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I didn't know this stuff! Hate to imagine if this guy and Pat Robertson ever got to talking...
'Divine mission' driving Iran's new leader
By Anton La Guardia
(Filed: 14/01/2006)
As Iran rushes towards confrontation with the world over its nuclear programme, the question uppermost in the mind of western leaders is "What is moving its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to such recklessness?"
Political analysts point to the fact that Iran feels strong because of high oil prices, while America has been weakened by the insurgency in Iraq.
But listen carefully to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad - recently described by President George W Bush as an "odd man" - and there is another dimension, a religious messianism that, some suspect, is giving the Iranian leader a dangerous sense of divine mission.
In November, the country was startled by a video showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a cleric that he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.
When an aircraft crashed in Teheran last month, killing 108 people, Mr Ahmadinejad promised an investigation. But he also thanked the dead, saying: "What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow."
The most remarkable aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's piety is his devotion to the Hidden Imam, the Messiah-like figure of Shia Islam, and the president's belief that his government must prepare the country for his return.
One of the first acts of Mr Ahmadinejad's government was to donate about £10 million to the Jamkaran mosque, a popular pilgrimage site where the pious come to drop messages to the Hidden Imam into a holy well.
All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days. A common rumour - denied by the government but widely believed - is that Mr Ahmadinejad and his cabinet have signed a "contract" pledging themselves to work for the return of the Mahdi and sent it to Jamkaran.
Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect believes this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, regarded as the 12th Imam, or righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.
He is said to have gone into "occlusion" in the ninth century, at the age of five. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.
This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse. Indeed, the Hidden Imam is expected to return in the company of Jesus.
Mr Ahmadinejad appears to believe that these events are close at hand and that ordinary mortals can influence the divine timetable.
The prospect of such a man obtaining nuclear weapons is worrying. The unspoken question is this: is Mr Ahmadinejad now tempting a clash with the West because he feels safe in the belief of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam? Worse, might he be trying to provoke chaos in the hope of hastening his reappearance?
The 49-year-old Mr Ahmadinejad, a former top engineering student, member of the Revolutionary Guards and mayor of Teheran, overturned Iranian politics after unexpectedly winning last June's presidential elections.
The main rift is no longer between "reformists" and "hardliners", but between the clerical establishment and Mr Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.
Its most remarkable manifestation came with Mr Ahmadinejad's international debut, his speech to the United Nations.
World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August.
Instead, they heard the president speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote "state terrorism", impose "the logic of the dark ages" and divide the world into "light and dark countries".
The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to "hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace".
In a video distributed by an Iranian web site in November, Mr Ahmadinejad described how one of his Iranian colleagues had claimed to have seen a glow of light around the president as he began his speech to the UN.
"I felt it myself too," Mr Ahmadinejad recounts. "I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It's not an exaggeration, because I was looking.
"They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic."
Western officials said the real reason for any open-eyed stares from delegates was that "they couldn't believe what they were hearing from Ahmadinejad".
Their sneaking suspicion is that Iran's president actually relishes a clash with the West in the conviction that it would rekindle the spirit of the Islamic revolution and - who knows - speed up the arrival of the Hidden Imam.
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__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
From today's British Sunday Times (excerpts -- fairly long article):
West battles to pull Iran's leader back from Judgment Day bomb
...
Middle Eastern commentators have noted the delicious irony of having two sparring, devout leaders — President George W Bush and Ahmadinejad — who believe in the second coming of a messiah on judgment day. But only the Iranian leader has vowed to “wipe” another nation, Israel, off the map, adding an apocalyptic air of menace to his country’s quest to acquire supposedly peaceful nuclear power.
Iran’s decision to break the UN seals at its nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz last week has placed the international community in a quandary.
Was it a shrewd piece of Iranian realpolitik designed to win approval at home and to spread fear abroad, or the actions of an Islamic fanatic and avowed Holocaust denier obsessed with destroying the Jewish state? And whatever the Iranian president’s motivation, can he be stopped?
. . .
Before the massive stroke that left him in a coma, Sharon had declared: “Israel will not accept a nuclear weapon equipped Iran.” He had quietly ordered the Israeli Defence Forces to be ready to launch airstrikes against nuclear sites in the Islamic republic if necessary.
“The whole issue is now with the Americans,” said an Israeli Defence source. “Once we get the green light, we’re ready.”
For now the light has stalled on amber. Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, chastised Iran last week for its “dangerous defiance” and warned that “the president of the United States never takes any of his options off the table”. She added, however, that diplomacy was the best way to solve the crisis: “If the international community stays united, it has a chance to work.”
Meeting in Berlin last week it took less than an hour for Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and his French and German counterparts to agree that talks with Iran had reached a “dead end”. It was time, they concluded, for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors to refer the matter to the UN security council.
That was the easy part, confirmed over tea and biscuits. Whether sanctions will be imposed on Iran remains a matter of intense debate and negotiation.
The next round of diplomacy opens tomorrow in London when senior EU3 officials will meet their counterparts from Washington, Moscow and Beijing at the Foreign Office. Top of the agenda will be an attempt to persuade the Russians and the Chinese, who have veto powers at the UN, to agree to a common front against Iran.
. . .
The EU3’s decision to recommend Iran’s referral to the security council should be a moment of vindication for the Americans, who have sought for years to persuade the Europeans that there is no point in dallying with the Iranians. As long ago as 2001 the neo-conservative hawk Richard Perle, then a senior adviser to the Pentagon, had accused Straw of “grovelling” to the mullahs.
Perle’s opinion of British and European negotiating efforts has not improved. “They’ll still be talking when the Iranians detonate their first bomb,” he said last week. “Ahmadinejad’s rantings are deeply rooted in an apocalyptic concept of the 12th imam which welcomes mass destruction. We may think it’s crazy, but the question is whether the Iranians are capable of acting on this madness. I’d rather not take the risk.”
Yet as Perle readily admits, much has changed in America in the past couple of years. “The (Bush) administration has become paralysed. It’s lost all clear sense of direction with regard to Iran and is all too content not to face difficult decisions,” he said.
In other words, as Straw said last week: “To quote the White House, Iran is not Iraq.”
There was a time when American officials boasted of “turning right after we march to Baghdad” — towards Tehran. The toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was supposed to be a warning to the remaining members of the “axis of evil”, Iran and North Korea, that nuclear proliferation was a fool’s game. Instead, Iran has been able to thumb its nose at the West while America struggles to prevent civil war in Iraq.
It is more commonly said in Washington these days that America does not have to worry about Iran because, if push comes to shove, Israel will do the dirty work needed to stop the Iranians from acquiring an “Islamic” bomb. But will it?
Some Israelis have declared themselves willing to shoulder the burden. “We should attack and we are capable of completing the job,” said General Uzi Dayan, former head of Israel’s national security council, last week. “Iran is an imminent danger to Israel.”
(Here's your Thumpers, 40)
At the Hatzerim air base on the edge of the Negev desert, the elite 69 strategic F-15 I squadron is ready to attack. Months of preparations have been completed and the young pilots have finished training for the long-haul flights that will be necessary to reach Iran and back without refuelling.
The planes, costing £60m each, are equipped with secret state-of-the-art weaponry and precision bombs that have yet to be tested in battle. Two submarines capable of launching cruise missiles are on standby: one hidden in the depths of the Persian Gulf, the other stationed in the Israeli port of Haifa. In an attack they will be used to receive high quality signal intelligence.
Israel’s elite special forces are also prepared for their role — flying into Iran by helicopter to sabotage the underground targets that cannot be bombed from the air.
That Israel has a plan of action surprises nobody, but it is a long way from pressing the start key. Its air force successfully bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 but, mindful of the lessons of that attack, the mullahs have dispersed their nuclear sites around Iran. There are thought to be at least 40 targets, some buried deep in the ground.
“What we now have is a lot of targets, which makes the operation much more difficult,” said Ze’ev Raz, the former pilot who led the attack on Osirak.
It is inconceivable that the Israelis could strike without the support of the Americans. “The reality is that it would have to be a sponsored mission because the Israelis would have to fly across Iraqi or Turkish air space,” said a senior British defence official.
“Then there is the question of retaliation. Iran has got ballistic missiles and some chemical weapons. What would happen if they used them?”
A wave of terrorism could be unleashed against Israeli and Jewish targets. On Israel’s southern border with Lebanon, Iran’s Hezbollah allies could fire off rockets — although, as with Osirak, there would be plenty of Arab nations relieved that Iran had been de-fanged.
The consequences, however, are so unpredictable that Perle believes it would be safer for America to take on the job itself. “If the only credible solution to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is an airstrike to destroy their facilities, we are far better able to do it than the Israelis. The worst thing would be to attack and not succeed.”
If (Israeli Acting PM) Olmert comes to Washington next month, Bush is certain to warn him against acting precipitately. “Our working assumption is that the Americans will try to pour water on our military plans,” said an Israeli defence source.
One of the questions uppermost in the policymakers’ minds is the state of public opinion in Iran. It is overwhelmingly likely that an attack would inflame people against the American “Great Satan” and Israel.
How to put pressure on the regime without punishing its citizens is a vexing question for the security council. One idea floated last week was to ban Iran from the World Cup, for which the country has qualified for the first time.
“It would give a very clear signal to Iran that the international community will not accept what they are doing,” said Michael Ancram, the Conservative MP. (Where's Neville Chamberlain when we need him?)
In London, Straw soon rejected the idea anyway, saying he was “not certain” that sports sanctions would help. “Sports sanctions hurt the people, not the regime,” said a spokesman.
Other suggestions for sanctions include blocking travel visas for the political elite and halting Iran’s application for membership of the World Trade Organisation.
China — Iran’s top oil importer, with burgeoning energy needs — is likely to veto all but the mildest of diplomatic sanctions. “It would be a replay of the Iraq debate,” said one western diplomat gloomily.
Only last month a high-level Chinese delegation slipped into Tehran for talks on an oil and gas deal worth more than $57 billion. The two nations also have military links stretching back to the Iran-Iraq war. Oooops. Crips and the Bloods shake hands...
The Russians are furious that their attempt to play the go- between with Iran and the West has gone nowhere. ...Even so, it is highly doubtful that President Vladimir Putin would support stringent sanctions jeopardising Moscow’s huge economic and strategic interests in the region. Even the French and Germans have warned that economic sanctions are “premature”. I'm shocked!
As a first step, the UN security council president is likely to issue a stern statement condemning Iran, a move likely to be interpreted in Tehran as a sign of western weakness.
The Israelis believe that time is running out. Its nuclear scientists claim that Iran is fast approaching the “point of no return” when it will have the technical expertise to enrich uranium to bomb-grade purity.
According to a study by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran will be three years away from producing a nuclear bomb if it can feed the uranium through 1,000 centrifuges that it hopes to operate at Natanz. A 50,000-centrifuge plant being built nearby could hasten the process considerably.
The 2½ years of talks with the Iranians have already sped by. By the time the talking stops, Iran may have the know-how to build what the rest of the world dreads: an “Islamic” bomb.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
There is a totally unsubstantiated rumor bouncing around the Middle East that Iran will do a subterranean test of a primitive a-bomb in the next three to six months. While we wait, I thought this was worth reading. I'm not sure this is just alarmist nonsense. (You're not paranoid if the sky is really falling, etc.)
On the right, it is said that the decision to let the Europeans play nuclear footsie with the mullahs in Iran for more than two years was a terrible blunder. Pacifist evasion is what the world has come to expect from continental Europe, but the decision by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, to become an enabler to their procrastinations was of a different order of strategic error. An emboldened Tehran seized the chance to play them all along while advancing its ambitions in great leaps.
On the left the hands are being wrung over Iraq. It is argued that the decision to invade the wrong country has made our situation intolerably worse. Iran was always the bigger threat. While we were chasing phantom nuclear weapons in Mesopotamia, next door Iran was busy building real ones. Now we are enfeebled, militarily and politically, our diplomatic tools blunted beyond repair by the errors in Iraq.
I tend to side more with the former crowd (though let it not be said that the latter do not have a point) but it is important for all of us to understand that this debate is now for the birds. All that matters now is what we do.
The unavoidable reality is that we now need urgently to steel ourselves to the ugly probability that diplomacy will not now suffice: one or way or another, unconscionable acts of war may now be unavoidable.
Those who say war is unthinkable are right. Military strikes, even limited, targeted and accurate ones, will have devastating consequences for the region and for the world. They will, quite probably entrench and harden the Iranian regime. Even the young, hopeful democrats who despise their theocratic rulers and crave the freedoms of the West will pause at the sight of their country burnt and humiliated by the infidels.
A war, even a limited one, will almost certainly raise oil prices to recession-inducing levels, as Iran cuts itself off from global markets. The loss of Iranian supply and the already stretched nature of production in the Arab world and elsewhere means prices of $150 per barrel are easily imaginable. Military strikes will foster more violence in the Middle East, strengthen the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, fuel anti-Western sentiment among Muslims everywhere and encourage more terrorism against us at home.
All true. All fearfully powerful arguments against the use of the military option. But multiplied together, squared, and then cubed, the weight of these arguments does not come close to matching the case for us to stop, by whatever means may be necessary, Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler. What the country itself may do with those weapons, given its pledges, its recent history and its strategic objectives with regard to the US, Israel and their allies, is well known. We can reasonably assume that the refusal of the current Iranian leadership to accept the Holocaust as historical fact is simply a recognition of their own plans to redefine the notion as soon as they get a chance (“Now this is what we call a holocaust”). But this threat is only, incredibly, a relatively small part of the problem.
If Iran goes nuclear, it will demonstrate conclusively that even the world’s greatest superpower, unrivalled militarily, under a leadership of proven willingness to take bold military steps, could not stop a country as destabilising as Iran from achieving its nuclear ambitions.
No country in a region that is so riven by religious and ethnic hatreds will feel safe from the new regional superpower. No country in the region will be confident that the US and its allies will be able or willing to protect them from a nuclear strike by Iran. Nor will any regional power fear that the US and its allies will act to prevent them from emulating Iran. Say hello to a nuclear Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.
Iran, of course, secure now behind its nuclear wall, will surely step up its campaign of terror around the world. It will become even more of a magnet and haven for terrorists. The terror training grounds of Afghanistan were always vulnerable if the West had the resolve. Protected by a nuclear-missile-owning state, Iranian camps will become impregnable.
And the kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our phones or stop us saying incendiary things in mosques. Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima.
Something short of military action may yet prevail on Iran. Perhaps sanctions will turn their leadership from its doomsday ambitions. Perhaps Russia can somehow be persuaded to give them an incentive to think again. But we can’t count on this optimistic scenario now. And so we must ready ourselves for what may be the unthinkable necessity.
Because in the end, preparation for war, by which I mean not military feasibility planning, or political and diplomatic manoeuvres but a psychological readiness, a personal willingness on all our parts to bear the terrible burdens that it will surely impose, may be our last real chance to ensure that we can avoid one.
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Last edited by AZZenny; January 28th, 2006 at 11:04 AM.
I'm too lazy to try to google it up, but the other day I heard on the radio that most experts on nuclear programs say:
1. Iran never has had a nuclear weapons program
2. It will be a minimum of 5 years, more likely 10 years, before they could put enough of a program together to actually manufacture a bomb.
FWIW...
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Here's to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here's to America's colors, the colors that never run. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather. ....
Yeah, why deal with it today when we can put it off until tomorrow?
Perhaps there are a few things happening right now that are of higher priority?
It takes the steam out of GW's arguments for invading yet another country?
__________________
Here's to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here's to America's colors, the colors that never run. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather. ....
John Bolton, Undersec'y for Arms Control said in 2004 that:
1) Iran has unquestionably and very deliberately lied about its nuclear program for 18 years, and was only exposed in 2002 when a hidden, partly completed 50,000-centrifuge facility was discovered
2) has never given a coherent explanation for the presence and scope (and expense) of enough nuclear fuel development facilities to power dozens of reactors (or make 30 bombs a year) when it is one of the most oil-rich nations in the Middle East (or why many of the facilities are on military bases)
3) Has evidenced a state of enormous haste and urgency to develop the capacity to enrich vast amounts of fuels when at most it could have one actual power-plant built and operational approximately eight to ten years from now,
4) Have been caught red-handed by inspectors with trace evidence of nearly weapons-grade materials in recently bulldozed or 'redesigned' facilities while (not yet told they'd been caught) they lied about never having run radioactive material in the area at all;
5) has three different methods of potentially weapons-grade enrichment in the works -- one of which is very unlikely to play a role in peaceful nuclear use
6) Doesn't have enough known native Uranium ore deposits to adequately fuel even one reactor for a few years, despite extensive mining operations, but it would be enough to build numerous bombs without seeking external fuel sources
and just recently obtained missiles capable of being adapted to deliver nuclear warheads, which it did not previously possess.
CIA has said 5-10 years until feasibly 'deliverable' atomic weapons but some US and EU experts think that's underestimating the speed with which they could produce a bomb once they are allowed to finish the production plants; Israel has said once they get the facilities done it'll take 1-2 years for a deliverable bomb, and some EU experts agree. Care to split the difference? The 'seals' Iran just broke were to enable it to finish building the 50K cascading centrifuge.
All of this, btw, has been recently restated by the Director General of the IAEA, who is an Arab. He said after 3 years of diligent effort on his part, he cannot express any confidence that Iran's purpose is peaceful, and he's getting fed up with their deceit..
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
Here we go again with "Who Do You Trust?" (boy, am I ever dating myself!!!)
Do we believe Bolton?
Or do we believe the CIA and most other world nuclear (or should we say "nucular") analysts who claim they never had a real program for them to restart, and put them 5 to 10 years off from being any sort of threat (left totally unattended by the rest of the world....)
__________________
Here's to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here's to America's colors, the colors that never run. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather. ....
Last edited by UncleChris; January 29th, 2006 at 04:40 PM.
I think you're being optimistic, Chris -- and I find a lot more information out there, including the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the IAEA, saying there is too much well-documented stuff -- not spy-stuff, but tangible, observed and measured hands-on stuff -- that doesn't fit typical peaceful use but does fit potential weapons-preparation, to just assume their intentions are benign. I mean, they even admitted lying about it for 18 years, that's not made up.
They ARE building a 50K centrifuge, IAEA has been inside it and the Russians have contracted to complete building it, and once finished (most reports say between 50% and 80% done) it could make enough fuel for a small bomb in less than one week.
I'm not endorsing military action, btw, just pointing out there is a growing chorus of concern, and not all by right-wing wackos -- and I don't think it'll happen, or that it should. The risks are too great on a score of fronts. We won't do it ourselves, Israel doesn't dare do it alone, and the EU would waffle themselves to death first.
If you're right and its 5-10 years away, then this IS the time to take non-military action to slow them down even more and hope the regime becomes more moderate by then, but nobody has the will to do that, either. They will put it off some more.
I guess I think we already blew it, Bush shot our wad on the wrong target, and we are likely looking at a madman with nukes. Real nukes, not fantasy WMD. Excuse me, ANOTHER madman with nukes. Besides our own and the Korean dude. And Chirac, he sounds pretty screwy now, too.
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oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
I diid a little "googling" last night myself and man-o-man, is there ever a lot of conflicting data out there.
While you may well be correct, "So -- the over-under is three years? I think you're being optimistic, Chris," the choices of action for now remain the same.... and military intervention is not one of them.
Act? Yes. Act irresponsibly? No.
p.s. As usual, we're 90% together on the issue(s)
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Here's to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here's to America's colors, the colors that never run. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather. ....
Moon Lander Champion!
All Hell is breakin loose!!!!!