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Iran: As Tensions Rise, So Does Rhetoric

By Jeffrey Donovan

September 28, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- To any reader of the English-language blogosphere, September appeared destined to be the month of the Iran war media blitz.

A first sign of an impending war of words over Iran came in late August. In an Internet blog, professor Barnett Rubin, a highly respected authority on Afghanistan at New York University, said a Bush administration insider told him there would be an "Iran war rollout" in the media in September.

Yet it was in Paris, not Washington, that perhaps the first salvo in the war of words with Iran was fired -- a drumbeat of rising rhetoric over the last month that Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, has called "not helpful" and "not useful."

On August 27, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking to a group of French diplomats, called a nuclear-armed Iran "unacceptable." He added: "I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

Iran Media Blitz

As if on cue, the language of U.S. President George W. Bush, speaking the very next day, also took a confrontational turn toward Tehran.

"Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," Bush told a gathering of U.S. war veterans. "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late."

Publicly, Bush has refused to take military action off the table if Iran does not comply with UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its uranium enrichment programs.

Led by the United States, the Western powers are seeking to pass a third round of even tougher Security Council sanctions against Iran. However, at a meeting today in New York, the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany agreed to delay a vote on tougher sanctions until late November at the earliest.

That outcome is a setback to U.S. and French efforts, yet their cooperation still signals a key break from the recent past.

Unlike during the Iraq war run-up, when France voiced fierce opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein, this time Paris is backing up Bush with tough talk of its own.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner weighed in with perhaps even stronger words than his boss, stating on September 16 that the world should brace for war with Iran if negotiations to end its nuclear program fail. Although he later tempered his comments, Kouchner and Sarkozy's rhetoric starkly contrasts with that of former French President Jacques Chirac, whose vocal opposition to war with Iraq dealt a blow to U.S.-France relations.

So what’s motivated France to talk tough now? Jean-Pierre Darnis, a political analyst at the University of Nice and Rome's Institute of Foreign Affairs, says the new French leader is partly motivated by a genuine desire to repair relations with Washington. Darnis adds that France clearly wants to avoid war with Iran, but sees its threat as a necessary prod to change Tehran’s behavior.

"Sarkozy said: 'I don't like the word war. I don't want to use the word war,' after Kouchner [used the word]," Darnis says. "But nevertheless, he is very open to a large panel of actions against Iran."

On September 25 at the UN General Assembly in New York, Sarkozy reiterated that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be an "unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world." He was echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “If Iran were to acquire the nuclear bomb, the consequences would be disastrous."

Robert Whitman, who studies European foreign policy at London’s Chatham House think tank, says the tough talk from Paris, and to a lesser extent Berlin, is partly aimed at permanent UN Security Council members China and Russia to persuade them to drop their opposition to new Iran sanctions since the alternative -- namely, war -- should appear so much worse to them.

New France

But Whitman adds that Sarkozy’s rhetoric should also be taken at face value -- that is, it reflects genuine French concern over the danger of Iran’s nuclear program:

"I think that’s partly why the French have been using the language why they have, because they think the Iran case is a very serious test of the credibility of the international nonproliferation regime for nuclear weapons," Whitman says. "And I think that their analysis is that it will have grave consequences for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East if Iran is not stopped. And the French do believe that they are being a responsible international citizen by bearing down on the Iranians."

But what about the Iranians? Are they, too, somehow served by all the war talk?

Speaking on September 25 at the UN, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad vowed Tehran would continue to defy any UN resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program. He said the nuclear question was "closed" as a political issue and that Iran would pursue the monitoring of its nuclear program "through its appropriate legal path," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog.

British analyst Whitman says the media circus that accompanied Ahmadinejad’s trip to the United States, along with the hard-line rhetoric against him, may actually be helping him in his domestic political battles back home. "Certainly, in terms of external criticism of the regime, and particularly criticism in the U.S., this will obviously assist him in terms of his struggle against moderates in Tehran," Whitman says.

Others have noted that every time the Iranian crisis escalates, the price of oil increases, further filling petroleum-rich Tehran's coffers.

The war drums have also been beating in the right-wing U.S. media, particularly among those "neoconservative" pundits who pushed successfully for the Iraq invasion and now reportedly seek to topple the clerical regime in Iran. Reports say their pro-Iran war views may be shared at least in part by Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration.

According to the U.S. magazine "Newsweek," in its October 1 edition, David Wurmser, a former adviser to Cheney on the Middle East, was considering a plan to press Israel to strike Iranian nuclear targets in a move that could bring the United States into a war with Tehran. Wurmser, in remarks today to the "New York Sun" daily, categorically denied those allegations.

But in a clear signal of the mood in Washington, this week the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran. The bill, which passed by a vote of 397 to 16, also calls on the U.S. government to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist group. The bill calls for sanctions against foreign companies that have U.S. subsidiaries who invest in Iran's energy sector.

A day later, the U.S. Senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution on Iran. Critics such as Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia said the motion "could be read as a tantamount to a declaration of war on Iran."

But if the martial rhetoric serves the interests of "hawks" in Washington, some say it also aides "hawks" in the Middle East opposed to Iran’s ascendance in the region.

Independent author Robert Baer, who spent two decades in the Muslim world as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, predicted in a recent article for the website of the U.S. magazine "Time" that there would be a military strike against Iran "within six months."

Military Caution

Last week, U.S. Admiral Fallon told Al-Jazeera television that he believed there would not be war with Iran, and called the war talk unhelpful. Similiarly, General John Abizaid, Fallon's predecessor as chief U.S. commander in the Middle East, said this month that while every effort should be made to stop Iran's apparent march toward nuclear weapons, the world could live with and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.

Baer, for his part, contends that part of the Bush administration, led by Cheney, wants to strike Iran for a number of reasons including the nuclear threat, Shi’ite Iran’s growing influence in Iraq and the region, its ties to terrorism, and its alleged threat to Sunni regimes friendly to Washington, such as Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis "are saying basically, if you want to keep your 10 million barrels or 9 million barrels [of oil] a day flowing freely in international markets, and keeping the price relatively low on oil, you better come to our protection," Baer recently said. "You better do something about Iran. And they’re telling us, or what they’re telling me, is that you have to decapitate the Iranian regime."

Today's UN talks in New York effectively gave the green light for IAEA chief Muhammad el-Baradei to carry on in his efforts to try and clear up doubts about Iran's past nuclear activities. El-Baradei recently gave Iran three months to clear its record in a move criticized by Washington as a tactic to stall sanctions and evade the key issue of halting enrichment.

Reports say the Western powers are considering their own economic and political sanctions against Iran, should efforts to pass a new resolution in the Security Council prove fruitless.

Where the Iran story ultimately goes is anyone’s guess. But as September 2007 draws to a close, some have recalled a famous remark by former White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

About Washington’s Iraq media blitz in September 2002, a half-year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Card said, "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August."

Source: radio free Europe

On translating Ahmadinejad

By Fawaz Turki,

Published: September 28, 2007, 23:14

Two cultures collided in New York early this week. Happily, the collision was not of the violent kind that we associate with bloodletting. But it was nasty nevertheless, involving as it did a nightmare of untranslatability between two disparate views of the world, two value systems, two historical experiences and two semantic fashions of perception.

On a three-day visit to the United States to address the United Nations General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to deliver a speech at Columbia University. That made him a guest speaker, and thus he was entitled to be treated with respect by his academic hosts.

Introducing him at the podium, however, the university's president, Lee Bollinger, deemed it necessary to identify the Iranian leader as a man who lacked "intellectual courage", had a "fanatical mind-set" and was "astonishingly undereducated". Turning towards Ahmadinejad, Bollinger hollered theatrically: "Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator". And on and on. And that was just for starters.

Bollinger, who did not appear quite "overeducated" himself, clearly did not seem to understand the sacrosanct place that a guest, whether invited to one's campus or one's home, occupied in Middle Eastern society.

Seeming visibly shaken and chastising his host for lambasting him before he uttered a single word, Ahmadinijad still soldiered on, delivering his speech and later answering questions from the audience. He did not disappoint the predominantly hostile attendees who had come to the lecture hall predisposed to laugh him off the stage.

"Our people are the freest people in the world," he said. On the issue of women's rights, he claimed that "the freest women in the world are women in Iran". Addressing himself to a question about the press, he asserted, none too convincingly, that "in our country freedom is flowing at its highest level". Then came this: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals as you do in your country". To the audience that was a howler. And so it went.

Currency of rational exchange

What is going on here? What is going on here is the question of two cultures that meet at an academic venue, to exchange ideas, only to discover that their respective experience of each other (each others' language habit and assumed social reference) has set them apart.

The language world of Middle Easterners is different from that of North Americans. Language, of course, is more than a mere currency of rational exchange among people, for it stands in vital, close-knit reciprocity with culture, felt reality and consciousness. The ornamental irrelevancies and elided references that we insinuate into our speech act in the Middle East, our capacity to use the same word to mean different things (to psycho-linguists known as "polysemy") will totally escape people in the Euro-American world but be recognised instantly by a Middle Easterner as signals of mutual understanding.

When Ahmadinejad, for example, claimed that there were no homosexuals in Iran, he did not expect his audience to take him literally. He may be "undereducated", and he may not have taken the trouble to read half a dozen decent books about what makes American society tick, but he is not insane. The remark's ferocious innocence came across to his audience as simply duplicitous. Then, passing equally misunderstood, came that strain of ultimatum, that separatist stance, that masculine use of the third person plural, in his references to "we in Iran".

Different cultures define the objective world around them differently, though they may seem to use the same vocabulary. During the heyday of the Soviet Union, as a case in point, Communist leaders employed the same idiom as their counterparts in the West to refer to, say, "freedom", "progress" and "human rights", but the terms in both locales had fiercely disparate meanings.

Try to search for the right words to explain to someone in a country that has known, or been allowed, only a "mobilising press" (whose sole role in society is to mobilise support for the government) the victory scored by the American media to win the right to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971 against the strenuous objections of the White House. Conversely, try to explain to an English-speaking person how absurd, how improbable, the character of Lady Macbeth, committed to killing Duncan "under my battlements", appears to an Arab being introduced to Shakespear's play. Duncan, he will exclaim, is her guest. Who harms a guest? Unimaginable!

Different cultures speak differently indeed, at times even in body language incomprehensible to non-native speakers. To Yasser Arafat, packing a .45 at his hip while addressing the UN General Assembly in November 1974 was, as it were, a normal fashion statement for him as it was for several other political leaders in his part of the world. For New Yorkers, and other Americans, however, it was gross, unbecoming and scandalous. A Korean who smiles at a stranger means to insult him. A Japanese fan beating before a speaker's face in ceremonious motion will convey impatience. And the rest of it.

Ahmadinejad did not appear to understand American culture one bit. Neither did Americans appear to understand Ahmadinejad one bit. They talked at not to each other. It was as if Iranians and Americans heard each other for the first time and discovered, with sickening conviction, that they shared no common language, that their previous encounter, before 1979, had been hollow, leaving the heart of meaning in both cultures untouched. All the pity.

Source: Gulf News

Kingdom, Gulf States Condemn US Senate Plan to Divide Iraq

P.K. Abdul Ghafour

JEDDAH, 29 September 2007 — Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have strongly condemned a US Senate non-binding resolution to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, saying the move would complicate matters further in the war-torn country.

The Bosnia-style plan, which was touted as a way out of the sectarian strife, which has risen steadily since the 2003 US-led invasion, “would add new complications to the already difficult situation in Iraq,” GCC Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Al-Attiyah said in a statement.

“Instead of calling for division, the causes that led to the current situation should be addressed. These include the (US-led) occupation, the sectarian and ethnic quota system, absence of law and security and the paralyzed administration,” the GCC chief said.

Apart from Saudi Arabia, the GCC groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Attiyah warned that the non-binding proposal to divide Iraq, which was passed by the US Senate on Wednesday, would also have a “dangerous consequences” on regional and international stability.

Saudi Arabia, which is an ardent advocate of Iraq’s unity, independence and territorial integrity, has reiterated its rejection of the move to divide the country.

In a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal cautioned the international community against dividing Iraq on sectarian and ethnic lines.

Prince Saud emphasized the Kingdom’s support for Iraq’s national unity, security and stability as well as territorial integrity. He said Saudi Arabia would soon send its ambassador to Iraq after taking steps to ensure the security of its embassy and diplomats.

The division plan, which is opposed by President George W. Bush’s administration, would provide for decentralizing Iraq in a federal system as permitted by Iraq’s constitution to stop the country from becoming a failed state.

It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues.

Yemen also rejected the US Senate plan calling it an “unprecedented flagrant interference” in the internal affairs of states, according to a Foreign Ministry statement carried by Saba news agency.

Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi has opposed the US plan and said it was up to the Iraqis to decide the future of their country. “Iraq has been united for thousands of years and it has the ability to preserve its unity and integrity,” he said.

Source: Arab News