Is the new president truly an exterminator?

Iran

Nov 3rd 2005 TEHRAN
From The Economist print edition

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's diatribe against Israel and the United States was made against a backlog of muddle, infighting and weakness

“YOU can't sow the wind and not reap a hurricane.” Thus Saeed Leylaz, an Iranian economist, the day after Tehran's stockmarket plunged to its lowest level for two years in response to worldwide condemnation of a venomously anti-Israel (and anti-American) speech by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on October 26th. Mr Leylaz bleakly notes a discrepancy between “running a country” and “pursuing transformative ideals”.

His message may be lost on Mr Ahmadinejad. The president's description of Israel's “occupying regime” as a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the map” recalled a time, after the revolution of 1979, when Iran's leaders competed to sound outrageous. The inexperienced and unworldly Mr Ahmadinejad probably had no idea that his comments would provoke such revulsion—or lead Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, to muse that he might have to “do something” about Iran. After all, the president explained, he was only quoting Iran's revolutionary leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Mr Ahmadinejad's reiteration of that bit of orthodoxy was a gift to those nations, led by America, Britain, France and Germany, that want the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear guardian, to refer Iran's nuclear activities to the UN Security Council with a view to imposing punitive sanctions. Discussion of the programme, which Iran insists, to American and European scepticism, is purely peaceful, is sure to dominate the IAEA's next meeting later this month.

In Tehran, embarrassed commentators suggested that Mr Ahmadinejad had spoken figuratively; his target was not Israel, but the “Zionist mindset”. A government spokesman asserted that Iran “has never used force against a second country”. But a pattern, baleful for Iranian diplomacy, is starting to emerge. An earlier aggressive speech by the president, to the UN General Assembly in September, also backfired, shoring up support for a tough anti-Iran resolution at the IAEA's last meeting.

For the conservative establishment that helped Mr Ahmadinejad to power in last June's election, the president's comments underline the dangers of promoting untested ideologues. Publicly bound to Khomeini's radical legacy, Iran's ruling clerics have quietly abandoned important parts of it. For instance, they have shelved the death-penalty fatwa that Khomeini served on Salman Rushdie for writing an allegedly blasphemous novel, and they have cultivated ties with Saudi Arabia, whose kingdom Khomeini detested. In public, they now regret the West's wilful “misinterpretation” of their president's comments; in private, they rue the new man's habit of saying what he thinks.

Iran's opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinians, while enshrined in the constitution, has always been less straightforward than the rhetoric suggests. In the 1980s, when Iran's Revolutionary Guards were helping Syria to set up the Hizbullah movement in Lebanon, Iran's government was secretly using Israel as a conduit to buy American arms for use in the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. More recently, during the presidency of Mr Ahmadinejad's reform-minded predecessor, Muhammad Khatami, Palestine policy became a domestic issue. Though he was deliberately vague, it is thought that Mr Khatami did not share his conservative opponents' abhorrence of a two-state solution. He too has rubbished Mr Ahmadinejad's recent remarks.

But sometimes, plainly, Iran has tried to help Palestinian rejectionists in their war against Israel. Conservative ideologues are said to have been the senders of a cache of Iranian arms, bound by ship for Palestine, which the Israelis intercepted in 2002. The incident helped persuade President Bush to include Iran in his “axis of evil” in the same year, ending Mr Khatami's efforts at détente with the Americans, which did not displease Iran's conservatives.

Iran lionises Palestinian suicide bombers and goes through the motions of preparing its own, though no Iranian “volunteer” is known to have carried out a mission. Iran also still backs Lebanese Hizbullah, which, having helped oust Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2001, nowadays portrays itself as a mainstream political party, albeit still dedicated to the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Iran may still help finance such violent Palestinian groups as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. And various prominent Iranians, not just the new president, have praised the idea of Israel's destruction. Rockets at parades have been inscribed with calls for Israel to be eradicated from the annals of history. Israelis are disinclined to assume that such threats are merely rhetorical.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor as Iran's supreme leader, trumpets the influence that Iran, despite being Shia and non-Arab, supposedly enjoys in the Sunni-dominated Arab world. But few Arabs joined Iran in observing Jerusalem Day, Khomeini's “worldwide” day of solidarity with the Palestinians, which fell this year on October 21st. As for Mr Ahmadinejad's remarks, Arab countries greeted them with stony silence, while the Palestinian Authority condemned them.

Just bluster, then?

Given Iran's cocktail of fierce rhetoric, double-dealing, ambiguity and pragmatism, it is questionable how much of a threat it truly poses to Israel. For sure, Israel was bound to react with horror to Mr Ahmadinejad's bellicosity; across the political spectrum, Israelis regard Iran's nuclear programme, secretly developed over the past 19 years, as an existential threat. But the CIA reckons that Iran is unlikely to achieve a bomb-making capacity for five to ten years. Iran's main threat now comes through proxies in Hizbullah and among the Palestinians. Israel would certainly react fiercely to any direct attack.

Moreover, it is arguable that Iran's leaders, by seeking to achieve a nuclear capacity for purposes that are (to say the least) ambiguous, are keener to secure their own regime's survival in the face of American hostility than they are to destroy the Israeli state. Indeed, despite Mr Ahmadinejad's diatribe, they know that any serious attempt to attack Israel would be more likely to provoke a large-scale assault, perhaps terminal, on the Islamic republic.

Plainly, Mr Ahmadinejad's remarks have done Iran little good. It is easier, now, for America to paint Iran as a menace that needs confronting. Yet far from showing any sign of backing down, he seems set to overturn Mr Khatami's more conciliatory foreign policy. He has recalled several top Khatami-era ambassadors to Tehran. He vilifies Muslim countries that recognise Israel, and favours imposing economic penalties on countries that backed America and the Europeans at the IAEA.

In any event, other challenges loom. Syria, a longtime friend, is under pressure for its apparent role in the killing of Rafik Hariri, a former Lebanese prime minister, earlier this year. And Sunni-run Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Jordan, condemn what they say is Iran's effort to turn Iraq into a chauvinistic Shia state.

Yet Iran's attitude to Iraq is ambiguous too. The Iranians want Iraq's emerging Shia-dominated democracy to survive but probably do not want it to thrive, lest Iraq then feels strong enough to let the Americans set their sights on Iran. The Americans and British in Iraq suspect Iran of giving money and arms to Iraqi Shia groups who have attacked the occupying forces. But the Iranians have tricky relations with Muqtada al-Sadr, the most belligerent of Iraq's Shia leaders, and shrink from picking a sectarian fight with Sunni fanatics. At least 150 Iranian pilgrims have died in attacks on Iraqi Shias by Sunni rebels in the past few months, but Iran has been careful not to respond with anti-Sunni invective.

So, despite Mr Ahmadinejad's noises, Iran knows it is vulnerable. In the past five months, at least 13 people in Iran's part-Arab city of Ahwaz, quite near Iraq's border, have died in bomb attacks. Iranian officials blame, variously, Baath party remnants, Arab separatists and the British.

The effect of Mr Ahmadinejad's diatribe, and the muddled foreign policy that underpins it, is already being felt. Confidence in the sector that Mr Leylaz works in, carmaking, has been shaken by rumours that Iranian customs officials are holding up South Korean auto-parts to punish the Koreans for backing the Americans at the IAEA. Capital has flown, making the Tehran stockmarket's loss Dubai's gain. Like other Iranian technocrats, Mr Leylaz rues his inability to “plan ahead”. So do many other Iranians. All in all, by talking tough, Iran's president has actually weakened his country in the world.

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