomb.”

To that end, the nuclear program that has become the center of an international crisis is a perverse point of pride to many Iranians, even those who do not support Ahmadinejad. It is proof that Iran has become a power both in the region and the world that can neither be bullied nor ignored.

More than a few Iranians would toast their president with champagne for his bald-faced defiance of the world’s superpower, if doing so too openly wouldn’t land them in one of his prisons.

In Iran, Relax and Learn to Enjoy the Bomb

[Shammu]

Iranian President's Got Game. But Which Game?

Thursday , June 15, 2006

By John Moody

TEHRAN, Iran — In his soccer-playing youth, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was renowned for two valuable skills: speed, and his ability to fake out an opponent with fancy footwork. Of course, he mostly played indoor, or salon soccer, on a smaller-than-normal field.

Today, the fleet-footed footballer-turned-president of Iran is using the same tools in his war of wills with the United States. There are many within Iran, however, who suspect that “the monkey,” as the bearded president is known among detractors, is playing a game whose rules he does not understand, on a playing field too vast for his skill set.

“He can’t comprehend the situation he’s facing, and he can’t even understand the consequences he’s talked himself into,” said Ebrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister who now heads the Freedom Movement of Iran, a leading opposition group.

Speaking at his home, where songbirds lighten the mood outside, Yazdi, who served as foreign minister in the first days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979, suggested that Ahmadinejad might not be able to serve out his full four-year term, which ends in 2009.

“He is not competent for the job he holds, and more people are saying it out loud,” said Yazdi, who remains under investigation by the government for his outspokenness and, until recently, his frequent trips to the United States.

Yazdi says he is no longer welcome in America, where his grown children live. Instead, he whiles away the days in his pleasant Tehran villa, fielding calls from fellow opponents of the conservative regime, and worrying about the outcome of Iran’s cat-and-mouse game with the U.S.

While Ahmadinejad and President Bush circle warily around the issue of Iran’s insistence on enriching uranium, ordinary Iranians — like their American counterparts — are more worried about climbing prices and unemployment. Unofficially, inflation is on course to reach above 100 percent this year, and joblessness is estimated to be 20 percent.

With the price of oil at record highs, Iranians openly resent their economic plight. The United States under Jimmy Carter suffered from stagflation. Iran has mad-flation.

Particularly hard hit is the 70 percent of the population under the age of 30 — a generation that has known nothing but rule by the Islamic Revolution that swept the clergy into power in 1979. At a high-rise apartment complex just off Afriqa Boulevard, where kids from wealthy families congregate in designer jeans and the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, for women, the rituals are similar to the U.S. — not-so-subtle flirting, regularly interrupted by the squeal of cell phones and the tinkle of text messages — and almost no attention paid to the regime’s claim that nuclear technology is every Iranian’s birthright.

Equally striking are the looks of incredulity when asked if they want Iran to have a nuclear bomb. “We don’t need any more weapons,” they say almost unanimously. Instead, they are frightened by what they consider the bellicose anti-Iran tone from Washington.

Last March, Tehran was swept by rumors that an American rocket attack was imminent. In response, a brigade of willing would-be martyrs was formed to defend the homeland. In Iran, martyrdom is the new patriotism.

“If America would listen to what we are saying, instead of simply deciding that we are bad people, we could resolve this conflict,” says Rafat Bayat, one of 12 female members of Iran’s parliament. Bayat adds, not bashfully, that it would all be a lot easier if women were doing the negotiating.

Nearly all Iranians insist that the Americans have missed, or have chosen not to notice, Iran’s overtures over the last few years. After the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Iran’s leadership sent an official message of condolence. Last month, Ahmadinejad sent a rambling letter to Bush in which he discussed religion, politics and philosophy. The White House dismissed the letter as not substantive.

Ahmadinejad came to power last year bringing his own brand of reckless talk about Israel and Iran’s right to acquire nuclear technology. It is widely believed that in so doing, the president was ignoring the advice of his own government and even some of the ayatollahs who hold supreme power.

If so, Ahmadinejad was demonstrating the same crowd-pleasing theatrics that made him a popular mayor of Tehran until he became president. While educated, wealthier citizens of the sprawling capital dismiss him as a buffoon, the president has rallied support among the poor, disenfranchised millions in other parts of the country.

Ahmadinejad is fond of descending on a provincial town with little notice, assembling a crowd, and asking if their municipal services are working satisfactorily. When he hears the inevitable shouts of “No!” he has the local official in charge hauled before him for a tongue-lashing. It is a tactic borrowed from Reza Shah, the father of the monarch who was deposed by the revolution in 1978.

Since the poor and uneducated know they cannot influence the debate on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they have chosen to see it in positive terms — as a signal that the country is emerging from 30 years of economic stagnation and international opprobrium.

Neither they, nor the rest of the world, can tell if Ahmadinejad is preparing to change course unexpectedly, as he once did on the soccer field, or if he is determined to drive Iran toward his nuclear goal.

Iranian President's Got Game. But Which Game?